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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fenris-77" data-source="post: 8000433" data-attributes="member: 6993955">[USER=3400]@billd91[/USER] - I'm not fretting initiative at all actually. Just identifying a couple of ideas about it that don't really get a lot of thought. One, the impact it has on action adjudication, which is often to introduce an additional chance of failure to many potential actions (not just furniture parkour). Two, the way it can take the agency out of the players' hands to move the action forward in a positive way. Initiative and combat aren't bad things at all, I'm just counselling a moment of reflection about exactly when to call for that initiative roll.I completely agree that you don't always want people swinging from chandeliers. That reminds me of watching my kids play Minecraft. They jump everywhere because it's marginally faster than running (or at least that's what they said) but if looks goofy as all get out. My point wasn't to privilege chandelier antics, that was just the example. The idea of running away in the face of discovery is a more mundane example of the moment I'm talking about. You round the corner and see a pair of the chancellor's guards. One of them spots you, what do you do? I can handle that with the surprise rules and a initiative roll, and sometimes I might, but I can also wait a beat and let the player decide how to answer the question I posed. If he draws his blade we go to initiative and combat, but if his goal is to run away, why would I immediately complicate that by calling for initiative? I can, obviously, but at that point the call for initiative is a consequence, I'm making his goal more difficult, and if I'm going to do that I want to be doing it for a reason, not just because it seemed like the thing to do.</blockquote>

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