Dear reader…

Let me briefly explain what happened here because otherwise, you might be confused about the sudden turn this Feature takes from setting up a new system to a ranty critical analysis of turn order and Initiative systems.

One day, I was thinking about turn order and Initiative in Dungeons & Dragons and I realized everything had gone terribly wrong and that roleplaying games had lost their way. That’s pretty normal for me. So I started a conversation in my supporter Discord community about turn order and Initiative systems and why they sucked and how they could be improved, and I was met with a very firm, “Meh, who cares.” This echoed sentiments I’d seen in other channels and forums I secretly lurk on. The “Meh, who cares,” reaction is explained in the body of the Feature.

I did eventually manage to start an interesting — if passionate — discussion about Initiative and, as it played out, I started secretly building a better turn order and Initiative system for modern D&D. One that fixed several different problems I saw with the current system. I decided I would write up my analysis and the system and share them both as a Feature on my site last month. I was going to limit the analysis and just say, “Here’s a new system; give it a try,” and started writing it up. But then a couple of things happened.

First, I remembered that I am at my best — and people like me best — when I don’t just hand them a system but instead talk about the analysis, the design, and the justification for the system. A lot of y’all are here because you like deep critical game design analysis at least as much as you like actually running games. So I let the analysis expand into a bit of a “everything wrong with turn order and Initiative in modern gaming” rant. Which is normal for me. It let me explore the history of a game mechanic and discuss design issues like friction, cognitive load, meaningfulness, and dynamism without rushing to leave space to describe an entire new turn order and Initiative system.

That’s when the second thing happened. I completely lost faith in the Feature and the system. For reasons I talked about in my recent Mostly Monthly Live Chat with my Discord supporters, I convinced myself this was a worthless analysis and a worthless system no one wanted. The participants in the Live Chat, though, encouraged me to talk through my analysis a bit and then said they actually really wanted the whole analysis and the system. So they convinced me to resurrect the article and emboldened me to give it the full two-part Angry treatment of ripping apart a system to establish some design goals and then building a new system to meet those goals.

Writing, rewriting, killing, and then resurrecting the article chewed up a lot of time, and I was already very behind for the month due to a long bout of illness and a personal emergency. So it left me in the ugly position of trying to pick up an article I’d half written weeks before, finish it, and change it to a full problem-and-solution design discussion. But I did it and here it is. Well, here’s the first part. The problem part. The second part — the solution part — will come over the holiday weekend or on Wednesday next week at the latest.

I just wanted to add this introduction in case you noticed the weird change in tone and writing goals at the halfway mark as I stitched together the old and the new. I’m sorry if it’s a little jarring. I hope you like my rant about why turn order and Initiative systems suck, and why they always have, and I promise you an alternative next week.

I also apologize to those of you who participated in the Live Chat and have heard at least two-thirds of this analysis already. But thank you for talking me off the ledge. Or talking me out of pushing this Feature off a ledge. Whatever.

The Actual Start of the Feature

But what if Initiative did matter?

Sorry. That’s me starting in medias radius again. Let me circle back.

If there’s one thing we modern roleplaying gamers know — especially we Dungeons & Dragons gamers who’ve played any edition of D&D or its derivatives published in the last quarter century — if there’s one thing we modern roleplaying gamers know, it’s that turn order doesn’t frigging matter. Want proof? Go to any site, forum, community, or store where such games are discussed and say, “I have a neat idea for a new Initiative system.” I guarantee you some mouthbreather will helpfully tell you, “Hey, dumbass, Initiative doesn’t matter.”

Hell, if you’re ever trapped on a desert island, just yell out, “I have a neat idea for a new Initiative system,” and, suddenly, there will be some asshole behind you telling you how it doesn’t matter. Cave his skull in with a rock and you’ll have food for a long time. Gamers have a lot of meat on their bones. If you know what I mean.

