There, I said it. I don’t like cyclical initiative in DnD (or, I guess, other games). I have a PDF of alternate initiative systems (some of which are still cyclical) in draft form that I always thought I’d sell, but I think I’m going to write about initiative and give away most of the alternate systems for free. To be clear, there are some goofy other ideas in that draft PDF, and cyclical is easy and “fast”. But, well, I don’t like it for gaming reasons, and meta reasons.
Warning: In no way am I saying this is wrong/bad/evil for anyone’s game. I’m not saying what you are doing is wrong. I’m saying I don’t like it.
In this first post, I’ll lay out some of what I don’t like about cyclical initiative. But first, on the tiny chance you don’t know what I’m talking about and are reading this anyway……..
What is Cyclical Initiative?
I’m going to define a bunch of terms in this section. If you know what they mean already, you might want to go to the next section.
Initiative: Turn order for the players in a game. That is, who goes when. In many role playing games, this order matters in encounters (fights or other similar things). We’re just going to say encounter in this post.
Round: In some games, a set of turns (Mike’s turn, Julie’s turn, Bob’s turn) is a round.
Cyclical: Going in the same order, round after round. So, Mike, Julie, Bob. Then Mike, Julie, Bob. Round after round.
It’s super easy to run this way, once you set the order. Or don’t set it, but we’ll get into that later. In DnD and Pathfinder, you roll some dice, add your modifiers(s) and set the order from highest number to lowest. Easy Peasy. Then you go in that order until the encounter is over. (there are some things you can do to change the order before it is set, sometimes even after, but in GENERAL, this is the order for the whole encounter).
So, You Ask, What Don’t You Like About It, Mike?
Glad you asked!
The Meta Part: There are a lot of things I don’t like, but we’ll start with the Meta part. I don’t like that the players always know what order they will act in. It allows them to “game” the system, rather than react “naturally” to what is happening in the encounter. As an example, if they know they get to act before a monster does, they may not heal a friend (or themself) because they can kill the monster in the next round. Whereas in a “real” fight, you might heal your friend in case they get hit before they can kill the monster (or not, and this is one example).
The Planning Part: Here is an example…..since in DnD (and many other games, though not all) initiative has a random component, it is much harder for players (or their characters) to act in ways that make sense or in ways that allow them to act as a team. If you go first, your friend the wizard can’t enchant your weapon before you go, or your friend the bard can’t inspire you first. But, my favorite example is the following:
The party knows there is a group of monsters behind a door. They come up with a plan for the cleric to open the door, the wizard to cast fireball in the room, and then the fighter and rogue to go into the room and clean up the mess, as it were. But, RAW (rules as written, which is shorthand for “this is what the rules say, not what you want them to mean”), once the encounter starts, the players need to roll dice to determine what order they go in. The wizard might go last….meaning no fireball into the room first!
Why You Just Standing There Part? Here’s another of my favorites! The chase! In cyclical initiative, a monster being chased stands around and waits for a player character to chase them down, until it is their turn to move. A monster standing right outside a door will just stand there until it is their turn, allowing the player character to move up and kill them (possibly) before they can even move. Or just stand there and wait while they are being chased. Or just stand there and let a player character charge at them. Not a fan.
Sure, this is easy, and many tables have fun (most tables, or they wouldn’t use the system) playing this way. But it bugs me.
The Action Economy Part: An action economy is a fancy term for talking about the value of going first, or not, in games. There is a huge advantage to going first, since you get to choose what happens! Do you run away? Run at an enemy and stab them? Cast some kind of spell that puts a barrier between you and your enemies? An example, the solo fight:
In cyclical initiative, the turns go in order every round. In MOST games (DnD is what I play), an actor (player or non-player character) gets one turn per round. This creates an economy where the players all get to act, and a solo enemy (let’s say a huge giant) gets to act one time. This creates a massive economic advantage for the players, as they can take 3, 4, 5 turns (one per player) and the giant gets one turn. This often leads to “boss” fights that end up not being all that fun (there are more posts on this on the internet than one can count). There are ways around this, and it isn’t an issue specifically only with cyclical initiative.
I don’t know, if anyone reads this, they’ll likely comment that this is not really a cyclical issue, but I think cyclical exacerbates the issue, by allowing players to be meta (see above). And, there are initiative systems that are built to make this not an issue (see this post about Daggerheart initiative), by having the boss act more often (and some monsters get to do that in DnD too, but not many).
Summary
So, there you have them. Some of the reasons I don’t like cyclical initiative. I thought about spending a few posts on the history of initiative, but Merric has done that well enough HERE. So, instead, my next post will likely be on, hmmmm, not sure. That PDF starts with a section on keeping cyclical, but not using only Dexterity to determine what modifiers are added to your die roll. That seems like a silly next post, given this one! Maybe I should have had a plan before I started this series? Nah. Wing it. That’s my DM motto.