Does an RPG Really Need Initiative?

The door crashes open. Six goblins charge into the room. The wizard begins casting. The fighter reaches for his sword. The rogue dives toward an overturned table.

Everything is happening at once. Then someone says: “Roll for initiative.”

Suddenly, nothing is happening at once.

Everyone stops. Dice are rolled. Numbers are compared. An order is established. Someone writes it down.

Okay.

Now everything can happen at once. Except it doesn't.
One character acts. Then another character acts. Then a monster acts. Then another character acts. We've become so accustomed to initiative in tabletop role-playing games that it's easy to assume combat simply needs it.

But does it?

Initiative Solves a Real Problem
Before throwing initiative overboard, it's worth understanding why it's there. Imagine six players and a GameMaster controlling eight enemies.

The fight begins and everyone starts talking:

“I attack the ogre!”
                                                                                “I cast a spell!”
                                                                                                                                                “I run through the door!”
“Wait, I wanted to close the door!”
                                                “Does the ogre get to attack?”
                                                                                                                                “I'm healing him!”
                “Which one happened first?”

That's chaos.

Not necessarily the fun kind. Initiative gives us an answer. Everybody gets a place in line.

It keeps one enthusiastic player from performing five actions before a quieter player gets one. It tells the person running the game when monsters act. It gives everyone an opportunity to participate.

Initiative isn't a foolish rule that generations of game designers somehow failed to question.

It solves an important problem. The question is whether the solution creates problems of its own.

Your Turn Is Coming
One of the strangest things about traditional initiative is that combat is supposedly frantic while the experience of playing it can be anything but.

You act.              Then you wait.

Perhaps five other characters and several opponents act before you get another opportunity. When your turn finally comes around, the situation may be completely different.

The enemy you intended to attack is dead.
The doorway you planned to run through is blocked.
Someone needs healing.
The wizard has set the room on fire.

So you reconsider your options. That takes time. Meanwhile, everyone else waits.

Initiative successfully organizes combat, but that organization can contribute to one of tabletop gaming's most familiar complaints:

Combat takes too long.

The Six-Second Traffic Jam

There's also a strange disconnect between what the characters experience and what the players experience.

Suppose a segment represents six seconds.

During those six seconds, ten combatants move, attack, defend, cast spells, dive for cover, draw weapons, and perform various heroic or foolish acts.

In the imaginary world, all of this is happening almost simultaneously. At the table, we frequently resolve those events sequentially.

Character A moves and attacks.
Character B casts a spell.
Monster A attacks.
Character C runs across the room.
Monster B moves.

And so forth.

The rules tell us those things are happening during roughly the same period of time. Our eyes tell us they're happening one at a time. That doesn't make traditional initiative bad, it does mean initiative is an abstraction.

Once we recognize that, we're free to ask whether another abstraction might work better for a particular game.

There Are Other Ways
Designers have been experimenting with alternatives for a long time. Some games use side initiative, where everyone on one side acts before everyone on the other. Some allow players to decide their own order. Some use cards, clocks, action speeds, phases, or resources. Some resolve declared actions simultaneously. Others barely use a formal initiative system at all, allowing the fiction to determine who can reasonably act.

Every approach trades one problem for another.

Simultaneous action sounds wonderfully realistic until five people announce mutually contradictory moves. Completely free action sounds fast until one player dominates the conversation. Side initiative is wonderfully simple until one side gains an enormous advantage by acting first. There isn't one correct answer because initiative isn't really the problem we're trying to solve.

Time is.
Who has enough time to act? Who acts before the situation changes?

And when does someone get another opportunity?

Those questions led us in a different direction when designing the Mayhem role playing system.

What If You Didn't Roll Initiative?
Mayhem doesn't use an initiative roll. Instead, combat uses Momentum. The basic idea is that your position in the action isn't determined once at the beginning of combat.

It changes. What you do matters. What happens to you matters. Weapons, actions, successes, failures, injuries, and other events can affect your Momentum.

Instead of asking: “Whose turn is it?”

we're interested in: “Who has the Momentum?”

That's an important distinction. Traditional initiative establishes an order and then repeatedly cycles through it.

Momentum makes the flow of combat part of combat itself. Do well and you may maintain pressure. Something goes badly and you may lose ground. An opponent can seize an opportunity. The rhythm changes because the battle changes.

Why Bother?
Because we wanted combat to feel less like people waiting in line. A battle has rhythm.

One fighter presses an advantage while another desperately tries to recover. Someone suddenly gets an opening. A combatant who seemed to control the fight gets hit hard and loses that control. Spells should be cast at the right time, not just because the fighter swung his sword.

We wanted the mechanics to recognize those moments.

More importantly, we didn't want to begin every fight with an administrative interruption.

When talking turns into an argument, an argument turns into a threat, and someone finally swings a sword, we don't want to stop the scene so everybody can perform an unrelated die roll.

The fight has already started. Keep going.

But Is It Fair?
This is where eliminating initiative can go badly. A system that simply says, “Everyone acts whenever it makes sense,” places a lot of responsibility on the person running the game. It also creates opportunities for assertive players to dominate. That's why Mayhem doesn't simply eliminate structure.

Momentum is the structure.
Everyone still gets to participate. There are still rules determining how the action moves from one participant to another. The difference is that the order is tied to what's happening in the fight rather than a list generated before the fight.

That distinction matters to us. We weren't trying to remove rules. We were trying to make the rule represent something happening in the game world.

Tactical Doesn't Have to Mean Slow
There's a common assumption that tactical combat requires more bookkeeping, more phases, and more waiting.

We don't accept that. Interesting decisions create tactical play.

A player deciding whether to press an advantage, change position, protect an ally, conserve resources, take a risk, or respond to an opponent is making tactical decisions.

Waiting fifteen minutes to make one of those decisions doesn't make it more tactical. Neither does eliminating every rule in pursuit of speed. The interesting territory is between those extremes.

That's where we've tried to put Mayhem.

So, Does an RPG Need Initiative?                 No.

But it needs something that does initiative's job. Players need to know when they can act. Opponents need opportunities to respond. Quieter players need protection from being drowned out. The person running the game needs enough structure to manage complicated encounters. And the rules need to answer the inevitable question:

“Who goes first?”

Traditional initiative is one perfectly reasonable answer. It just isn't the only one. When we began building Mayhem, we used initiative, made it part of character creation. Then we asked what initiative was accomplishing. Then we asked whether we could accomplish the same thing while keeping the action moving. Our answer was Momentum. Because sometimes the best way to change a familiar rule isn't to ask:

“How can we improve initiative?”

It's to ask:

“Why are we rolling it in the first place?”