D&D 5E When to Roll Initiative

[Lanefan]

Yeah, side initiative seems like it would be kinda swingy. I've never tried it myself. I guess it's a holdover from the wargame roots.

I'm planning on trying out rolling initiative each round to mix things up. It sounds fun.

My house rule for Action Surge is the second action happens at initiative minus 10 in imitation of the 17th level thief ability. It hasn't come up yet though because the fighter I'm DMing is still level 1.

Same goes if you're using two weapons, in my view: each gets its own initiative; and if you want to attack with both at once the faster one has to wait for the slower one's initiative.

Yeah, I just noticed that ranged attacks add a dex bonus to initiative while melee does not. It looks like it could get pretty messy. It's funny that Gygax warned against moving away from side initiative, considering all the other complications he built into the system. I haven't been able to find the six segment round, though. Presumably the other four segments are for resolving actions (like casting spells) that were started on the first six initiative counts?

Reading over the relevant bits of the 1e DMG shows me we might just have misinterpreted it right from day 1. We always assumed that because the initiative die was d6 that each round logically had 6 segments (except spellcasting had ten). It never occurred to us that the d6 represented only the first 6 segments of each ten-segment round! (it's of no matter now; we long ago went the other way and converted all the casting times to fit 6-segment rounds).

Lan-"while looking this up I also found yet another Gygax description of what hit points represent"-efan

 

[Inoeex]

My question is which dice is for initiative ?
Is it D20? Cuz if its so, the given initiatives are really meaningless at lower levels when you have a D20 die and then add it to your initiative which is 2-4 at lower levels


And sorry if my question is off topic, I did not want to make a thread for this question

 

[BoldItalic]

My question is which dice is for initiative ?
Is it D20? Cuz if its so, the given initiatives are really meaningless at lower levels when you have a D20 die and then add it to your initiative which is 2-4 at lower levels


And sorry if my question is off topic, I did not want to make a thread for this question

You roll d20 for initiative and apply Dexterity adjustment. Advantage/Disadvantage may apply sometimes.

Initiative order can make a big difference in the first round of combat.

 

[Inoeex]

You roll d20 for initiative and apply Dexterity adjustment. Advantage/Disadvantage may apply sometimes.

Initiative order can make a big difference in the first round of combat.

Thank you : )

Eventho its still pointless at lower levrl cuz a D20 can easily make your initiative score, meaningless.

A Ranger with 6 intiative and a Wizzard with 3 or 2, can both make D20 and there is a very high chance that Wizzard starts the fight first.

If I were a DM I would make a houserule for intiative checks, D10 if you are below level 10 and D20 if you are above level 10.

With a D10 the chance for the wizzard being prio to the ranger is less in comparison when they can roll D20.

And this way the little differences between initiative scores at lower levels will remain bold.

 

[BoldItalic]

Thank you : )

Eventho its still pointless at lower levrl cuz a D20 can easily make your initiative score, meaningless.

A Ranger with 6 intiative and a Wizzard with 3 or 2, can both make D20 and there is a very high chance that Wizzard starts the fight first.

If I were a DM I would make a houserule for intiative checks, D10 if you are below level 10 and D20 if you are above level 10.

With a D10 the chance for the wizzard being prio to the ranger is less in comparison when they can roll D20.

And this way the little differences between initiative scores at lower levels will remain bold.

I think you are confused. You can't have a low-level ranger with an initiative adjustment of 6. He would have to have a dexterity score of 22 or 23 and that's not legal.

Suppose we have a 1st-level Ranger with a Dex score of 16 and a 1st-level Wizard with a Dex score of 13. Those are quite possible. The Ranger has an initiative adjustment equal to his Dex adjustment, which is +3, while the Wizard only gets +1, which is not quite so good. The DM calls for an initiative roll. They each roll a d20 and add their adjustment. That's their initiative scores for this combat. The ranger will be somewhere in the range 4..23 and the wizard will be somewhere in the range 2..21 with all scores in those ranges equally likely. Agreed so far?

Now, what is the probability of the wizard going before the ranger? Assuming that ties are resolved 50/50 either way, if you draw up a 20x20 table of all the possibilities, you can count the ways. It works out at 162/400, or 40.5% which is less than half, isn't it? So, when you say "there is a very high chance that Wizzard starts the fight first", it simply isn't true. Less than half isn't "very high".

If you use a d10 instead of a d20, it's exactly the same numerically as if you had doubled all the dexterity adjustments. So the difference between the wizard's +1 and the rangers +3 is magnified and the probability of the wizard going first drops to 32%.

Have you misunderstood the meaning of "making a dexterity check"?

 

[spectacle]

"Very high" is relative. I'd say a 40% chance of a slowish character going before a fast character is rather high

 

[Inoeex]

Have you misunderstood the meaning of "making a dexterity check"?

Yes I was confused, thank you for your help. I thought we add prof bonus for inititaive checkes

 

[BoldItalic]

Yes I was confused, thank you for your help. I thought we add prof bonus for inititaive checkes

Ah, that explains it.

Proficiency bonus only affects initiative checks if a special class feature says so and there are only two of those:

• Champion Fighters with 'Remarkable Athlete'
• Bards with 'Jack-of-all-Trades'

Glad we've cleared that up.

 

[Valador]

I'll post this because it's in the same vein and people were debating recently over this issue I'm about to post about.

https://twitter.com/ChrisPerkinsDnD/status/672110447185690624

I asked Chris Perkins via Twitter - Are attacks allowed outside of initiative combat? Is initiative rolled before or after an attack is declared? Forum debate.

And his response was - The PH states that initiative is rolled "when combat starts," which I take to mean before any attack is resolved.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

It is very vague... I think combat may start only after the first arrow in some situations... Alert feat has given me some headaches already...

you may not have noticed any threat and still you can act before anybody else, even the attacker.