Playing D&D without initiative
We tried playing D&D combat without initiative based on my experience that combat sometimes takes so long / that the cognitive load of having to wait while others complete their turns over time can be hard to follow. A DM suggested they had a method in a video - basically everyone goes at once with 60 seconds to plan and rules are massaged for surprise, range, reaction, etc. and everyone takes damage if there’s a hit.
I found out after testing the method, while scrolling through the comments of the video posted by the DM who came up with this idea, that he doesn’t use the “no initiative” method anymore, which, if I had realized that, might have left this idea dead in the water before I tried it.
It brings up a whole other question of accountability - if a content creator changes their mind, should they perhaps feel obliged to go back and update the description of the older video? It turns out that he has another idea of how to improve initiative, but I would have had to pay for his Patreon to find out what that one was and the experience left a bad taste in my mouth rather than make me feel interested in paying for another idea.
Here were the pros and cons based on the experience, along with open questions:
Pros
In theory, faster combat - though this group of level 3 PCs actually hasn’t yet had combat with initiative with rules as written for comparison. I believe 3 rounds of combat with 8 giant rats and a swarm of maggots and 4 players took 5 minutes.
Cons
Group still went in order to declare who’s doing what before the roll, so the whole group can hear.
Is there room for someone to change their mind having heard others? Is the brief time enough for coordinating attacks?
Support roles that want to change their position and/or actions to help others based on what other players are doing were unable to figure out how to do those actions.
Qualitatively, the arcane trickster rogue felt like they could just stab – nothing interesting to do. Granted there were a lot of one-shotted kills given the enemy level.
There were questions about where people move after they attack, especially for the rogues.
It wasn’t always explicitly stated who the PCs were targeting prior to rolls, possibly related to confusion (including that of the DM). As a result, when single enemies were one-shotted, we had to decide whether the next PC had been targeting that same enemy (we were inclined to say no and optimize) and if so, if they were changing their aim. We looked at the success of the roll and said it seemed so high that they could change aim
If we had to do it again, even if we were more precise about targets in advance, the question still remains – who of the PCs go first? The one with the highest roll? And then what happens if there is one obvious high HP enemy within range, and another further away, and both planned to attack the first enemy, but one of them kills that enemy? Does the second player revise their move?
Do PCs with ranged attacks always go before PCs with melee?
Does combat actually have more flavor if each person has more time (think like a slo-mo sequence in an action movie where the move can be described in more detail)?
As a group, we don’t even know whether long combat turns is a problem our group even has in the first place so this effort was contextually premature. And we didn’t spend time specifying details of this solution in advance, so we were testing something that by definition was incomplete, so it’s possible that the questions raised could be answered and accounted for and the system retested.
For now, we’re going back to trying to play with initiative.