But enough about cannibalizing gamers for survival…

The statement, “Turn order doesn’t matter,” — note, by the way, that I am being careful in my terminology — is actually totally backassward. The problem isn’t, “Turn order doesn’t matter,” but rather that we gradually built a system that made it matter less and less and less until we got to where we are. Consequently, we shrunk Initiative — the rule by which turn order is determined — down into this anemic little nothing of a mechanic to size it appropriately for the fact that what it determines — turn order — doesn’t matter. Which only made it not matter more. And now we say “turn order doesn’t matter” like that’s an inherent fact instead of a consequence of the game design choices we made over the last 25 years.

But what if it did matter? What if we could make it matter? Wouldn’t it be better if it did matter? Of course it would. After all, turn order has to exist. We have to resolve things in sequence because of our punctual existences. We experience time as a sequence of single moments and therefore have to take things one moment at a time. Thus, if we want to play out a combat, we have to resolve things in some kind of sequence, even if we then try to imagine that the simulated combat events aren’t happening in sequence. Which is a stupid-ass thing to imagine. It’s like trying to imagine that hit points aren’t meat.

Which brings me to my old-school friends. I just know some of you cranky, leathery-faced grognards are going to talk all about how Initiative worked back in the day. Well, look, grandpa, I was there. Initiative did matter. Kind of. But it was also burdensome and awful. Old-school Initiative sucked just as modern Initiative sucks. But modern Initiative only sucks relatively tiny elephant balls. Old-school Initiative sucked giant, honkin’ bushcricket balls. Relatively speaking.

Oh, and your variant Initiative systems were like dropping a relatively huge-ass pile of elephant shit on the game in terms of overhead, cognitive load, and tracking. Don’t even frigging start with me.

Honestly, I don’t want to sit here and analyze the evolution of D&D Initiative systems and how we went from a system where turn order barely mattered and sucked to manage to a system where turn order totally doesn’t matter, but at least it’s really easy to work out. No. I want to do the game design thing where I look at something I’m stuck with — because you gotta have a turn order — and say, “Well, if I’m stuck with it anyway, I’d much rather it did something interesting and then build manageable mechanics for it than make it as small as possible and shove it in a dark corner.”

But, to get there — and to shut some of you up from telling me that I’m wasting my time trying to make games better because “turn order doesn’t matter” or because “turn order was so much better when we had to walk fifteen miles uphill in the snow to roll Initiative using dice we had to color in ourselves” — but, to get there, I’m going to have to do some analysis.

So let’s talk about why Initiative should not and does not not matter and how we got to thinking it should and does. Or whatever.

Fire-and-Forget Cyclical Horseshit Turn Order

First, let me say it so that none of you asshats have to scream it…

In modern D&D as it’s written, turn order doesn’t matter the absolute width of a bushcricket’s left testicle.

The claim that turn order doesn’t matter in D&D isn’t not true.

What I’m saying, first, is that turn order absolutely should frigging matter. The fact that it doesn’t matter is a consequence of mechanical design. Frankly, I think it’s a failure of design. It’s not because the idea of turn order itself is inherently meaningless.

So how did we get here?

Back in 2000, the d20 system — introduced in Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition — back in 2000, the d20 system — yes, that is the correct way to reference what I’m talking about — back in 2000, the d20 system — no, I didn’t mean 3.5E and never, ever type 3.5E, you assclown; that’s not correct — anyway back in 2000, the d20 system introduced what I’m calling Fire-and-Forget Cyclical Horseshit Turn Order and an Initiative system to go with it.

Now, everyone knows how Fire-and-Forget Cyclical Horseshit Turn Order works because it became the standard for everything that looks even remotely like D&D forever after. When a fight breaks out, everyone involved uses an Initiative check to determine their position in the turn order for the entire battle. It’s that simple.

In Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition, there were some ways to change up the turn order. Specifically, the Ready, Delay, and Refocus options — though Refocus was folded into Delay in Dungeons & Dragons v.3.5 and note how nice and clean and correct my references are so stop fricking correcting me you dumbasses — specifically, the Ready, Delay, and Refocus options actually changed your position in the turn order. That shit got dropped in future editions. Options for readying and holding actions do still exist, but they don’t change the turn order.

