Handling Initiative, Part Two

    I will be the first to admit that I oftentimes enjoy theorizing and philosophizing without actually testing my theories. It is common in the OSR space, that people theorize quite a lot and play maybe a bit less. While armchair thoughts can certainly be productive, they can also be blind to the problems that will crop up in the real world. So, lets take a look at combat based on my experience with testing the combat system I have proposed in my last post on the topic. 

    Today, I am going to focus on rolling initiative. One thing that I have seen people often talking about is making combat more chaotic and frenetic, sort of the Combat as War instead of Combat as Sport paradigm. One method people propose to do such a thing is changing initiative, such as by regularly rerolling it. I personally really like the idea, since it actually makes initiative bonuses more meaningful than when it is only rolled once. If initiative gets rerolled every round, sure the slow-pokes in combat might get lucky once or twice but that won't hold overall. 

    So, I implemented it into my combat system and gave it a try. In my tests, it didn't go great. The actual benefits of regularly randomizing who goes when, at least as my current system stands, are minimal at best. Other than getting to attack first, the primary benefit of this constant shifting of initiative is that it makes choosing when to cast spells more meaningful (since they take a number of counts equal to their level). If there is not a significant amount of casting at 2nd level or higher, this benefit evaporates for the most part. And, in addition to the lacking benefits, the practical downsides are steeper than I was anticipating.

    Sure, yes, obviously if you are constantly rerolling initiative, you will be rolling more dice. That takes time, but OSR combat is faster right? A little bit of extra time can be forgiven for more fun, but what I (and many others) had neglected to consider was that every time initiative is rerolled, the order of who goes when must be re-established. If you are rolling on a d20 based system (I don't, but I know people do), this is a real pain because of the big spans you have to cover and you will still have to adjudicate what happens when people get the same initiative (~35% chance in a 4-on-4 fight, so its common). On a d6 system, like mine, you can just do a countdown from 9 to 0 but that still takes up more time than expected, nevermind if you want to write down the order of people for any given round. It massively bogged down the pacing of the combats I was testing (both solo and with a real group).

    But, that isn't the only way to handle initiative (with each person getting a spot in an order). The original style of initiative had each side of the combat roll a single d6 and compare, with the higher going first. With a system like that, where you just compare the rolls and go from there, rolling for initiative every round is light enough to be practical. Of course, I have issues with that, as if you are already having each side just go is it really all that important to be randomly changing up the sides? It seems to me that in a side vs side initiative system that the benefits for randomizing initiative are even smaller  than what I tested it in!

    What this all means, at least to me, is that while the goal of rolling for initiative each round - mixing up combat order - is good, this implementation of it leaves something to be desired. Knowing this, what alternatives exist? The only solution that I have been able to come up with is that everyone still gets their individual initiatives (+3 vs +0 vs -1 on a d6 is impactful enough to not need a reroll) and instead people are able to swap around who on their side goes when. It has a bit of meta-mechanics to it, but I think it would still work to let someone go first when they really, really need to. Of course, I also think that everyone should have to feel their rolls at least a little, so perhaps spots in initiative can only be swapped after the first combat round? I would love to hear your thoughts or anecdotes on this in the comments!