“PressureSensitiveStartingBlocks” by Andrew Hecker, Licensed to Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. Text created with Logo54.com Logo Maker.

For the record, none of the PCs in the Star Wars campaign is named Fluke. But the pun was irresistible.

When we started playing Star Wars: Edge Of The Empire, we got the initiative system all wrong.

What’s supposed to happen is that each PC and NPC / NPC-Group rolls initiative to create a set of initiative slots, “ours” and “theirs”. Each player then chooses one of the “ours” slots and that’s his place in the initiative sequence until the end of the battle, while the GM does likewise with the “theirs” for whatever opposition the PCs happen to be facing.

We had part of this right.

In fact, we had all of it right except the part that reads “until the end of the battle.” Instead, as each initiative slot arrived, those who had not yet acted chose who should have that opportunity to act. The last time we played, this was ‘simplified’ to selecting an order at the start of each round, but this required remembering the sequence in which people were to act; we will probably revert to the ‘choose as the slot arrives’ next time because it’s a lot easier to simply remember whether or not you have acted. (We use a whiteboard to track initiative results and simply put a tick in each slot, each combat round).

The Effect

On the micro-scale, with decisions being taken and actions being resolved one initiative result at a time, this makes no difference at all. But what it permits is small-scale tactics, i.e. domino-planning of actions as a group through the course of a turn. The plan might be for Jeffron to cover my Wookie as he charges to melee range, or it might be for the Wookie to strip a piece of armor from a defender to make them vulnerable to the others’ blaster fire or whatever; it enabled thinking and acting as a unit, introducing an element of strategy that simply wouldn’t be there under the official rules.

Of course, the other side was doing the same think, so combat was enhanced from “I shoot, I hit, I do, next please” to a series of tactical skirmishes, with first one side and then the other gaining ascendancy. In the long term, the usual things – numbers, superiority of position and/or armament, and silly mistakes – told, and the outcomes trended toward the biases set up by these factors – but these simply outlined the parameters of the specific tactical problem to be overcome (or exploited) in that particular combat round or battle in general.

That’s a lot of impact from the loss of six words. By the time we realized we were doing it wrong, there was no way we would go to the official rules unless there was no way to salvage what we were doing.

You see, we discovered the error because of a problem – one that doesn’t arise under the official rules.

The Problem

What happens when a character falls in battle? Quite obviously, one of the slots has to be removed from the list of those comprising the battle – but which one?

The GM was the one doing the choosing, and it gave him a tremendous power over the shape of the conflict, especially in an even fight. There were occasions when – rightly or wrongly – the players felt that he was making choices that favored the opposition.

The Initial Solution

Ian, the GM, states that he was simply choosing the last slot belonging to the same faction as the now-out-of-the-battle character, but there were occasions when a used slot was removed, and other occasions when one was chosen by die roll – regardless of whether it had been used in that combat round or not. There was no consistency, and the GM was under no compulsion to make any particular decision. A house rule was needed to enshrine the viability of the house rule.

It would have been simple enough to enshrine that “last slot” as the other part of the House Rule, but there’s a problem when a character succumbs to some environmental or self-imposed condition in the course of an action – you now have more characters in a faction waiting to act than you have slots, and someone is going to miss their chance to act.

In discussion, a more interesting possibility emerged, one that solved this new problem almost as an afterthought. This rule should be accredited to all three participants: Ian Gray, Blair Ramage, and Myself.

The Final Solution

The rules we are now using would read, if we put them in writing, more-or-less as follows:

Each PC and NPC / NPC-Group rolls initiative to create a set of initiative slots, “ours” and “theirs”. Each player then chooses one of the “ours” slots and that’s his place in the initiative sequence, making the allocation as the slot is reached within the combat round.

If a character has already acted in a combat round, the slot in which he acted is removed from the initiative sequence if the character is killed or otherwise removed from the combat. If a character has not yet acted, the next available slot is removed from the initiative sequence.

This not only solves the problem with the initial solution, it imposes a new tactical consideration for each side to manipulate. If you are a character close to being taken out of the battle, you can increase your certainty of being able to act one more time before that occurs by taking an early initiative slot – but at the risk of losing that initiative slot for your faction, handing a tactical advantage to the other side for subsequent combat rounds.

Or, you could choose to act late in the round – risking not getting to act at all – but enhancing the odds of your faction winning the battle. It’s a straightforward choice if all characters are identical and in an identical situation – but as with most groups of PCs and the enemies they face, things become far more complicated when there is diversity involved. Character A has a better chance to hit, but does less damage, than character B; in the long run, they may be equally effective, but this isn’t the long run. And what if they aren’t equal? Character B may have put more into his combat capabilities while Character A has better non-combat capabilities. It changes with the situation, with the immediate objective, and with the individual PC and his circumstances.

And this solution adds this extra tactical layer for free. It takes no longer to cross one slot off a list than it does another.

Further Consequences

Further complicating matters is what we think of as the Balance Of The Force – a mixture of “Force Tokens” assigned by die roll at the start of a game that can be flipped (becoming a token for the other faction) to confer a bonus or advantage to your faction at various times – including in combat. Careful tactics can force the opposition to consume one or more of his Force Tokens, effectively giving you aces up your sleeve to be deployed whenever they most benefit your faction in the course of the day’s play; or they can utilize such an advantage that you already have to increase the likelihood of success, for example, of the “low chance to hit, high damage” character.