Nowadays, we still use the same system. Consequently, turn order doesn’t matter for shit. Even winning Initiative is pretty much worthless. It wasn’t always, though. Back in Third Edition, everyone started the combat Flat-Footed. Until you got your first turn, everyone had the drop on you. You just couldn’t react fast enough to fully defend yourself. Rogues loved this shit because winning Initiative meant Sneak Attacks, except when your foes were immune to Sneak Attacks, which was most of the time because rogues suck and you suck for loving them.

We need to make rogues suck again.

Anyway…

Flat-Footed is another one of those ideas that got dropped, and with it went the last vestiges of turn order actually frigging mattering.

Like I said above, I don’t want this to be all about analyzing turn order and initiative systems, so I don’t want to show all of my math, but there are three elements to the whole Fire-and-Forget Cyclical Horseshit Turn Order thing that render turn order completely frigging meaningless.

The first element of Fire-and-Forget Cyclical Horseshit Turn Order that enshittifies turn order is that there’s nothing beneficial or suckaficial about having a specific spot in the turn order. Going first doesn’t get you anything — as it used to when Flat-Footed was a thing — and going last doesn’t hurt you in any way.

The second element is that there’s absolutely no way you will ever get a second turn before everyone else goes. You will never get to go twice before a creature goes once. That’s because everyone gets exactly one turn per round. No more. No less. No exceptions.

The third element has to do with timing. Because rounds are measured from one creature’s turn to that same creature’s next turn — as I noted above — and because all lasting effects’ durations are measured relative to either the inflictor’s or the inflictee’s turn, every such effect will affect a creature a precise number of times, no matter what. If you hit someone with an effect that lasts for 3 rounds, that’s going to hurt their next three actions. You can’t game the timing so that you squeeze out a fourth action, nor can you fuck up the timing such that it only hurts their next two actions. The same’s true for buffs.

Not that durations matter anymore anyway. Fucking designers.

Now, I am not going to get bogged down too much with specific mechanics, and I will not be responding to any dumbass fights with asshats insisting that it’s actually better for the game that turn order doesn’t matter and how much fairer this all is. Instead, I just want you to imagine playing a hypothetical game in which those three issues weren’t issues at all. Imagine if your position in the turn order did affect your actions. Imagine if there were times when you could actually take two turns before a creature got to go again. Imagine there was a way to game timing so lasting effects could be stretched a little farther — or run out of gas a little sooner — if you inflicted them at the right time.

Would turn order matter then?

What Does It Really Mean for Turn Order to Matter?

Above, I said that the whole “turn order doesn’t matter, so Initiative rules should be simple” thing is backassward thinking. It’s the rules that make turn order not matter. But I just demonstrated another insidious example of backassward thinking that Game Masters and designers always fall prey to. Not just with Initiative and turn order. With everything.

When someone says, “Initiative should matter; turn order should matter,” everyone interprets that as Speed Factor Initiative. Admit it, dumbass, you’ve been thinking I was building to some kind of Speed Factor Initiative this whole time, haven’t you? Well, I won’t pretend there won’t be something that smells like it later, but, honestly, without other changes, Speed Factor Initiative doesn’t actually change anything.

Speed Factor Initiative is predicated on the idea that your actions — your choices — should affect your place in the turn order. That’s not a bad idea, of course, but now imagine the system I asked you to imagine. What I asked you to imagine was a system wherein your position in the turn affects your actions and choices.

If you know you’ve got an extra turn before an enemy gets to go again, might you blow some extra resources to deal massive damage in the hopes of finishing it off? Might you choose to target a foe you can finish before their next turn rather than one you can’t?

Meanwhile, if you go early in the turn order and know that means your buffs will linger just a little longer, might you pick that as the turn to help an ally with a blessing of battle or some shit like that? Or maybe that’s what you do when you’re stuck going last anyway. You can’t really change this round, but you can set up a very good next round for everyone.

Let’s make this more complicated. Consider that you’re not only first in the turn order, but also that an ally is slated to act right before an enemy that he maybe could finish off if he had a little extra oomph. Maybe now’s the time to cast sword of fiery oomphness.

Are you starting to get me? For fuck’s sake, please tell me you’re starting to get me.

