Quote from: _kent_;501864Sure. I did say ... ' insignificant outside of one-shot kill scenarios'

I don't find this to be true for several reasons:

(1) Given identical performance, if the bad guys go first they will deal one extra round of damage. Even if this makes no difference on the outcome of the fight, it will accumulate over the course of several fights. IME, if I'm using group initiative and simply default to "the PCs get to go first" this can often add 1-2 combat encounters per day.

(2) In the course of a single fight, it's relevant if the fight gets close at any point -- not just a first round knock-out shot. That extra round of damage can mean the difference between a PC that's near-death and a PC that's dead.

(3) It can also be mechanically significant if there are any abilities which become more significant or powerful if you gain the advantage of initiative. An easy example of this is sneak attacking in 3E.

(4) Moving beyond "pure melee", abilities like fireball or web are considerably more powerful if you can unleash them before the monsters split up and/or engage in melee.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;501820I've long considered adoptin a system like this but have had two reservations. The first is speed of play; have you found this sequenced method takes longer than standard D&D initiative? The second is what happens after round one; does this present believability issues after the first round. For example, it makes sense the archers go first when there is some distance between combatants, but what happens when my swordsman is right next to the archer?

Re: Speed of play. Doesn't seem to slow anything down. In fact, the only thing I've found that can really slow down play is confusion. (Which is why I abandoned the "everything is simultaneous" mode once we had too many characters to keep track of.) Method of initiative doesn't seem to have much effect.

Re: Believability of ranged vs. melee. If you follow the link, there are a couple key rules to note:

(1) If you're engaged in melee, all non-melee actions (spells, missile fire, etc.) are considered a miscellaneous action and delayed until that phase.

(2) Missiles: Firing into melee has 50% chance of hitting a random target.

(3) Magic: Includes turning and most magic item use. Characters preparing to cast cannot take other actions. Any damage suffered while preparing forces a prime requisite check (modified by damage taken) to avoid losing the spell / turning.

Basically, once you've become engaged in melee, trying to fire your bow or cast a spell becomes really difficult and the guy with a sword is going to have a chance to smash it into your face before you finish.

Another big conceptual shift is that you can actually do a lot of stuff in a single round: For example, you could cast a spell, then charge into melee, attack with your sword, and then drink the potion you had in your off-hand. Meanwhile, the guy you're charging could have fired his crossbow at you, tried to run away from your spell, then ran back towards you to engage in melee, and attack with the sword he has in his other hand.

That usually doesn't happen, but I've found it can be difficult for some people to break away from the concept of "I took my action this round". But once they do, the system is actually very fluid and responsive.

What's particularly nice about it is that it's everybody's turn all the time. People don't take their turn and then tune out, because we're immediately into the next phase and they could potentially be taking an action again.

Here's the standard for RPG Initiative: a random roll, to determine where you act. Then attack rolls, or other miscellaneous activities.

Attacking a guy, and doing HP damage, moves your side closer to victory by ensuring they're dead, bleeding out, Taken Out, whatever. If battlefield tactics come into play, it's a matter of positioning (3.0 Flanking or Attacks of Opportunity), cover, or other such "at this moment" environmental benefits.

In Destiny, Initiative is a combat capsystem. Each attack or defense has greater weight, outside of just the damage it does. It bears on Initiative and the Advantages you gain from having it and keeping it.

You attack, and you gain an Advantage. You follow it up and see the Advantage increase; or fail to attack and see it shrink away. Follow up, because it keeps them off balance which makes it harder for them to hit you, and easier for you to hit them.

You defend, and the enemy's Advantage shrinks because he failed to affect you, which gives you a respite. Every time his Advantage shrinks, it becomes easier to counter-attack him, easier to go on the offensive, easier to gain the Initiative for yourself, and gain an advantage over them.

Every hit and miss has a greater purpose than doing damage. It aids one side or the other in gaining or loosing the Advantage in the engagement.

Each hit or miss plays into greater tactics. Not the tactics of positioning and cover (though those are present in the combat mechanics), but the tactics of managing the flow of combat.

Causing confusion and disorientation, or recovering from it. Taking charge of the battlefield, and hammering each blow home so you can keep them off balance, and make each future blow more effective, until they cannot resist you and must surrender or die.

Or keeping the enemy off your back, scrambling for cover (or blocking blows) so you can clear your head and take an active, not reactive role in the combat. So you can Counter-Attack and Seize the Initiative.

Initiative isn't about who goes first. It's about the press of battle, the need to increase your Advantage or decrease the enemy's Advantage. It's about making sure you keep them off balance. Or gaining the space to regain yours.

In the real world, individuals blows have a greater context. And defending against them does as well. Destiny brings this reality into combat, by providing a framework where all this makes sense and is given a numerical, mechanical basis.

