7 Alternatives to Traditional RPG Initiative

The fight starts.

Everybody rolls initiative. The numbers are sorted. Someone writes down the order. Then everyone waits for their turn.

Traditional initiative works. There's a reason it has survived for decades. It creates order out of chaos, makes sure everyone gets a chance to act, and answers one of the most important questions in a fight:

Who goes first?

But rolling initiative and then cycling through the same sequence isn't the only way to organize RPG combat. Game designers have tried everything from cards and clocks to simultaneous actions and systems with almost no formal turn order at all. Each changes not only how quickly combat moves, but how combat feels.

Here are seven alternatives—and what each one actually changes at the table.

1. Side Initiative
Instead of determining initiative for every combatant, determine it for each side.

Players act. Enemies act. Repeat.

The order within each group might be fixed, chosen by the players, or simply determined by whoever is ready. The obvious advantage is speed. A fight involving five adventurers and eight monsters doesn't need thirteen separate initiative positions. There are only two.

Side initiative can also encourage teamwork. Instead of thinking only about their own turn, players can coordinate. “You knock him down. Then I'll attack him.”
“I'll open the door before you run through.” That can make combat feel more like a group effort.

The downside is that acting first can become enormously powerful.

If every player acts before any enemy responds, they may be able to eliminate several opponents before those opponents do anything. Then the same thing can happen to the players when the enemies go first. Side initiative is fast, but those big blocks of uninterrupted actions can make combat swingy.

2. Player-Chosen Order
Why roll at all?

Let the players decide who acts first. Once one character finishes, another player goes. Everyone acts once before the sequence starts again. This gives players considerable tactical freedom.

The fighter can knock an opponent down before the rogue attacks. The wizard can create cover before someone crosses an exposed area. The healer can wait to see who needs help.

It also eliminates the frustration of rolling badly and being trapped at the bottom of an initiative order for an entire battle. There's a catch.

Players have to decide. A group that communicates well can resolve this quickly:

“You go.”

“Okay.”

A group determined to find the mathematically perfect sequence can turn every round into a committee meeting. Player-chosen initiative replaces random delay with decision-making. Whether that's an improvement depends on the players sitting around the table.

3. Popcorn Initiative
Popcorn initiative takes player choice a step further. One participant acts and then chooses who should go next. That participant acts and chooses another. Eventually everyone has acted, and the process begins again.

It's called popcorn initiative because the action “pops” from one participant to another rather than following a predetermined order. This creates interesting decisions.

Do you give the next action to an ally so your group can execute a plan?
Do you force an enemy to act now because you'd rather know what they're going to do?
Who gets the final action of the round?

And, depending on the rules, who gets to choose the first participant in the next one?
Those decisions can turn initiative itself into part of the tactics.

The disadvantage is bookkeeping. Someone still needs to remember who has acted. It can also create combinations where one side engineers several consecutive actions. That's exciting when you're doing it. It's considerably less exciting when you're on the receiving end.

Another potential problem is fairness, friends tend to act together. Two or three close friends could dominate the action. This doesn’t freeze out other players, but it could keep certain, less known or favored players from ever acting first. This causes arguments and creates players who are NOT enjoying the adventure.

4. Action-Speed Initiative
Maybe characters shouldn't determine initiative. Maybe actions should.

A dagger thrust should probably happen faster than loading a crossbow. Taking a few steps shouldn't require as much time as running across a courtyard. Shouting a warning should happen faster than performing an elaborate magical ritual.

Action-speed systems assign different speeds to different activities. Fast actions happen first. Slower actions happen later.

This has an interesting effect: you don't necessarily know when you're acting until you decide what you're doing.

Want to swing that enormous two-handed weapon? Fine.
But someone with a quicker weapon may get there first.

This can make weapon choice, movement, spellcasting, and other actions tactically meaningful in ways traditional initiative doesn't.

It also makes intuitive sense. The problem is complexity.

If every action, weapon, spell, and movement has a different speed, players can spend more time calculating when something happens than actually doing it. Action speed can make combat feel alive. Too much action speed can make combat feel like accounting.