Gamers only see meaningfulness in one direction. They only see it in terms of, “If I do this, I’ll have to eat that cost,” or “If I take this opportunity, I’ll assume this risk.” But meaningfulness goes both ways. It’s not just about how your actions affect the future situation, but also about how your current situation affects the utility of your actions. In fact, when it comes to turn order and Initiative, it has to go both ways. Speed Factor Initiative doesn’t frigging matter if turn order doesn’t matter. If there’s no benefit to going first — and no penalty to going last — who cares when you go? If everyone always gets a turn before you go again, being fast offers no advantage.

Given that turn order — and consequently some kind of Initiative system — pretty much has to exist for the game to work anyway and given that roleplaying games are all about choice and given that strategic and tactical gameplay is about making strategic and tactical choices based on the totality of your situation, the idea of relegating turn order and Initiative systems to minimal meaninglessness is utterly and completely moronic.

Seriously… it makes zero frigging sense.

Keeping Gameplay Dyanmic and Well-Paced Too

Well, this is getting ranty, huh? I guess I actually am going to spend a few thousand words angrily analyzing the history of turn order and Initiative systems in modern roleplaying games and how they’ve totally failed us. That’s kind of de rigueur for the course here, ain’t it? Spend a few thousand words ripping something down to its component atoms to find all the flaws, then build something new from those atoms.

But since I’ve already got a good rant going, let’s talk about dynamic combat. That’s a buzzword topic, huh? We’re all always complaining about how D&D combat needs to be more dynamic. It seems like there comes a point in the middle of every fight when the melee bashers have their lines established and the spell-and-arrow slingers-have their sniper spots chosen and everyone’s just throwing attacks and eldritch blasts back and forth every round, right?

Of course, whenever we piss and moan about static combats in D&D, we always end up blaming the same thing, don’t we? It’s all about movement. No one’s moving. That’s why combat is so static. We have to make people move around the battlefield.

Except, bucko, that ain’t what dynamism is. Dynamism isn’t movement; dynamism is change. A dynamic situation is one that changes. It’s one that forces everyone to adapt to the evolving situation. Movement is one element that can lead to more dynamic combat, but it ain’t the only one. Anything — anything at all — that stops you from doing the same thing on automatic pilot every round — anything that even gets you to think about doing something different even if you ultimately decide the best move in this particular round just happens to be the same move as the previous round this one time — leads to dynamic combat. If you can’t make a choice without considering the exact current state of the combat game, the combat is dynamic.

Given that, do you notice anything about the modern Fire-and-Forget Cyclical Horseshit Turn Order system? Anything that my clever, colorful nickname very clearly calls out? Yes! The modern Fire-and-Forget Cyclical Horseshit Turn Order system is cyclical. It’s a fire-and-forget system. You determine the turn order once and then cycle through it over and over and over. It doesn’t change. It’s static. Yes, it’s weird to think of a cycle as static, but practically speaking, a cyclical turn order is a static turn order.

Have you noticed that rounds basically don’t exist anymore in D&D? The word round still exists, sure. It’s used in the rulebooks. Technically, there are rounds. Rounds are the roughly six-second spans of world time during which everyone gets a turn, but what do rounds even mean anymore? It’s not like counting rounds matters. Most combats don’t even last for a minute of world time, so who cares how long they are? Durations might be measured in rounds, but they’re decremented based on individual turns, so a round is just the space between one creature’s turn and its next turn.

It used to be that rounds actually began and ended. Different editions of D&D did different mechanical things with the starts and ends of rounds, but there was an actual start and an actual end to each round. Outside any other mechanics, though, the changing of the rounds actually provided a very important, invisible gameplay benefit. It’s one of those things most people didn’t see at the time, and so don’t realize they’ve lost. People are stupid. They think wrong. What can you do?

The break between the rounds was a great pacing tool.

Y’all know I love pacing. I’m pacing’s biggest fan. If pacing had a fan club, I’d be its president, founding member, and publisher of its newsletter. Admittedly, I’d probably be its only member. I’d be the weird, annoying guy going up to pacing at every convention saying, “I loved your work in Star Wars: Episode IV and I don’t know why Joss Whedon didn’t call you in sooner in the original Avengers movie,” and pacing with mutter an awkward thanks and say something about “doing a panel” before sidling quickly away.

