Fixing 5e Initiative Part 2: More Solutions that Don't Work

Last time, I talked about what's wrong with 5e initiative, and why none of the variants in the DMG solve all the problems. Now we're going to solve it.

Let's start by looking at what a couple of recent games have done to address the problems.

In Shadow of the Demon Lord, there are fast or slow actions. Your choice of action determines whether you go before or after the opposition. This is not disengaging, and it makes initiative depend on what it should: player decisions about what they are going to do.

The trouble is that there isn't an obvious way to convert that system to 5e. You could look at every possible action and decide whether it's slow or fast. But when you do that, you'd also break everything that is supposed to interact with initiative by modifying characters' Dexterity checks, and you eliminate the advantage of high Dexterity for initiative. It might work, but it's a lot of work.

In the upcoming Delve RPG, player characters get three actions per round, and monsters go first each round. Player characters can sacrifice one of their actions to go before the monsters do. This system does away with the disengagement of rolling initiative, but your choice of action doesn't have a lot of effect on the decision whether to go before the monsters. The main questions for players are (a) is there a good reason to make the monsters go between my turn and another player's turn?, (b) do I need to do three things this turn anyway?,  and (c) will it be good for me, having gone last this turn, to go first next turn?.

Unlike Shadow of the Demon Lord, Delve doesn't make your place in the initiative depend on your action choice. However, Delve asks the player to think about and make decisions about their initiative directly, in conjunction with their choice of action. For anything you can do with one or two actions, you ask yourself, "Should I do this before or after the other side's next turn?" That can be an interesting decision, but it's also a deterministic interaction with a purely mechanical aspect of the game, turn order. Those decisions would be more interesting and immersive if they involved risk or uncertainty derived from player choice.

The Delve system could, maybe, be implemented in 5e. You could try having the monsters always go first, unless players sacrifice their bonus action, movement, or action, to go first instead. That would probably have unintended bad consequences. For example, characters such as rogues are likely to use their movement, bonus action, and action each turn. In unmodified 5e, they are also likely to go early in the round. In the 5e-converted Delve system, they'd go last. The system also removes any initiative benefits that come from high Dexterity or bonuses to Dexterity checks.

Next: The Solution?