Image courtesy of Freeimages.com/Pontus Edenberg

I originally intended to present the Tavern Generator that I promised on Monday as today’s post, but it will take longer than I initially thought. Probably one more day of designing the tables and two days to format them – largely because what I am offering is far more robust and advanced than the basic version outlined in the Beginner’s series. With any luck, it will be finished next week! But in the meantime, I needed a quick fill-in article to plug the gap…

When the time came to post it, I realized that it deserved to be the first part of an occasional series analyzing conflicting points of view at the gaming table from the perspective of actual “battlefield” experience. I have no idea at the moment when there will be another, but the time will come…

I have to admit that of all the 3.x rules constructs, the Initiative system was the hardest to get my head around, for two reasons: first, the player who is best at building efficient and effective PCs seemed to focus on achieving a high Initiative Score, making the value seem more important than it was; and secondly because my thinking was contaminated by considerations of real time.

Distributions Of Time?

Rather than making an Initiative total an abstract measure that signified nothing more than who went first, I tried to synchronize them with distinct in-game passages of time, so that a character with half the initiative score of another took his action half-way through the latter’s action round, and was half-way through his action when the character with that higher initiative total took his next action.

This gave a character with a substantially different initiative score an opportunity to see what the first character was doing and act to block or counter them – something that was especially important in terms of giving one character the chance to counter a spell being cast by another.

Furthermore, the concept lent itself to the distribution throughout a character’s round of multiple attacks – in other words, if you had two attacks, the second took place half-way through that character’s combat round. It also means that character movement did not have to happen instantaneously, but took a measurable real-time interval to get the character where he was going.

On the face of it, an interpretation with far greater verisimilitude – or, perhaps, the interpretation which placed the least strain on my suspension of disbelief, because that was the issue – no alternative interpretation seemed credible to me.

The diagram above illustrates my thinking. It depicts 3 characters – one with 3 attacks, one with 2 attacks, and one with a single attack, with Initiative Totals of 20, 18, and 15, respectively.

If Character #1 had a movement rate of 60′, movement of more than 1/3 this, or 20′, would mean that he was not in position to attack with his first attack, so he would only get 2 attacks in that round. Character #2 doesn’t try and pack as much into his combat round; he could easily move that 20′ and still get both attacks in, so long as he had a movement rate better than 40′.

Assuming that Character #3 is a spell caster, and cast a spell on Initiative Count 15, any spells with a casting time of Instantaneous would go off before the first event in Initiative Count 14 but after the last event in Initiative Count 15; any spells with a casting time of 1 round would go off as the last event in the next round’s Initiative Count 16, leaving him free to do something else in his next combat round. If he consumed 1/2 his movement getting into position to cast the spell, he would actually get to cast it on initiative count 15-(1/2 of 20)=5; an instant spell would go off prior to Initiative count 4, a full-round spell would activate just prior to initiative 15 next round, as usual.

Anyone who wanted to attempt to prevent the successful casting of a 1-round spell would have a whole round in which to do so, either by attacking the caster or casting an appropriate counter-spell; if you wanted to counter an instantaneous spell, you either had to be in striking position and with the appropriate Initiative Total to do so, or to have specified that you were waiting for someone to begin casting a spell (effectively changing your Initiative Total).

Maximum realism, minimal complication. And it very closely reflects the rules and explanations given within the 3.x rulebooks. The player I mentioned earlier hated it, and wouldn’t or couldn’t explain why.

The Practicalities: How It Works

The highest initiative total defines both the starting point of the Initiative Count each combat round and the number of slices the combat round is broken into. In the example given, it was 20, but it could just has easily have been 26, or 32, or 41 or whatever. Half a combat round is half of this value, rounded off, 1/4 is 1/4 of the value, rounded off, and so on. Lower initiative totals change the starting point of a character’s combat round, but not the length of the round.

Half a character’s full round movement takes half a combat round.

If a character gets multiple attacks, they are spread as evenly as possible throughout his combat round. 3 attacks means that the 2nd attack takes place 1/3 of a combat round after the first, and the 3rd, 2/3 of the way through his combat round.

The Hero System Connection

It’s ironic, given that I later adapted the 3.x initiative game mechanics to the Hero System, replacing the subdivided turn with multiple actions per turn that those rules have, but a lot of my thinking on the subject was clearly influenced by the Hero System, which I had been GMing (in one incarnation or another) for nigh-on 20 years at the time.

It uses combat Turns instead of Combat Rounds as its foundation, and defines these as a standard 12 seconds long. Characters get as many combat rounds as their Speed stat within those 12 seconds, spaced as evenly as possible. In each combat round, a character gets his movement and gets to attack, to use a power, or whatever.

In the standard Hero System mechanics, you get a situation in which everyone acts on Segment 12, with the consequence that this segment frequently took as long as the rest of the turn put together; one of the first house rules that I instituted in version 2.0 of my campaign House Rules distributed the actions more evenly, eliminating this bottleneck. If you only had a Speed of 1, you got your action on Segment 7, for example.

The similarities between the approach to the two different systems should be obvious.

Why did Initiative matter?

So, what’s the real value of a high initiative score? From a position midway through a combat, it makes no difference whatsoever, because the initiative count rolls through the characters one after another in the sequence in which they get to act and then restarts; the difference between one combat round and another is purely a matter of labeling. Nor does it help you if your character is surprised, because you are then caught flat-footed and don’t get to act in the surprise round, anyway.

It took me a long time to work out why this particular player obsessed so much over a high initiative total, and why he disliked my interpretation of the combat mechanics so much.

The answer lies in those occasions when the character is not surprised; a high initiative score lets the character act first, and if all three of his attacks take place instantaneously, he has the best possible choice of both taking one or more enemies out of action before they even get to act, and of taking tactical control of the battle. Furthermore, as the character rose in levels, not only did his increased combat effectiveness make this a more likely outcome from a first strike, but it became harder to take the character by surprise, enabling the resulting advantage to come into play more frequently.

What he wanted was a rules interpretation that supported his entire round’s actions taking place on the one initiative count (or on his fraction of it should someone else match his initiative total), and anything else was detracting from the design philosophy that he had employed in creating his character. This less-realistic interpretation is, furthermore, implied by the rules as written.

Adapting

Once the light had dawned, I was able to “get lazy” (because his interpretation was less work to GM), accept his desired interpretation, and design my encounters accordingly – either configured to withstand his massive first-strike capability, or with targets present to do nothing but soak it up before the real threat showed itself. Placing mages out of his reach, or invisible foes that he could not target, for example.

It’s not even clear that he gained all that big an advantage, even without these tactics. Spell use becomes much harder to counter under his preferred interpretation, and by ruling that spell-like abilities etc worked the same way as spells in terms of combat mechanics, I was able to take advantage of this fact on a number of occasions.

With these tactics, I was able to let him have his fun without his high Initiative score totally overwhelming the game, and that’s the important point to be made. I still disagree with his interpretation, but purity of game concept is, and should always be, compromised if that’s what it takes to make the game fun.