Mike Mearls Games
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Static Initiative
🕑 Added 2024-09-17 16:40:50 +0000 UTCIn the comments in one of my recent posts, Swiss Calavera talked about the asymmetry of my design work here. That's very intentional. DMs need a different set of tools than players. A player manages a single character with a deep bench of spells, feats, and features. A DM manages many creatures, the environment, and the narrative. That's a lot of work.
To help with that, I'm moving to a static initiative model for creatures. If you remember the dragon stat block I posted earlier this year, it had different actions that fired off at fixed moments of each round.
This approach makes things easier for a DM to plan. You can build a script of sorts for an encounter, giving you a clear starting point for how things should work. It also means less die rolling and tracking at the table.
On top of that, static initiative helps with monster design by giving as a much clearer idea of how many actions a creature can take, and when those actions take place.
Consider a the leader of a goblin warband. She might have a spell that grants other goblins an attack and damage bonus. Under a fixed initiative system, I can give her a high initiative and be confident that her buff applies to the other goblins in an encounter. When I'm stuck rolling, it's literally random whether she gets to do her thing and make the encounter work.
This approach also means that I can balance my design around that timing. Let's think of initiative as falling into a few buckets:
High Initiative: These creatures generally go before the characters. They can reliably act before being overwhelmed by focused attacks. They are good for setting up other creatures with buffs, or creating obstacles that the players must consider as they take their turns.
Creatures designed to protect or buff other monsters, or those with control effects, are ideal for this initiative slot.
Average Initiative: The typical creature sits here. If timing isn't important for the creature's power set, we can place it here to reward fast or lucky characters who can get the drop on it.
Low Initiative: These creatures act after the entire party. That means they have fewer actions than usual, so we can increase their damage by about 50%. Since a fight is meant to last three rounds and these creatures survive for only two actions, we need to spread that missing third action's damage into its stat block.
High damage creatures are best for this slot, as we can justifiably increase their base damage output at the clear cost of the entire party having the chance focus fire them into oblivion.
As I work with this approach, I've found it a great way to add additional layers to monsters. Even better, it's a case were streamlining and simplifying the system has led to more robust and tactically interesting play.
Comments
Swiss Calavera
I think the pacing that most people are referring to is a narrative pacing. I actually like rolling initiative it feels like the fight music in a JRPG. There are multiple pacings that are being confused in the conversation though. The pacing of the mechanics themselves, that JRPG fight music takes some people out of it, and they would prefer combat flow more like an ARPG like Diablo or Baldur's Gate 1/2. The game moves to turn based for the one aspect which some people don't like. Personally the pacing it ruins for me most often is the narrative pacing. I have had games where 1-2 hours of crawling through caves harried by a monster is then undercut by the monster rolling 1 on initiative and everyone just piling damage on and killing it before its second turn. That is very anti-climactic and I have at least one player that stopped playing a Gloomstalker because he felt like his damager output was making the game feel less tense. The third pacing is actual table pacing, the flow of conversation and interaction at the table changes for a lot of tables from a communal, "what do we do?" to a "wait your turn and figure out what you're gonna do."
Eric Menge
I'd be very interested in your development on this. Initiative is one of the most frustrating things for me as the DM for a lot of the reasons you listed. Lately, I've just been deciding where monsters go in initiative order without rolling. Fast monsters go first, most monsters go halfway through the initiative order, slow monsters go last. I really like having the monsters interspersed through the players to have more back and forth.
Michael Sixel
I've never quite understood the idea that rolling for initiative ruins pacing. It's just part of the game to us.