One of the perennial problems of this sort of Token arrangement – one that has bedeviled all the games of 7th sea that I have played, for example – is a reluctance on the part of both players and GM to expend these tokens. Instead of promoting an ebb-and-flow to combat that adds dynamism and thrill to the fight, they tend to be a stultifying factor, employed only when one side has a significant Token Advantage over the other. We have a similar system in the Zenith-3 rules that also experiences this problem despite our best efforts. In part, this is paranoia at giving the other side an advantage that can be exploited at a more significant moment in the game; in part, it’s not wanting to waste an advantage unnecessarily. But it’s a conservatism that does the game no favors.

This tactical change encourages the use of Force Tokens by both sides, helping them achieve their purpose within the game system. It encourages swashbuckling acts of derring-do that are entirely appropriate, given the setting.

Wider Application

When I set out to write this article, it was with the intent of simply describing the house rule and the consequences that came with it. It was only as I began to outline it (in my usual bullet-point fashion, in which each bullet point becomes the heading of a paragraph) that I realized that this change can be made applicable to Every Game System I Know Of, and yielding the same benefit to each.

D&D / Pathfinder / d20

In every version of D&D that I’ve played, combat is divided into turns, and each character/combatant gets to act within each turn. Some editions don’t go much farther than that; some use a formal initiative value; and I’ve see some house rules that specify “initiative slots” based on base attack value (so that fighters go first, then clerics, and so on), or the reverse.

The biggest problem that I’ve encountered with all of these approaches are the impact of things like spells that take a measurable amount of time to cast before they take effect. If everything that happens in a combat round is considered simultaneous, and handled separately only because of human limitations, there’s no problem. If you run on the system interpretation that states that the casting time indicated is complete when the GM says it is, that’s fine too. If you use some house rule to apply an initiative value to the spell activation, that works fine as well. There are all sorts of combinations and they all ultimately come down to whether or not a combat round is considered simultaneous or if the initiative sequence reflects a subdivision of time in which events happen within a sequence.

I’ve always preferred that latter interpretation because it is a more faithful reflection of the narrative that emerges in the course of play – the fastest character acts, then the next fastest, and so on. But it does make combat timing a lot more tedious when a character is doing something like movement or spellcasting that is continuous throughout the turn, because it forces the subdivision of that activity.

To apply the House Rule to these systems, all you have to do is generate your sequence of actions as normal and then throw away the ownership of each slot or initiative number. The faster character’s contribution is that he confers a higher initiative slot to his faction that can then be allocated to whichever PC can use it to the greatest benefit of his faction. He is using his speed to create an opening for the Mage, or getting out of the way of the Mage so that the mages’ spell takes effect more quickly, or whatever.

Of course, the other side also gets this ability…

Hero Games

Hero Games has 12-second combat turns in which a character may receive multiple actions depending on their character’s speed. Human-normal characters typically have two such actions. One of the earliest House Rules that I devised was an alternative action chart that did away with the “phase 12, everyone acts” overload problem, spreading phases out as evenly as possible through a turn. (More recently, I’ve gone to a completely 3.x-based system in which character’s SPD scores simply elevate their initiative numbers, but that would be covered under the previous section, so I will be ignoring that modification – described in “Superhero combat on steroids – pt 1 of 2: Taking the initiative with the Hero System” – here).

There are two ways of applying this house rule to the Hero System: the first is to simply replace the tie-breaker system with it; but that generally doesn’t achieve very much. The second way is to go the whole hog: Each character creates slots for actions in the different segments as usual, and gets to use as many of those slots as the character has Speed, but – once again – as soon as they are created, ownership of a given slot by a specific character is stripped away, and the entire group of PCs gets to pick who uses which slot as they become available or tactically advisable.

A further modification to the rules presented would be possible, in that it is always possible to trace a given segment’s slot back to it’s contributing character, and so the slot(s) that is/are lost in the current combat Turn may not be the slot)s) that is/are lost overall; but I consider that an unnecessary refinement that would do nothing but slow combat down.

In General

In fact, as I said, every RPG that I know of uses some system to distribute the spotlight during combat situations, and it is always possible to interpret those results as being “slots” in the combat-round (or equivalent). Even if it’s as simple as “all the PCs act, then all the NPCs”, there is still some internal sorting mechanism regarding who goes first – and I have to admit that I don’t know of any game that simplifies actions that much. Okay, maybe Toon – my memories are a little vague…

I don’t know of a single game system that can’t benefit from the enhanced group cohesion, tactical flexibility, and combat dynamics that these house rules offer, and to which they can’t be applied.

The Need For Consensus: A Practical Limitation

There is, however, a real-world limitation; players need to reach consensus, repeatedly, on “who acts next?” If there is a grand plan for the way the combat situation will evolve as the round progresses, that shouldn’t be an issue. But the more players that you have, the harder it is to reach consensus on anything. So you may need some additional social rules to moderate real-world behavior, and this house rule may even open a can of worms that is currently only dripping. That’s a risk-assessment that every GM would have to make for themselves.

So, Who’s On First?

If the benefits sound like they would be a welcome addition to your campaign, give implementing these house rules (or some variation on them) some thought. You have nothing to lose but your tactical inhibitions!