I decided the combination of speed factor and initiative scores wasn't helping the game enouhg. The declarations phase just bogged things down too much. So, I tried a different way.
The monsters use their initiative scores. At the beginning of combat, the PCs make initiative rolls. All that matters, though, is which monsters they beat. In the simplest case, the initiative rolls divide the PCs into two groups—the Befores and the Afters.
The thing is, I don't care about what order the PCs in a group go in. They can act in whatever order they like. They can even interrupt each others' turns.
Initially, I let them actually resolve their turns at the same time. I found I couldn't keep track of multiple turns at once, especially with players making automated rolls on a VTT. So now, I let them choose the turn order, and a player can interrupt another player's turn if they want to. They usually don't want to.
This injects a little bit more player choice into initiative from round to round. Using initiative scores for monsters speeds up the beginning of a combat significantly.
It isn't perfect. Since initiative is circular, it often turns into a cycle of : Fast PCs, monsters, slow PCs, fast PCs, monsters .... The PCs get bunched together, but they don't have full control over their order at that point. The fast PCs share a turn, followed by the slow PCs' shared turn. Why not one shared party turn at that point?
There are a couple of modifications I'd like to try.
Add initiative rerolling. At the beginning of each round, the players reroll their initiative. In this way, there's always a possibility that fast character goes goes with the Afters one round, or that a slow character gets lucky and goes from the After group to the Before group one round.
Initiative as a group check. If half the characters beat the monsters' initiative score, they all go before the monsters. Otherwise, the monsters go first.
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