Y’all know — because I won’t stop telling you — that pacing isn’t about speed, but rather, it’s about flow. It’s about smoothness. Sometimes, the best thing you can do for pacing is slow your ass down. Remember all the shit I said about that in The True Game Mastery Series? Remember How to Manage Combat Like a Motherfrigging Dolphin? Did you know YouTube creator Zee Bashew recently made a whole cool animated essay inspired by my dolphin approach to combat? You should totally check out DM Secret: Combat Like a Dolphin. It’s pretty amazing.

Anyway…

Pacing is energy. Pacing is smoothness. Sometimes, that means going at a breakneck pace, and sometimes that means taking it slow because slow is smooth. That space between the rounds used to be a great place to slow down and smooth up.

As I said in True Game Mastery and my Dolphin Combat thing, it’s a good idea to periodically pull back the camera and summarize the state of the combat game. Sometimes, between the actions, you want to say shit like…

His attack leaves the goblin dead, but Ardrick is still surrounded by goblins on the stairs to the altar, while Cabe is climbing the balcony unnoticed by any of the foes. Danae, still protected by her shield of faith, continues to defend Beryllia from the wolves on the ground level, leaving Beryllia free to fling spells with impunity. But the sinister goblin shaman is similarly disengaged on the balcony and looking to rain down unholy hell with his dark magic.

Those moments when you pull back the camera and sum up the action before you launch into another series of turns are great for pacing and engagement. They ground everyone in the combat, they let you highlight opportunities and dangers, and they give the players a little breathing room to think more clearly about their next moves. Because of that, they help the players make quicker decisions when their turns do come up. While they take a little extra table time to pull off, they give it back in spades.

Without a break in the turn order already built in, you — the Game Master — have to work that shit in for yourself, and it’s easy to go a little too long without one. It’s also easy not to notice how much those combat wide shots were improving things until you find yourself sobbing, “What’s wrong with me,” in one of Live Chats because I’m screaming, “I cannot fathom how anyone can actually take over an hour to resolve a D&D combat!”

So, if you wanted to instantly make combats more dynamic and also improve your pacing by adding breaks in the action to manage the fight, do you know what you might want to kick off a cliff? I’ll give you a hint. It rhymes with Shmire Shmand Shmorget Shmiclical Shmorseshit Shturn Shorder, which I am definitely going to regret typing when I record the audio version of this Feature for my supporters.

Old School Wasn’t Better; Shut Up

I spent the better part of two months trying to win favor among my followers and on some private channels for this whole let’s rethink turn order and Initiative in D&D thing. As I mentioned above, I got a lot of, “Why bother? Initiative doesn’t matter. It doesn’t need better rules, it needs fewer rules.” But I also got more than a few folks reminding me that Initiative, like literally everything, used to be better in D&D before the year 2000. I should just go back to the old, good games.

Listen, grognards, I’ve been there, I’ve done that, and I’ve got the tee shirts. I ain’t some whinging zygote who didn’t discover D&D until Mike Mercer was running romantasy games for furries or whatever the hell you think modern D&D has become — you’re wrong, by the way. I’m as oldballs as many of you. I grew up in the eighties and started playing D&D with the Red Box and AD&D and AD&D 2E when I was nine years old and my older cousin left me all his gaming books when he ran off to college. You know why I don’t play and run those systems anymore? It’s because, as much as modern D&D sucks sometimes, they suck harder. I have a very limited patience for inelegant, inconsistent crap kludged together before the invention of actual fucking game design.

Switching to old school games or old school inspired games will not solve all my problems because none of my problems are, “Running D&D just isn’t miserable enough; I need to find a way to make it suck even more.”

That said, the pre-2000 D&D editions did offer a variety of turn order and initiative options. Assuming you could actually find them. I swear the only reason oldbies like those crappy somewhere in this giant hexboard sandbox is the fun so go find it scavenger hunt games is because that’s what it was like trying to find any rule for anything ever in any of the AD&D core rulebooks. Hey, Gary, did it ever occur to you to maybe put all the initiative rules in one, single place in the book?

