Saturday Morning Adventure Dev Diaries #2: Combat Turn Order

In this weeks deep dive into the minutia of tabletop RPG design, I will be discussing various methods for determining turn order, or "initiative" as it is more commonly referred to within RPGs, and talking about my plans for initiative design in Saturday Morning Adventure.

The method used for determining the order turns are taken during combat in an RPG is an integral component of combat design, and implementing different methods can serve as a useful way to incentivise certain behaviours of the players. I thought I would start of by classifying what I think of as the three major "families" of initative determination.

Fixed Rounds

This is the name I'm using for the initaitve rules in D&D 5e. I call it "fixed" in the sense that once it is determined there isn't any changing it. Roll at the start of combat, follow the order from there onwards, unless some special abilty says otherwise. Easy to use, light, few dice rolls. This form of initative determination is perfectly fine, but doesn't exactly have much space for including interesting mechanics or pushing certain strategic elements. You really just have to work with the rolls you get at the start and build a plan from there. Or you could even have a system where you don't roll initiative at all in this family, something like highest initative "stat" goes first, then next highest and so on without rolling.

I'm distinctly trying not to harp on about the merits and drawbacks of each design family here, because if I let loose I know full well this post would just become a rant about how I find this kind of system boring. Tab Atkins-Bittner covers most of my feelings towards the standard 5e system in their blog post where they discuss Michael Long's house rule (which we'll get to later).  I understand this system works well for most people playing games like D&D or Pathfinder, but I think something a little more interesting would work better for SMA, especially considering that my current plans for SMA mean tracking position is more or less gone (see Dev Diaries #1) which should free up some combat time and mental effort.

No Rounds

In a "no rounds" initiative system, rounds don't exist. Shocker. By this mere fact they would be a lot harder to homebrew into a game like 5e where rounds are such a core construct that is used fairly frequently. However, it's certainly possible to design a game from the ground up with this sort of system. To give a quick example of how this could work, I'll lay out a quick system here.

1. All actors in combat make an initiative roll, with lower rolls being better.
2. The GM periodically counts. As they do so, each actor reduces their roll by one.
3. Once an actor's roll is 0, they take their turn, with some tie-breaking rule.
4. At the end of their turn, an actor makes their next initiative roll and continues to increment downwards as the GM counts.

Now of course this system as wrtitten is a pretty flimsy, but it's just meant to illustrate the concept. The major upside of this sort of system is tactical complexity. In games like Cosmic Star Heroine you can do all sorts of things to shuffle around the turn order, allowing you to pull off some pretty satisfying combos as a team. Though, of course, there's a pretty signifcant drawback. This kind of system usually ends up with quite a lot more number tracking, which is probably why it's mostly relegated to use in video games rather than tabletop RPGs. I think for a tabletop RPG to use this sort of system would require the whole game to be carefully designed and balanced with this in mind, and even then it would probably only work if the number of actors in combat was pretty small.

Dynamic Rounds

And finally, dynamic rounds systems. I'm lumping any initiative system in which rounds exist, but initiative is somehow recalculated every round under this title. An example of this kind of system would be the "Speed Factor" initiative rules given in the Dungeon Master's Guide. I'm aware that this system seems to be relatively controversial within the community, but I actually kind of like it. I won't dive that much into what I like about it, since The Angry GM already wrote a great article that covers my thoughts pretty succinctly. If you've decried the system in thepast I would encourage you to give it a look. For an example of a simpler dynamic rounds system, I would point you towards Michael Long's house rule on Tribality, as mentioned earlier - I really enjoy this system, and it seems to me like a promising starting point for what I want in SMA's design.

I particularly like this family of mechanics for various reasons. Rounds still exist, so they can be used in the rules elsewhere without hassle. In my opinion it's easier to homebrew a fixed rounds system onto a game using a dynamic rounds system than the other way around. It's also probably the broadest of the three groups I'm discussing here. As I've already said, this covers the Speed Factor system from the Dungeon Master's Guide, the fast/slow turn houserule by Michael Long, and even the Unearthed Arcana on Greyhawk Initiative (hey I didn't say they were all good systems).

Sidebar: Two Types of Speed

In any turn-based combat system, there are two types of speed in play. Between-turns speed, and within-turns speed. Between-turns speed measures how much time there is between an actors turns, which is usually relatively constant in tabletop games with a rounds format. Within-turns speed measures how quickly a character acts or how much a character can do during their turn. Giving players the option to make choices that effect either of these speeds can increase tactical complexity of a game. This is one of the reasons I like Michael Long's house rule so much. Taking fast turns or slow turns both have their own advantages, but moving between these two types of turns also comes with effects. If you take a slow turn one round then a fast turn the next, your between-turns speed is breifly a lot faster, and the inverse is true for moving from a fast turn to a slow turn. 

This essentially lets you "store" some between-turns speed for later. I'll talk about within-turns speed in more depth when I dive into my planning for the action economy for SMA, since that influences within-turns speed more than anything else.

Initiative in SMA

As you may have guessed based on what I've written so far, I'm currently planning to implement a dynamic rounds initiative system in SMA, probably similar to Michael Long's proposed system. Michael Long attributes the inspiration for his design to "Shadow of the Demon Lord", an RPG written by Robert Schwalb, so I'll probably look into the systems in that game for further inspiration as well. The specifics of the system I'll use for SMA are still somewhat hazy, since the design of the initiative system is more heavily reliant on other components of the game like the action economy and character building, which I haven't put loads of thought into at this stage.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I'm taking a break from Modern Manual content over the next month due to university work, so until June these Dev Diaries are gonna dominate the blog. In the next one I plan on talking about some of my basic plans for character building in SMA, I hope to see you again then.