5. Card or Token Initiative
Instead of rolling dice, put the initiative order on cards, tokens, chips, or another physical object.

Draw a card. That participant acts.

Draw another. Keep going. You can reshuffle every round, leave the order intact, or allow abilities to manipulate the deck. The great advantage is uncertainty.

Traditional initiative usually tells everyone exactly when every combatant will act. Cards don't have to. You know the dragon hasn't acted yet. You don't necessarily know whether the dragon acts next.

That's tension.

Cards can also make initiative highly visible. Nobody needs to ask who's next if the answer is sitting on the table. But randomness has consequences.

A character might act at the end of one round and then immediately act at the beginning of the next. Another might wait through almost two complete rounds. That unpredictability can be thrilling. It can also be infuriating.

Whether it works depends on whether uncertainty is a feature of the combat system or an obstacle to it.

6. Simultaneous Action
Real fights don't politely wait for each participant to finish.

Everyone is doing something. So why not resolve combat that way? In a simultaneous system, participants decide or declare what they're doing during roughly the same period of time. Then those actions are resolved together.

The fighter charges the ogre. The ogre swings at the fighter. The wizard casts. The archer fires. Nobody stands frozen while everyone else completes their turn.

This can make combat feel dramatically different from traditional initiative. Players think about what their opponents might do rather than knowing exactly what has already happened.

It can also produce wonderful chaos. The fighter charges an enemy who is simultaneously retreating. Two opponents incapacitate each other. Someone fires at a target that an ally is trying to tackle. Plans collide.

That's also the problem. Someone has to determine what happens when simultaneous actions contradict each other. If the wizard closes the door while the fighter runs through it, which happens first? Eventually the game needs an answer.

A simultaneous combat system doesn't eliminate timing rules. It simply moves them somewhere else.

7. No Formal Initiative
The most radical alternative is to stop tracking initiative altogether.

Who acts? Whoever logically acts next.

If the rogue says, “I stab him,” the rogue attacks. If the ogre responds, the ogre attacks.

If another player jumps in, the action moves there. The person running the game follows the fiction and makes sure everyone gets opportunities to participate.

This can be incredibly fast. There is no initiative roll. No initiative chart. No cards. No sequence to maintain.

The conversation simply becomes combat. For groups that already play collaboratively, this can feel wonderfully natural. But it puts enormous responsibility on the person running the game. Who hasn't acted recently? Is one player dominating? Should the monster have acted already? Did that character just perform two actions while someone else was waiting for one?

Traditional initiative answers those questions mechanically. When you remove it, someone still has to answer them. A good group may barely notice. The wrong group can discover exactly why initiative was invented.

There Is No Perfect Initiative System
Every one of these systems solves something. And every one creates something else. Side initiative is fast, but can be swingy. Player-chosen order creates tactics, but can create analysis paralysis. Popcorn initiative makes turn order interactive, but adds another layer of strategy and tracking. Action-speed systems make choices affect timing, but can become complicated. Cards create uncertainty, but can be unfair. Simultaneous action feels dynamic, but still needs rules for conflicting actions.

No initiative at all can be wonderfully fluid, but requires players and the person running the game to manage fairness themselves.

Traditional initiative has exactly the same problem.

It solves some things and creates others. That's the important part.

Don't Ask Who Goes First
When we started working on Mayhem, we weren't particularly interested in inventing a clever new way to roll initiative. As the rules evolved, we became interested in a different question.

Why are we determining initiative in the first place?
We need combat to have structure. We need to prevent one player from dominating. We need opponents to have opportunities to respond. We need actions to have consequences. We need the situation to change.

But none of those requirements necessarily says: Roll a die at the beginning of combat and establish a repeating order.

Mayhem eventually answered the problem with Momentum, where a combatant's place in the action can change as the fight changes.

That's our answer.

It isn't the only answer. And that's really the point.

Initiative is a tool. Side initiative is a tool. Cards are a tool. Simultaneous action is a tool.
Momentum is a tool.

The important question for a game designer isn't: “What's the best initiative system?”

It's: “What do we want combat to feel like?”

Once you know that, you can choose the tool that creates it. And sometimes the best initiative system for a game...

isn't initiative at all.