RPG Design: Experimenting With Initiative
This weekend I concluded long-running D&D campaign. We've been playing it for about three-and-a-half years. 3.5 edition of D&D, naturally. We normally alternate games so we only end up playing a little over twice a month, and then only for about three hours per session. It's tough having longer games when the majority of our group have children to take care of. So while not quite as impressive as it sounds, it was still a Big Game.

And we have a very big gaming group - ten players if everybody showed up, and that was only because we had to turn down a couple of friends who wanted to join the game later (which feels really, really sucky to do, I should add). Handling initiative for a large number of players is horrible. Third edition tried to streamline matters by removing the die roll every round. Taking the time to roll dice wasn't the killer - it was everything else associated with tracking who goes when.

With such a big group, players would end up chatting and spacing what was going on while waiting for their turn, and then find out that by the time their turn came around, the combat situation had changed and they'd have to re-figure everything out. Which made their turns take even longer. Which encouraged other players to chat and mentally check out while taking their turns. After all - with ten players, if each player takes only three minutes per turn, that's a half-hour waiting to get to do something. And that is not including the wait for the DM to resolve his side of things.

Jockeying for who would go next, with changing initiatives, also took place. You generally wanted the casters with the big area affect spells to go first, along with those casting "buffs," followed by the melee characters rushing in to mix it up. Even without the dice-rolling, initiative order would change in mid-combat, complicating things and sometimes confusing people. Including me!

Then there were all the times we'd lose track of who's turn it was. And as a DM - not being the most organized person in the world - I'd get distracted and forget to keep things moving along swiftly. It was a mess. Combats took forever.

I made an effort to streamline the initiative system, which was met with very reserved tolerance at first. I don't roll for each monster's initiative separately --- to save my own sanity, I have monsters with the same (or very similar) initiative modifier all go as a group. At most, the monsters end up broken up into three initiative groups.

What I gradually came to realize is that what order you went within your party was largely cooperative and unimportant. What was important was whether or not you got to go before your enemies.

So I decided to put players into initiative "groups" as well. Against one unified group of monsters, the party would be divided into "group one" and "group two." Then, within the players' initiative groups, I let them decide among themselves who is going first. At first, we worried that this would slow things down, as deciding order could turn into a lengthy debate.

In practice, this was not the case at all. I estimate that this sped up combat by about 20% or so. While not a complete revolution, it's a substantial improvement. The increased speed seemed consistent across all character levels. I wouldn't have believed that the transition of turns was actually taking that long - but in our group, it was.

Secondly - and perhaps most importantly - it helped keep the entire group engaged in what was happening in the game. Since it's possible to go at any time during your group's initiative, players stay more involved and attentive to what's going on in the combat. Actions get taken as players are ready to go. They discuss their battle plans as they go with each other a lot more. They get to work tactically much better together. Without increasing the difficulty at all, it increased the number of interesting decisions players could make.

Effectively, this system made combats much more fun. And that is always a big win. I don't know if it would work as well for significantly smaller groups. But for a large group, it was a game saver.

So would this work in computer RPGs? Well, the group-based, single-player RPG is something of a vanishing breed, though the indies and some companies like Atlus have really been bringing it back lately. Traditionally, these games still tend to go by the old "roll dice to determine your order" system. Would something like this be advantageous?

Probably not in the same way. After all, we're talking about only one player, and the computer can automate the turn transition extremely well (better than us poor humans). But - borrowing once again from wargames - would having initiative be more at a "group" level rather than individual level make combat more interesting?

Maybe the party pools together its initiative bonus (plus random dice rolls) to allow the player to select who in what order - when you absolutely, positively need to get protection from vampires up as fast as possible. In the D&D Miniatures game, the player winning initiative could move two characters - any two - first, with each player alternating movement. Deciding who moves when was not a complicated decision, but it was an interesting one. The order in which units are able to move is often just as important as what they do. It often dictates what they can do.

In the real world, in time-critical situations, the coordination and timing of individual actions is often critical to success. But due to the limitations of the user interface, you don't see much of that in single-player action-RPGs (or RTS games). While the reaction speed of the player, not the character, is usually the issue in these games, could something be done here as well?

Stuff to think about.

Have fun.

Labels: Game Design, Roleplaying Games

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