[Design Diary] Taking the ‘Initiative’ in RPG Design
“Roll for initiative.”
It’s a phrase that probably every one of us has heard before. Initiative is a mechanic ingrained in almost every roleplaying system, including the one we all know and... ‘love’. Today I wanted to look at the design journey that my game’s initiative system has taken. It’s probably one of the subsystems I’m most satisfied with in the game’s current iteration. So, without further ado...
Why Does Initiative Even Matter?
Initiative dictates the turn order within an RPG’s fights, and by extension can radically alter the ‘feel’ of a fight... but that’s just the thing. In an appropriately serious game about inflicting and recovering from grievous violence, combat shouldn’t feel like a polite series of discrete ‘turns’; it should feel like a real gunfight, where even a split second can mean the difference between life and a painful death. (Or it should feel like a scene from a ridiculous action movie; I’ll honestly take what I can get at this point).
The Early Days... Living in the Dragon’s Shadow
I play and run a lot of the international juggernaut of a media franchise of a game system, Dungeons & Dragons: 5th Edition. It’s true. I might even say that being a corporate sellout is an important part of the hobby. D&D 5e’s Initiative subsystem is conceptually straightforward and easy for new players: when a fight breaks out, every participating character makes a skill check and then each gets a turn to act, working down from highest roll to lowest. It gets the job done, but it’s boring. It has no style. And it can easily lead to boring fights. And, perhaps worst of all, it invites my eternal arch-nemesis to the table:
Bookkeeping.
Image Credit: Ashley St. Lawrence
My Exodus into Negative Space
As soon as I started working on my own full-length system, I knew I wanted to innovate with the Initiative subsystem. I knew what I hated: the aforementioned bookkeeping, and the popular ‘side initiative’ variant, where all characters on one side of a conflict act, followed by all of their enemies. Even when I run 5e, I sometimes fudge die results to ensure play is constantly alternating between me and the players; I want to ensure pace, tension, engagement and excitement are consistently high. Having six NPCs take turns in a row, with no interjections from the player side, makes that very difficult.
So my first innovation was just to remove the parts I hated. It... turns out game design takes a little more than just pure, simple hatred. My initiative system was simple: A player rolls to see if they get the first turn, then play alternates between self-nominated players and NPCs. At the end of the round, everybody who hasn’t had a turn yet gets one. Rinse. Repeat.
This system... didn’t feel great. The reduced randomness made combat feel less tense; less chaotic. And while I was indeed doing less bookkeeping, I paid for through a massive increase in mistakes. I tenaciously stuck with this system for a while, then...
Who Let Her Innovate??
A brainwave struck me. What if I combined the chance for players to choose when to take a turn (that magical ‘engagement’) with a huge injection of randomness? Now they nominate themselves to take a turn, and then the GM hands them a die with a number of sides equal to double the player count, then try to roll over the number of enemies. If they succeed, they get their turn. Fail, and the GM gets a turn instead.
Image Credit: Jeshields
The problem with this approach, of course, is that I’m not a very good mathematician. By the time the maths finally dawned on me, I was already halfway through a playtest. If the odds are tipped even slightly in one direction, this version of Initiative has a huge impact on how likely the players are to get a turn. And if they’re outnumbered two-to-one, characters should absolutely be praying to whatever god they pray to for a swift death, but they shouldn’t completely lose their ability to attack enemies at all.
The TROIKA! Moment
At some point, I suddenly remembered a delightfully idiosyncratic mechanic from a delightfully idiosyncratic game: TROIKA!’s Initiative stack. At the beginning of each turn, the GM pulls a token, or card, from the stack to determine whether it will go to a Player Character or enemy. As much as I loved this experimental little idea, I never expected to give it a second thought after playing the game once, back when I was just beginning in the hobby. But it’s a perfect fit: it introduces the same randomness and agency as my previous attempt at Initiative, yet is elegant, thematic, and not irreparably mathematically broken.
I did make some slight tweaks to the system when adapting it for my game, Echoes of Yesterday. For example, in TROIKA! A character suffers damage if they fail an attack roll. This appears to be an attempt to give back some small amount of control, and luck, to a faction when the Initiative Stack just isn’t going their way. In a game primarily about guns, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. To compensate, I abandoned TROIKA!’s wild card that makes combat even more chaotic and unfair, the ‘End of the Round Token’, which signals that all tokens must be returned to the stack. In Echoes of Yesterday, the stack is not reassembled until every character has had a turn.
I found that combat improved enormously once I introduced this new subsystem.
Pros:
So chaotic that it almost makes you forget you’re sitting around a table politely waiting for your turn in the spotlight.
Tactile. Who doesn’t love a good, thematic prop that intrinsically ties into a game’s mechanics?
Thick with tension. When the whole table is leaning over a player’s shoulder, waiting to see the outcome of an action, you know you’ve struck gold.
Cons:
My initiative system still gets the job done stoically for an online session. But boy if it doesn’t lose a huge amount of magic when the players can’t see what’s happening.
It cuts back on bookkeeping and mistakes. It really truly does. But you can still count on yours truly to find every possible way to mess up her own mechanics. But the average GM will be far less incompetent than me... right?
Until next time,
Élodie