In classic D&D, there's an order of actions. Everybody can sing it along with me now, we all know the five alliterating m-words—movement, missiles, magic, mêlée, miscellaneous—but for various reasons I chose not to include this particular rule in Engines & Empires. I like it well enough when I'm running vanilla D&D, but it's not without its problems. When lots of players (or monsters) all take the same type of action (e.g. "We all shoot bows and arrows!"), adjudicating what happens when can get a little hairy. And when initiative is bloody simultaneous—look the heck out, because then it's time to dust off the old "DM fiat" gavel.
Many of the problems with classic D&D's group initiative rules can be overcome by using some kind of individual initiative system, like you see in 2nd edition AD&D or any of WotC's d20 editions. But those systems are all dreary and soulless and slow the game down. Nobody likes rolling individual initiative. It's pointless tedium, and there's usually no reason for it. 2nd edition actually fares the worst out of all these systems, because in 2nd edition, every creature and character on the battlefield is rolling an adjusted 1d10 every round, as opposed to the cyclic spread of modified d20 rolls employed only once, at the beginning of 3e/4e/5e battles.
And yet, I feel so much nostalgia for 2nd edition's method, that I wondered recently whether it might not be the key to solving a little problem I have with classic D&D's initiative system.
You see, classic D&D employs group initiative with 1d6 rolled for each side. This means that there's usually 2d6 being rolled, one die for player characters and one die for monsters. So in the vast majority of combat situations, there is a 1-in-6 chance every round of having to go through the hassle of dealing with a simultaneous group initiative situation. (In the long Barrowmaze campaign I ran at my FLGS, it got to the point where, by the time the players were getting up to 3rd or 4th level, every round with simultaneous initiative was being accompanied by a groan from at least three players.) Obviously, the chance of simultaneous initiative could be reduced by simply increasing the die-size—use d20s to make the chance 1-in-20, or heck, roll percentile dice for each side to make it 1-in-100.
But that's only a good idea if you think frequent simultaneous initiative is a bug and not a feature. To me, it's a feature, however bothersome it is to deal with. I like the spicy hint of chaos that it adds to my combats. So, how do we square this circle? How do we keep simultaneous initiative, but make it easier to use?
Obviously, the answer is to replace simultaneous initiative with individual initiative, used only on those rounds where the 2d6 roll turns up a pair.
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In Engines & Empires, characters' actions are organized into moves rather than according to the order-of-actions listed at the beginning of this post. Every creature gets three moves per combat round, and it costs 1 move to move your encounter speed and 2 moves to take most actions. (A few actions, like casting a memorized spell, cost 3 moves.) This more or less neatly organizes movement and combat actions from classic D&D in such a way that very little changes: a character with a speed of 30' (90') can still move 90' in a round by spending all 3 moves on movement, or they can move 30' and attack by spending 1 move on movement and 2 on an attack action. (Without getting into the nitty-gritty of disengaging from a mêlée, the main substantive difference between E&E and classic D&D is that a ranged attacker could now shoot first and then move second, nothing prevents that any longer.)
The basic initiative procedure is as follows:
1. Anyone who wants to spend a full round on total defense or spell-casting from memory has to declare it first. All other actions may be decided after initiative is determined.
2. Each side rolls 1d6, with the high roll acting first.
3. If the monsters win, the ref decides what the monsters will do and in what order, and then plays out all their actions. If the players win, they decide what their characters will do and in what order, reporting this to the ref as a group, who then plays out all of their actions.
4. After the side that won the initiative takes all of its moves/actions, the side that lost initiative takes all of its moves/actions.
5. Lather, rinse, repeat.
It's simple enough, while also leaving plenty of room for tactics and planning on the part of the players. If they want to send spells and missiles ahead first, before fighters close for mêlée on that same round, totally viable. They can do whatever they want, in whatever order, when they have the initiative. Likewise for the ref's monsters (and as I'm sure any player here knows, some monsters pull no punches when it comes to brutally efficient tactics, *cough* kobolds and hobgoblins *cough*).
But what about simultaneous initiative? E&E doesn't even have order-of-actions as an organizing principle here. At least in classic D&D, however much of a mess it was, you could still kind of fall back on, "Okay, first all the movement happens; then all the missile-fire…" etc. Just trying to have everything happen all that once would be pure, unmanageable chaos. So… why not, on rounds with simultaneous group initiative, just invoke individual initiative to simulate the fact that everybody's actions are being all mixed up and jumbled together?
This is where the system from 2nd edition comes it. On a round with simultaneous group initiative, every player grabs and rolls a d10 for their character and any henchmen (just 1 roll per player, to keep it simple). The referee rolls a d10 for each type of monster on the battlefield (1 roll for goblins, 1 roll for skeletons, that sort of thing). Ties get broken by roll-offs so that nothing is ever truly simultaneous—i.e., if the rogue rolled 6 and the goblins rolled 6, they each roll 1d10 again, and now maybe the rogue's initiative is 6.7 and the goblins are 6.5, so we know the rogue goes before the goblins—and one can repeat this procedure as needed, which is why d10s are used instead of (say) d20s. Compared to the way things ordinarily work under a group initiative paradigm, this mess of individual actions (inevitably without group planning or tactics on the part of the players!) serves as a good substitute for genuine chaos.
The alternative—the only one I can think of that still organizes things while doing away with the tedium of recording individual initiative rolls on one random combat round out of every six—is to rely on the player-determined order of actions. That is, on a round with simultaneous initiative, first (1) the ref would secretly write down what the monsters do in what order, then (2) the players would report what they want their characters to do in what order, and finally (3) the referee "shuffles" these two lists of actions together into an "action sandwich", alternating between monster and player actions as evenly as possible. But I don't like this solution: it's not random enough, it gives the players too much tactical control, and it still doesn't actually resolve things (or even decide which side gets an action first) without a bit of annoying fiat on the part of the referee. No, it's looking like individual initiative is the better way to go here. That at least doesn't require hardly any fiat, and it brooks no arguments. The dice tell when you go; couldn't be simpler.
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In conclusion, I believe that the best possible initiative system is one that actually combines group initiative with individual initiative, resorting only to individual rolls when the group roll indicates simultaneity. It's elegant, it's functional, and best of all, the outcome is little different from by-the-book Moldvay or Mentzer, just without the headache of needing to adjudicate everything.