Sorry…

The turn order and initiative systems in AD&D and AD&D 2E did actually accomplish some of the shit I’ve been talking about. I ain’t denying that. But they didn’t do all the things I’m talking about, and they didn’t do them well.

The default, for example, was what’s called Side-Based Initiative. The monsters roll one die for initiative, the players roll the other, and everyone on one side takes all their turns, then everyone on the other side goes. That fails basic dynamism. Combats are better when the action switches back and forth between the sides.

Of course, there were variants offered for Individual Initiative and Speed-Factor Initiative, where everyone rolls their own die, and it’s based on the action they’re going to take. Combats in many older editions were also divided into phases, so all the missile combat happened first, then all the melee combat, then all the movement or whatever. Don’t correct me if I put those out of order. I cannot express in words how little I care about correctly citing a fifty-year-old rule system that sucks.

The point is, there’s meat in the old school editions. I’ve never claimed otherwise. But when it comes to turn order and initiative, it’s all tainted by one terrible fact. Almost universally, old school turn order and Initiative systems were Lock-In and Resolve systems. At the start of each round, every creature chose the action it was going to take when its turn came up, then the turn order was determined, and then the actions were resolved in the turn order. Which is, of course, a necessity for any Speed-Factor Initiative. If the initiative dice and the combat situation conspired against you, your action might be impossible by the time your turn came up. Sucks to suck.

One thing I will admit, though, was that this system did create a uniquely wonderful opportunity for telegraphing. Of course, this was before telegraphing was invented, so it didn’t actually take the opportunity — not explicitly in the rules anyway — but the opportunity was there. Like I said, there’s meat in the old school editions. It’s just that there’s also a lot of crap side dishes, and some of the meat’s gone bad, so the meal as a whole fails. Kind of like 4E but worse.

Lock-In and Resolve is not a viable solution. Anything that relies on it — like Speed Factor Initiative — should be dragged out into the street and shot. But I don’t want you to misunderstand me, here. This is not a skill issue. I don’t need to git gud. I totally understand that part of the challenge was considering your likely place in the turn order and the current situation and committing to actions that wouldn’t be invalidated by the fickle finger of Initiative fortune. I understand, fully, that that does in fact meet all my criteria for being meaningful and affecting decisions and all that crap. I totally agree that Lock-In and Resolve is a perfectly valid way to handle turn order in a war game. I just don’t like it.

I want fast-paced, tactical play rather than slower-paced, strategic play. I’m an action gamer, not a war gamer. I want everyone taking their turns in the moment. Lock-In and Resolve is a strategic system inspired by wargames about big, slow military units taking high-commitment actions. I’m running nasty, ugly barroom brawls and hallway skirmishes between individual combatants where seconds count and the best action is the one you can take immediately. Lock-In and Resolve just ain’t for me. It’s not broken. It’s not wrong. But it isn’t what I want.

Well, except for the part that is broken and wrong and that brings me to the last segment of this design-discussion-turned-nasty-screaming-rant…

Games for Humans

This is now a full-on everything that’s wrong with gaming, screaming rant. I’m sorry, but I’m also not. I’ll tell you what, though, if you let me rant out my last rant, I’ll come back and fix turn order and Initiative in D&D for you. Or, at least, I’ll give you something new and fun to try that’ll suck less. Because I actually do have a system I’ve been working on. This ain’t just a rant for rant’s sake. I’m just furiously identifying all the reasons why you need my fix, even if you’re too complacent to think you do.

Anyway…

Roleplaying gamers and designers forget that roleplaying games are things meant for humans to play, run, and enjoy. While I can illustrate that point by beating on old school turn order and Initiative some more, I’m going to give the modern system another pummeling first. See? I’m an equal opportunity asshole. I hate everything.

Isn’t it weird how D&D tells you the rules for following turn order and determining Initiative, but it never tells you how to actually do it at the table? Nowhere do the core rulebooks say, “Track turn order by writing a list,” or, “Here is a tracking sheet,” or, “Have every player use a spin-down die to track their turn order.” It’s just, like, “Here’s the rules, now figure out how to make it happen, cap’n.” At best, you’ll sometimes get some suggestions about things you could do, but that’s it.

