This is part of an ongoing series of posts about Initiative (mostly in Dungeons and Dragons, but most of this can be used in any TTRPG). I have a massive PDF I planned to sell, but I’ve decided to post it all here for free.
Being a game master is a lot of work, and keeping track of everything during combat can be a lot, things get missed, stuff happens. One way to decrease the load on the game master is to make monster initiative easier, so the game master doesn’t need to think as much about that. Here are three ways to manage monster (NPC, adversary whatever) initiative rather than the method your game currently uses.
In addition to what is here, you could use the method that I’ve used that is based on what Daggerheart proposed in its first draft (unsure if this is still their process).
Fixed Monster Initiative
This is the easiest way to handle monster initiative. Every monster has a fixed initiative number. To make it even easier, I suggest doing what game designer Mike Mearls just posted on his Patreon (Pretty sure you have to pay to read this). He is testing out static monster initiative. He even has the players KNOW what the options are! When I go look at my draft PDF, I see I came up with nearly identical numbers as him, must be a Mike thing.
I think that all DM controlled elements should fire off on specific initiative numbers, always losing ties to players:
25: Very fast stuff, penalized in damage or defenses to account for their speed.
15: The typical monster, defaulting to 15 rather than 10 because the party is rolling multiple initiative checks.
5: Slow stuff, giving a boost to offense or defense since they are likely to see fewer actions than other monsters.
In designing encounters we can now establish a basic flow of play. Let’s say you want to run a fight with a gang of goblins back up by an ogre:Initiative 25: The goblin shaman picks a character and all their allies have advantage on attacks against that character.
Initiative 15: The mob of goblins goes.
Initiative 5: The goblins’ ogre ally goes.
Mike likes this because it allows the DM to set up an encounter, rather than have things happen at random times (which is one reason I hate random initiative, it removes cool stuff the DM can do). He also likes this because players will know that if they are facing a fast, powerful, adversary, they need to get an initiative over 25. They also have a good idea of when each monster will act (over time, I guess?), so they can plan tactics. In his opinion, this increases the tension around initiative.
Personally, I agree with the first idea. It makes the GM’s job much easier if they can have a plan ahead of time, and don’t need to track stuff. It also allows us to set up things so they are more fun, and not so random (there is still plenty of randomness in damage rolls and attacks and the players’ initiative rolls).
Manage Groups of Monsters as One
This is pretty typical advice, but if you have a lot of low level monsters, just roll initiative once for the group of zombies, and have them all act at once. Way easier than trying to remember which zombie is which in turn order (powerful VTTs help manage this for us, and removes this complexity). My preference is to have at least two different turns for monsters, if possible, which might complicate this if all you have is 5 goblins…..
Intersperse the Monsters
One way to keep the PCs from wiping the floor with your carefully set up encounter is to have a monster act after each PC acts. This is easy…..a PC acts, then have a random monster act. This does put some mild pressure on the GM to pick a monster, but you could rank them in order by rolling, or by assigning them numbers ahead of time (from fastest to slowest). So, if you have 3 goblins and an ogre, you could rank the goblins 1-3, then the ogre 4. After the first PC acts, goblin 1 goes, and so on.
The image for this post is the cover from the last ever Dungeon Magazine (miss that so much) by Craig J Spearing. HERE is his website.