I previously proposed combining two variants from the 2014 DMG: Initiative Scores and Speed Factor initiative. The idea was to replace the chanciness of rolled initiative with uncertainty, and to make the initiative order depend more on what characters are doing, rather than merely on how they are built.
Does it work?
My earliest experiment involved two combats in which the PCs were facing groups of identical opponents—giant spiders and harpies, to be precise. Due to their size and Dexterity, giant spiders have an initiative score of 9. Harpies have an initiative score of 11, or 13 in rounds when they plan to use their clubs. They always plan to use their clubs.
Declarations. The declarations phase tended to go smoothly, but players were worried about being locked into their actions before they knew what was going to happen in the round, potentially winding up doing nothing. That was as intended from my perspective: I wanted there to be fog of war in action selection for both sides.
There were some twists that arose and required ruling. First, a harpy was caught in the area of a web spell, and so had to make a save at the start of their turn. If the save has not yet occurred, the harpy has to make their decision about what to do before they know if they'll be restrained by the web. I decided to go ahead and make the save during declarations, but not to apply the result until the harpy's turn.
In another case, a harpy was incapacitated by a hypnotic pattern. Can that character declare actions, for the case that they are free of the pattern when their turn comes up? I ruled yes, but it couldn't declare attacks, due to its being charmed.
In both cases, I'm tempted by the other possibility—force the webbed creature to choose an action in the fog of war, and don't allow the incapacitated creature to choose an action at all.
I had precalculated initiative scores for most of the things the PCs would be doing, and it wasn't unwieldy. One player did wonder if there were time savings overall, because this system requires me to write down what everyone is doing each turn, while the standard system doesn't require any writing. I try to write fast, but it's a good point. The procedure of getting everyone's declarations each round, without resolving them yet, was as annoying as getting everyone's initiative results each round would have been.
What's more, after the declarations phase, there are very few additional decisions to be made. Players we not more engaged during combat while others' turns were being resolved.
Decision-making for Declaration. The point of the system is to make initiative order depend more on player choices. My experiment had only three players, with initiative scores of 14, 11, and 10. The 11 was an artificer who could go as late as 9 (casting a 2nd-level spell), but usually just went on 11. The 14 was a bard who had no action options that would put him later in the initiative order than the artificer. The 10 was a cleric who was sure to go last among the PCs, unless the artificer cast a 2nd-level spell.
So, the only decision in the fight that affected PC initiative order relative to each other was the artificer's decision whether to cast a 2nd-level spell; which wasn't much of a decision, generally speaking.
What about their position relative to the monsters?
The giant spiders have an initiative score of 9, due to size (-2) and Dexterity (+1). The init 14 bard could not possibly go after them. The init 11 artificer goes after them if and only if casting a 2nd-level spell. The init 10 cleric goes after them if and only if casting a non-cantrip spell. So, two players' decisions make a difference to their order with respect to the spiders. Neither the artificer nor the cleric were even tempted enough to cast leveled spells for the question of "cast X before the monsters or cast Y after them?" to come up much.
The harpies were much faster than the spiders: Base initiative 11, 13 when using their clubs (which they always used). In this fight, none of the PCs were affected by the harpies' songs.
The harpies were always going on 13. That meant that they went before all PCs except when the bard cast a 2nd-level spell. So, the decision of what to do again didn't have much effect on turn order round to round.
Fog of War. While player decisions rarely made a difference to turn order, the need to declare action did introduce uncertainty for spell casters. They had to anticipate whether the enemy would be in position to target with their spells. If they weren't going before the enemy—either because they were slower innately or because they were casting spells with long enough casting times—declaring the spell meant risking the loss of action for the round. In the harpy fight, both casters had to adapt on their turns to new conditions in order to cast the spells they had initially declared. There is no equivalent, commonly occurring complication that non-spell casters have to deal with.
Actions. The actions phase gave me some, but not all, of what I hoped for. It was pretty quick to resolve, as almost all the decision-making had been done ahead of time. It was just movement and dice rolls to resolve the previously declared actions. It felt frenetic because turns went by so quickly. On the other hand, because movement was involved, it still felt like everyone was taking their turns in order, but much more quickly.
Future investigation. So far, the fixedness of the initiative scores looks more significant than the variability from action choice. The declarations phase introduces fog of war to action selection, and the jury is still out as to whether that enhances or detracts from the game. Even with the fog of war, it only presents some PCs with interesting choices, and only in some circumstances.
The declarations phase alone did not introduce the feeling of simultaneity I was hoping for, but it came close. Next time: Can anything do that?
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