I’ve personally never found turn order tracking that hard. I do it pretty much the way I have since I actually was a gaming zygote. I use a combat tracking sheet that’s actually just a piece of blank paper I scribble quick abbreviations and scrawls on. I track everything there. I track turn order, hit points, conditions, declared actions if I’ve suffered temporary brain damage, and I’m running an old school edition, reaction speed, whatever. It’s really quick and really easy. I don’t even have to stop narrating while I make my notes.

I wonder, though, why I had to invent this sheet myself. I mean, players get character sheets, right? They’re in the back of the rulebook, or you can download them, or, thanks to modern technology, you can now pay for a license basically forever to have a character sheet you’re not allowed to print, and that only works when you have internet access, and that’s infinitely less versatile than a paper sheet and a pencil would be. What an age we live in.

Sorry. Had a little “Get off my lawn moment,” there. It’ll happen to you someday.

My point is, the game designers knew that players would need to track hit points and record stats and skills and gear, right? So they supplied a tool for that. They also know that Game Masters need to track enemy hit points and turn orders and conditions and shit. Why no tool? Why don’t the rules include actual instructions?

Well, I guess there are virtual table tops. Pay a license fee for infinity months and… you know the drill. But that didn’t come from the designers. That was the developers of the virtual tabletop applications solving the problem that the game designers didn’t. Unnecessarily, I might add. Because once you have a solution for tracking turn order and Initiative at a physical table, you can just do the same thing at a virtual table. I don’t use the turn trackers in Foundry and Fantasy Grounds. I still use my combat tracking sheet. It’s quicker, it’s easier, and it doesn’t require me to break the pace. If I’m not careful, though, I will end up in a whole other rant about what invisible costs virtual tabletop applications are actually charging us Game Masters. It’s not the shit you think. Maybe I’ll do that some other time.

Meanwhile, online, I still use my combat tracker paper, and I can still keep a normal D&D 5E combat under twenty minutes. But this ain’t just about sheets and tracking tools and the need for instructions instead of rules. There’s another layer to this whole games for humans thing.

As a designer, you have a duty to think about both the cognitive load and the friction that your game system imposes on the people playing and running it. Cognitive load refers to how much shit the game asks people to carry in their heads. For example, if ten different common modifiers might apply to any given attack roll — things like flanking, having the high ground, outnumbering the opponent, and so on — Game Masters have to keep that list of ten possibilities in their heads and look for each one every time someone makes an attack. That’s a high cognitive load.

Friction, meanwhile, refers to the amount of actual, physical work you have to do to get something done. How much actual effort do you have to expend to use the rule or system? For example, if you have this pool-based dice system where every action requires the player to assemble a dice pool of six to twelve dice of different colors, roll them, and then scan for different symbol combinations, that’s a high-friction system.

Now, don’t spill jimmies in your panties over those examples because that’s all they are. They’re examples. There’s nothing inherently wrong with systems imposing a high cognitive load or creating gameplay friction. That’s just a part of gaming. But every ounce of cognitive load and every Fig Newton of friction you impose is a cost your game charges the participants to play it. If the system or mechanics gives the participants more than they pay for it, that’s a good mechanic. It’s all about how much gameplay value you offer for your players’ complexity dollars. Get me?

I really hate talking about this shit, by the way, because the retort is always, “Well, I don’t find it too hard to handle this, so it isn’t a problem.” Like, have a conversation about what a shitty system THAC0 and subtractive Armor Class actually is for human brains and why additive and roll-over systems are easier for human brains to process, and show actual research data on how humans process math, and you’re still going to hear, “It’s not that hard. I don’t have a problem with it.” And then they’ll hit you with their cane and trundle off back to their retirement home in Lake Geneva to complain that they got the wrong flavor of pudding at dinner.

People can do the math. I can do the math. That’s not the point. The point is that, as a game designer, you always want to minimize the cognitive load and the friction your game creates so you maximize the value you’re delivering. There is no good reason to stick with a subtractive system once you know additive systems are better and easier for all humans. If you do, you’re just a stubborn, clueless jackass.