Once again, if you want a radical rethink of Initiative, one that is interesting in concept and compelling in play, that's it.

Or so I think anyway.

The martial artists responses are interesting. Persoannly I think that Cranewing's point about the nature of the weapon needs to be looked at closer.

I think the difference between being punched or kicked and being stabbed with a blade are really about types of damage not about initiative.

When you talk about knife fighters taking lots of hits you are talking about superficial cuts most of the time. A deep stab wound or a deep cut can't be shrugged off.

So you need to think of combat in RPGs. Now I prefer combat in an RPG to feel like a contested game. It's why I can't stand T&T combat and love Amber combat. As a player I want to feel like my skill and the abilities of my character can have a direct effect on a combat outcome. At the same time I don't want to have a game where sword combat, hand to hand combat, knife combat etc all have their own subsystems, but I want them to feel different.

Initiative feels like a key part of any game. White starting in Chess has a major effect effect on the game, the starting player in a game of MTG has a real advantage over their oponent (whcih the rules try to limit), the player that serves in tennis has a real advantage etc etc ...

The gunfighter that drwas first wins, the Iajitsu practicioner learns how to draw, strike and win in one move.

In theory I prefer a sequenced model which faster Pcs completing actions faster. This lets the afrementioned Iajitsu guy respond to an attack by drawing his blade and killing his opponent before their strike connects or the theif get his dagger blow in before the ogre can swing his might club... Now I think this works well in Computer games but can slow down table top games (I am actually working on a mechanism that handles this but book-keeping is a real concerns) so a simple die role for initiative is a workable solution.
I have used the 2e d10 + Dex + wp Spd individually rolled for each PC and group rolled for monsters for 25 years and it seems fine ....

I used to love Boot hill where a hit reduces your initiative.
I think games where everyone gets the same number of actions per round for fairness sake are a bit stupid especially when it means a slow cumbersome guy gets 3 unanswered attacks at the end of a combat round.

Quote from: two_fishes;501902But these are all systems that use initiative. I'm curious about how people handle this sort of issue if they don't use initiative. Philotomy said it hasn't really come up at his table, which is fair, but I wonder if anyone can comment where it has.

Nobilis is such a game. Players can revise their actions as often, if they like. Problem being, if they spend any points on the aborted action, those are lost.

I run at least a few games without initiative.  ICONS basically doesn't use initiative; the heroes are assumed to get to act first, unless they're taken by surprise; or there's a situation where two particular characters (PCs or NPCs) are racing against each other to accomplish something mutually exclusive.

Amber, as such, has no initiative either; you figure out what everyone announces they are doing first (or NPCs intended actions) and then try to resolve everything organically, looking at things like Warfare for cases where, again, two intended actions are mutually exclusive (does the NPC get his spell off before the PC can hit him, or vice-versa?).

In my current FR campaign, we roll group initiative, and then do things in action order: movement, ranged attacks, magic, melee attacks, then morale. I don't bother to have PCs roll individual initiative, except again if I need to know which of two PCs who were casting a spell get the spell effect off first.

RPGPundit

As an aside I have to say that I always thought that the phased action chart used in Hero system games was one of the best ways to handle who-does-what-when that I have ever seen.

It's a real shame that the system as a whole became such a bloated monstrosity.

Quote from: Nicephorus;50196021 chances to hit vs 20 is a 5% advantage for going first.  3 chances to hit vs 2 is a 50% advantage.

No you don't get the concept. One extra attack is an advantage *in the limit* as the number of rounds increases with one side winning initiative every time. There is no such advantage over one two or three rounds and your '3 chances to hit vs 2' above is nonsensical.

There is a separate concept at work for brief encounters which result in death because measuring the value of death versus hp loss is very tricky and in some part subjective.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;502026I don't find this to be true for several reasons:

(1) Given identical performance, if the bad guys go first they will deal one extra round of damage. Even if this makes no difference on the outcome of the fight, it will accumulate over the course of several fights. IME, if I'm using group initiative and simply default to "the PCs get to go first" this can often add 1-2 combat encounters per day.

Letting players or bad guys always go first is not the same as tossing a coin to see who begins a sequence of ABAB... at each encounter. It is the latter I suggest in indistinguishable in effect to determining initiative each round. But I hasten to add players enjoy rolling for initiative on the micro level so I let them at it.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;502026(2) In the course of a single fight, it's relevant if the fight gets close at any point -- not just a first round knock-out shot. That extra round of damage can mean the difference between a PC that's near-death and a PC that's dead.

That is just the difference between a priori and a posteriori probabilities. All nitty gritty blow by blow initiative probabilities can be subsumed into an initial probability at the beginning of the encounter - a fifty-fifty probability. I already argued above that initiative can only be a purely random phenomenon because modifiers often introduced by players would affect rate not sequencing.