This is where the whole series has been walking.
Nine articles ago we asked whether an RPG needs initiative. Then we took apart turns, waiting, and the spaces between actions. Each time, the same suspicion followed us, patient as a creditor: sure, you can make combat fast and loose - but don’t tactics require machinery? Don’t interesting decisions need complicated rules and careful turn order to protect them?
It’s a fair suspicion. Here’s why we think it’s wrong.
Three Different Things
Tactics, slowness, and complication are three different things that traditional combat tangles together. Tactics is interesting decisions with consequences: press or withdraw, commit or hold back, protect the wizard or finish the ogre. Complication is procedures between decisions. Slowness is waiting between decisions. A game can have the first in abundance while starving the other two - but only if it’s built that way on purpose. Which is what the last nine articles have been about: building it that way on purpose.
What That Achieves in Play
The decisions become the game. Not the optimal build, not the memorized chart - the moment. You’re winning because you read the fight: you saw the advantage shifting, you spent your effort where it mattered, you recognized that the strongest move right now isn’t the strongest option in your hand. And because the fight keeps moving, that reading has to stay fresh. Tactics here isn’t something you set up once. It’s something you do continuously, the way a fighter actually fights.
Think about what that does to the table. In a traditional fight, the tactical player is the one who planned three turns ahead - and then watched the plan die when the battle changed during everyone else’s turns. Here, the tactical player is the one paying attention right now. The reward moved from preparation to perception. You don’t win by having the best plan. You win by having the best read, updated continuously, while the ogre is charging at you. That’s a much more exciting skill to reward.
It Gets Faster as You Learn It
And here’s the part we’re proudest of: the game gets faster as you learn it. That’s the compass we held to through all of this - depth that converts to speed with familiarity. The first fight, you’re learning what the pieces do. The tenth fight, you’re not thinking about the pieces at all. You’re thinking about your opponent. The system gets out of the way at exactly the rate you stop needing it. Complicated games stay complicated forever. This one is supposed to disappear.
That only works if the things players need to remember stay short. We kept the player-facing lists lean on purpose - short enough to hold in your head, because a rule you can’t remember in the middle of a fight is a rule that slows the fight down. The depth isn’t in the lists. It’s in what happens when the pieces collide: your press creating their opening, their mistake becoming your opportunity, the advantage sliding back and forth because the battle won’t sit still.
One Question Wearing Different Clothes
So: does an RPG need initiative? No. But it needs what initiative was doing - structure, fairness, a way to know what’s happening. Does it need turns? No - but it needs what turns were doing, too. Every article in this series has really been one question wearing different clothes: what is this rule for? And once you know what it’s for, can you build something that does that job while keeping the battle alive?
Our answer is Momentum. Not because it’s clever, but because of what it achieves: fights with rhythm. Advantage that has to be earned and can be lost. Every player in the fight, all of the fight. Decisions that arrive at the speed of the battle instead of the speed of the queue.
What We’re Not Claiming
A word of honesty before we close the series: this isn’t the answer for every game. Some RPGs want the deliberation of turns - the chess-match pacing, the careful planning, the pleasure of a perfectly sequenced round. That’s a legitimate appetite, and initiative serves it well. We’ve spent ten articles arguing for a tool, not against all the others.
Mayhem is built for a specific feeling: the fight as it happens, immediate and shared, where the battle won’t wait for you and doesn’t need to. If that’s the feeling you want at your table, the machinery we’ve described is how we get there. If it isn’t, the questions are still worth asking - what is this rule for? - because they’ll tell you what your game is actually about.
If you’ve followed the series this far, you’ve watched us interrogate every assumption combat was built on - and you’ve seen what we kept. Not the list. Not the queue. Not the waiting. What we kept was the fight: immediate, shared, and honest about who’s winning.
The Engine Room door stays open. Mayhem is still being built, and we’ll keep showing you the work - what changed, what broke, what the players taught us. If you’ve read this far, you’re already thinking the way we do: the rules aren’t the game. They’re the thing that gets out of the game’s way.
Come watch us build it.
Next from the Engine Room: That's the last of the combat series. Next week: Magick. Why does the wizard who killed the dragon still buy potatoes? Come find out.