Club Slapdash members know that I am hyperfixated on how many complexity dollars I’m charging anyone for anything I do. That marathon combat redesign last week? It started with a bunch of wild ideas, yeah, but most of the actual design work was about iterating down to the lowest levels of friction and cognitive load I could hit. Because I design games for humans.

In that respect, modern D&D has actually done a pretty good job. Since good ole version three of D&D, the designers have streamlined many of the speedbumps out of the Fire-and-Forget Cyclical Horseshit Turn Order very effectively. For example, back in v.3, readying an action actually changed your place in the turn order. But that was kind of a pain in the ass because your system ain’t fire-and-forget if you have to change it sometimes. That said, I still count modern turn order and Initiative as a fail on the games for humans front because it’s just a little cumbersome to keep track of without a computer doing it for you, and because the game designers knew it would be and didn’t provide a solution.

That’s why, by the way, all those Etsy D&D creators and 3D printer owners and third-party gaming accessory sellers are still selling initiative tracking solutions. You can buy all sorts of little hangers for your GM screen, little dial-wheel initiative rememberers, and magnetic dry-erase combat tracking boards. There are dozens of different bespoke web applications you can find in Google that’ll track the turn order for you. And when we content creators run out of ideas, we can always put out something called “The best way to track turn order and initiative in D&D in 2025,” just to meet our content creation Patreon quotas.

This brings me back to the old-school Lock-In and Resolve systems. It’s just a terrible game for humans to play and run. If you have to declare the action you’re going to take in five minutes, then roll initiative, then modify the initiative based on the action you’re going to take, then keep track of both the initiative score and the action every creature is going to take when it’s finally their turn, that’s a hefty cognitive load and quite a bit of friction. Especially if you’ve got to sort that shit into combat phases too. Again, this is not a skill issue thing. I can do it, dumbass, and I can do it quickly and smoothly. I’ve spent a lot of the last two years running AD&D 2E with Individual Speed-Factor Initiative, and I kept my combats just as smoothly as I do in any other system. If a player forgot the action they had been planning to take or got confused about their place in the order, I was always ready to say, “Okay, Adam, you can make your melee attack with your greataxe now. You can move first to get into position if you want, up to your walking speed. Then take your attack.”

I can do it. I can afford the complexity cost. It ain’t no thing to me. But I’m not sure what actual value I’m getting for my complexity dollar. That’s the issue.

Great Story, Angry… Now What?

So what the hell is my point? What am I doing here? Well, honestly, right now, I guess all I’m doing is ranting. I’m pissing and moaning because turn order and Initiative systems in D&D and other modern games leave me feeling really dissatisfied. And while everyone else out there is perfectly happy making pat observations like, “Initiative doesn’t matter except in the first round and even then it doesn’t really, so it’s not really worth thinking about,” I find myself saying, “Yeah, but shouldn’t it matter? We have to have a turn order; shouldn’t we get something out of it? Shouldn’t it matter through the whole fight if I have to track it through the whole fight?” But every time I say that out loud, the answer is always, “But it doesn’t matter though, so why make it complicated? Just leave it there sitting quietly in the corner, just doing its one tiny little thing.”

That’s when the answer isn’t just, “If you want a good Initiative system, play AD&D as Gygax intended.”

Well, I think it’s worth fixing, and I hate every pre-2000 D&D thing — though the Mentzer Red Box gets a pass for some very specific reasons — so that’s what I’m going to do. I want initiative to be interesting, even if it’s only a tiny little bit more, and I want it to be meaningful, even if it’s only slightly more meaningful than it used to be, and I also want it to be easier to manage at the table, even if it’s really not that hard already. I realize what I’m doing is the tiniest, dumbest, time-wastingest thing here because I’m basically looking to make something 1% more meaningful and 1% less complex for a total gameplay value of 2.02%. I did the math. If you don’t think that’s worth it or if you don’t care or if you’re happy with what you’ve got, fine. But this is my website and I get to make whatever I want here.

Oh, I also want to gut Dexterity right out of the whole turn order system. Fuck Dexterity.