The Problem With Initiative

Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons..

Fucked in some ways, revolutionary in others. It is simultaneously the reason I barreled serendipitously into the RPG hobby and the bane of my OSR craving existence. It's often an absolute chore gathering the type of crowd that is willing and able to dedicate themselves to an OSR system.

As a result, I'm left dismantling the edition that garners the least resistance. With enough tinkering, I can work it into the kind of game that I can really dig into.  All of this preamble is meant to put this into proper context. I wish to break down the concept of initiative, and how it's applied in 5e.

Anytime you are going to be picky, pedantic little shit, as I am wont to do, you need to get definitions out of the way.

As we all know, initiative is little more than the method by which we determine turn order. This is the most basic, stripped down definition. Taking this further, a turn is an opportunity in which a creature may do something within a round, which is only six seconds.

You roll initiative order at the beginning of combat, and for the remainder of the combat, this is the order you go in through every round. You declare your action on your turn, then roll and see how well you do. In theory, the understanding is that everything that happens in a round is within the same 6 seconds.

Already, the cracks should be visible here IF you care about combat being a flowing, narrative or immersive experience. If you don't see it, let me spell it out.

The initiative has been tracked, the PCs face the monsters, and the first actions transpire. Bows and crossbows out, the highest rolling PCs (20, 18, 16) release a volley of missiles toward the enemy. The Cleric, who, again, is probably just going to shoot someone at this point, is aiming down sights... Because that's what you do before you shoot.

Suddenly, an Orc sprints forward (15) and throws a javelin straight into the Sorcerer's gut. The grievous wound knocks the Sorcerer unconscious. Here's the problem: the Cleric, by conventional D&D rules, is perfectly able to drop their weapon, grab their holy symbol, run across the battlefield, and pray to the gods to heal the wounds of the Sorcerer, all as a reaction to something that happened less than a second ago, AND within a six second time window.

Obviously, there's a narrative disconnect here.

This isn't quite as bad as the notion that if multiple PCs are targeting the same creature with projectiles, that the moment a creature falls, the next player can say "oh, I'll target the next monster instead." So yet again, a mere split second after an ally drops an opponent, the PC is able to recognize they're dying, change targets, aim, and fire.

These are the kinds of situations that commonly crop up in 5e D&D, and the bizarreness of it is rarely discussed. We can all agree that these are abstractions that many players are more than willing to handwave. It's not the only potential issue, though.

Quite simply, playing this way often takes much longer. Certainly we have all seen those players who "check out" when their turn is over, only to try to get a grasp when they've come back. Even if they've paid attention, playing in this manner creates a chesslike quality that means engaged players are constantly reacting to the ever changing enemy positions within the rounds, and when their turn comes up, they're stuck trying to finish calculating these new variables into the most satisfying conclusion.

For people who enjoy strategy RPGs, (like me admittedly), this can be a godsend. But sweet holy fuck does this take even more time. Combat in 5e is already rather lengthy, why prolong the misery of everyone else who just wants to get to the action?

The fix is simple. Stop letting them call actions on their turns.

AD&D proposed a very simple way to do this. At the beginning of EVERY round, all participants roll a d10, adding their speed modifier, and trying to roll as low as possible. The speed modifier was dependent upon what your character would be doing, which means that more lengthy actions are likely to occur late in the combat. This served many, many wonderful purposes.

First, it required that the players decide what their characters were going to do at the beginning of the round and commit to it. Players lock in the type of action that's being committed, which results in less stuttering when people take time to rethink their action when it's their turn.

Secondly, it gave decisions more weight. The casters may choose to use a spell with a very low casting time so that they can prevent someone from disrupting their cast or landing a killing blow on an ally. Fighters may use a lighter weapon to get a quick stab in on an enemy that may retreat, or to be the one doing the interrupting.

Thirdly, it made things seem a lot less disjointed. It seems less the case that these PCs are omniscient SWAT teams acting in perfect harmony and more the case that they're in a brutal fight for survival, and it's hard to know exactly what's going on with everyone else because you've got your own business to attend to.

Mike Mearls knew this about 5e, and he developed his own initiative system for it that seemed heavily based on what works from AD&D's initiative. https://dnd.wizards.com/articles/unearthed-arcana/greyhawk-initiative

However, there's a glaring difference: he breaks them up into broad categories rather than having hard coded modifiers that remove some of the randomness and allow for a bit more complexity.

Mearls' fix may not be the approach I'm after, but it's a start. It works in the spirit of addressing these dilemmas, while keeping things incredibly simple for players to pick up. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with 5e initiative, but I know this: I don't like the way it's written. Let me know what you think.