System updates and initiative

Well, I’m in an interesting place with Dark Fantasy X. I’ve actually made two updates; one to 2.3 and then almost on the heels of it, to 2.4. The change from 2.2.4 to 2.3 was mostly about adding the sylphs, tritons and dwergs to the document, the removal of the grendlings from the appendix races, and otherwise shuffling the races around just a bit. I made a few other minor changes, but that’s the gist of the real change, and what prompted it in the first place.

The 2.4 update, on the other hand, was where I decided to take the Appendix off of the file, and create a separate Appendix file. The Appendix file is also at the same rev level, since it is a permutation of the same document, but I thought it would be good to just keep that separate and allow me to add more things to the appendix without changing anything on the main. One of the things I’d like to do is take a bunch more spells from official lists (maybe 3e SRD, or some OSR file.) I thought that I could copy and paste these, but it looks like I’d have to do some editing, plus I’d really prefer to not duplicate spells or versions of spells from the main rulebook to the appendix. It’s possible, as I’m still finalizing what 2.4 looks like, that I’ll just expand the spell list in the main rulebook rather than having all of this stuff in the appendix. But probably not. If anything, I may do the opposite; consolidate to fewer main spells and more appendix spells, But we’ll see. Either way, the actual spell list will probably get pretty heavily reworked before I release this new two-part update.

I’m also considering, before I’m done, reworking initiative. I like Bob World Builder’s channel. I know some of the guys who are kinda sorta on our side of the cultural divide disparage Bob, and think he’s a shill for WotC or whatever, but I don’t think that that’s true at all. I think he’s just a nice, non-confrontational guy, and part of the reason WotC invited him (as opposed to say, Professor DM) is that they could see that and knew he’d be easier to manipulate into making their interview with him turn out to give the message that they wanted to share. Bob, especially in the last year or so, has spent a lot less time specifically talking about D&D. He’s been covering lots of other fantasy games like Dungeon Crawl Classics and ShadowDark, and even is releasing (or just released, not sure) a ShadowDark supplement for sale as a third party product. Being a nice, non-confrontational guy who kind of got a little bit publicly steamrolled by a sociopathic corporate gas-lighting campaign isn’t something to hold against him. I see him, even if he doesn’t see himself this way, as a bit of a martyr in that regard. He took one for the team. Professor Dungeon Craft has a smaller (although same order of magnitude, I’d guess) reach if number of subscribers means anything, but he’s also the kind of personality who was unlikely to be steamrolled and manipulated into presenting exactly the message WotC wanted him to without him even realizing it. On the other hand, PDM’s content lately has either started to feel like repetitive, irrelevant or sell-out in any case. I’m still subscribed, but I’m a lot less excited to see something he’s posted than I used to be. Frankly, BWB is doing better stuff lately. And, as alluded to at the beginning of this paragraph, he had a really pretty good initiative video that he posted recently, where he analyzed a lot of alternatives to the default initiative scheme, including some homebrew ones that he uses himself, and lots of other “modern” initiative alternatives from games like Index Card RPG, EZD6, Daggerheart, or many others. Frankly, he’s spelled out some that I think I like even better than the options that I have currently in DFX, so I might well make some updates there too as part of 2.4.

While I’ve played, run or at least read well over 40-50 different games, maybe even more depending on where you draw the line between a variant or spin-off versus a full-blown new game, I honestly either can’t remember or didn’t pay attention to how most of them handled turn order. I presume that most of the older games did something similar to D&D just due to not having occurred to anyone to try anything clever. And some systems I’ve used, like The Window, probably don’t even address it at all, although I don’t remember now if that’s true or not. In any case, I played enough d20 games that that was just normal to me, and I played with a small enough group that it rarely became overly tedious to do Initiative (if sometimes just barely), so it’s only been recently that it’s really crossed my mind to do away with Initiative as we know it and replace it with alternative initiative mechanics, or something that’s not actually even initiative at all. It’s kind of a bummer; the whole “Roll for initiative!” is a pretty iconic war cry in the D&D world, but still.. I’ve come to agree more and more than initiative as written is actually a pretty poor system, and even if it wasn’t causing me particular problems, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t better alternatives out there that I should be using instead.

I currently have two alternative methods in the rules (besides the 3e/5e initiative system, that is, which is a third); one of which is the older D&D mechanic of rolling a d6 for “side” initiative. While this has many advantages over ranked initiative by character, it was clearly designed for use when the game hadn’t yet strayed too far from war-gaming conventions, groups were very large, and it works more like an army war-game type of thing than something that really fits super well in a small group character RPG. I’m almost certainly going to get rid of this one. The second is simultaneous initiative, where everyone acts on the same turn, and everyone is required to state their actions beforehand and then they’re all resolved at once. This works pretty well… but it’s possibly more complicated than it needs to be.

EZD6, for example, just does simultaneous turns; all players first, and then all opponents. Daggerheart just doesn’t even bother with turn order; combat is handled just like non-combat; if someone states that they’re doing something, then it’s resolved. It’s up to the GM to make sure that this doesn’t get out of hand, but given that everyone’s read an action scene in a book or watched one in a movie before, everyone can intuitively handle this just fine, most likely, unless it’s a larger than average group with all kinds of stuff going on at the same time. (I think the ideal party size is 3-5 players, by the way.) And frankly, I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with simply going in Dexterity score order, or even just going around the room like every other game you ever play, except that possibly sometimes players may want some more variability instead of the same order all of the time. The more I think about it, the more I think all of these methods are superior for my needs to side initiative or ranked initiative, so there’s no reason to even have either of those in the game anymore. I’ll probably default to something like the EZD6 method, and have the others as options.