Critical Role released the beta of their game, Daggerheart, last week. I don’t particularly like cyclical initiative in Dungeons and Dragons, so we tried a variant of Daggerheart initiative in our DnD game last week. Here are my thoughts:
Daggerheart Initiative
Before examining what we did, let’s look at a summary of how initiative works in Daggerheart. (with my limited experience and understanding so far)
There is no turn order in Daggerheart, PCs and NPCs act when appropriate to the story. Sort of. There is an action tracker used during combat, and every time a PC takes an action, they place a token there. They also place a fear token there (sort of) if they roll a higher number on their fear die. (each time a PC does a check, they roll 2 dice, one hope and one fear. If the fear die is higher they roll with fear, and vice versa).
Sometimes the PCs go first, and sometimes the NPCs (we’re going to ignore this part for now). Once the PCs act, if they roll with hope, the PCs get to act again. They can act in any order they want, but the game suggests mostly taking turns so everyone gets the spotlight. If the roll is with fear, the action passes to the GM. The GM can generally take an action for every token in the action tracker (so, if the PCs acted twice, there would be two action tokens and one fear token in the tracker, since the last roll was with fear). The GM can also decide not to use all the action tokens in one turn, indeed, they can choose to use them any time, not just when the players roll with fear! It’s about the story.
This puts the pressure on everyone….as it is possible that some players will just keep going over and over, which would not be fun. On the other hand, it might make narrative sense that the fighter that is engaged in combat go twice while others move into position, so, ya. Also, the GM is encouraged not to activate the same monster/NPC over and over in one round, but if there is a solo out there, well, I’d say do a bunch of interrupts. That is, PC goes, solo goes, PC goes, solo goes, etc.
How we Used Daggerheart in our DnD Game
We basically gave every player an orange 20 sided die. That was the fear die. They rolled both dice, but only the result of the regular die mattered for determining their score. This prevented changing the odds of the dice roll. As per Daggerheart rules, a tie on the dice resulted in a critical success. I let them choose a maneuver of some kind on a critical, to make it more fun than just more damage (YMMV on this). We only put a token on the action tracker for each action, and did not do so for fear. I also only changed over to the NPCs when fear was rolled, and did not just take over the action.
Overall, it took a bit for the players to get used to how the rules worked. Indeed, when I explained them before playing, no one actually had any idea what I was talking about! So we just used the rules in play, with them not fully understanding how things would be until we played, which was fine with me.
The flow seemed to work pretty well. The players were very cognizant of who had gone, and who had not, and tried very hard to take turns. I think they would like a turn tracker for them, so they all got a turn. They tried to take advantage of who went when only one time, IMO. When the enemy spellcaster cast flaming sphere, our druid player tried to control flame (this might not be allowed RAW, but I gave them a contested roll to see who controlled the sphere. Alas for the players, it did not go well and the sphere did nearly all the damage in the combat as the NPC attacks largely failed every time).
Our Impressions of the Rules
The players expressed interest in trying this method of initiative again, so we’ll likely do that. I have other systems I want to test, so we’ll see.
As for me, the GM? I really did my best to not activate the same NPC over and over. I think this worked for everyone, but then I’m not sure why this is actually better than cyclical, or how it ended up not being the same in practice, if not in RAW. Everyone took turns going on the player side and I did the same on the NPC side. The only difference was when the players went vs the NPCs. You could accomplish this with a random even/odd die roll if you wanted. The action tracker did seem to make the action economy fair, and I think it would really help when there is a solo out there against 4-5 PCs (RAW, it is very hard for a solo fight to be good/interesting, IMO, and this helps with that).
I did appreciate the randomness of changing sides, that helped immersion for me some. I also liked the PCs couldn’t be sure of who went when, so they couldn’t meta game healing and stuff. I’m just not sure this is really all that different than cyclical initiative if everyone takes turns.
I hope at some point my players email me their thoughts, if so, I’ll add them here.