Hi everyone!
Hi everyone. Today I want to talk about one of the most important moments in a tabletop role-playing game: the moment you enter combat. You’ve realised the enemy is too much, you’re not going to be able to negotiate – you’re going to have to fight.
Then… you do whatever initiative mechanic your game calls for.
Sometimes that breaks you so far out of what you were doing that you lose the feeling of the moment. You’re no longer excited: suddenly you’re doing arithmetic or scrambling for a deck of cards.
I do want to recognise that the way the Games Master presents it absolutely has an impact. The way it is presented can promote the excitement is not to be underrated.
It’s worth mentioning that I believe a good GM can fix almost any game! I just believe that they should not have to!
But a lot of games (and I’m somewhat guilty of this myself) simply do what everyone else does, without really thinking about how to promote the best feeling in gameplay.
So that’s what I’ve been revisiting! I’ve never been totally happy with my initiative rules, which are more or less the same as everyone else’s: roll one die, add your initiative number, that’s the order.
From the very first times I introduced RPGs to brand-new players, I noticed it was a problem: they’d done a few non-combat rolls and then bam! Initiative!
“Why is this the mechanic?”
It made no sense to them in context, it didn’t fit. I did it because it’s what everyone does.
For years I’ve been asking: What can I do better about initiative? and What feeling do I want to evoke by changing it?
I’m not going to tell you what I’ve come up with because it isn’t final yet! I’ve got ideas, but the point I want to leave you with is this:
The feeling your mechanics evoke is everything, initiative or otherwise.
Good luck out there, whether you’re a Gamer, a Creator, or a Games Master.
Don’t forget: the vibe is everything.
– Ed
