Initiative, Dice, and Dramatic Tension

Timing is the best tool in a storyteller's kit. By their very nature, stories are artifacts of time. They unspool in acts, with tension rising and falling over time, before the story ends at its most dramatic moment.

Combat should follow a similar model in D&D. Initiative is the best tool in the DM's kit for ensuring that happens, and rolling dice for initiative won't get us there.

The current system is rooted in the wargame simulations that spawned D&D 50 years ago. Wargames with random initiative provide balance by giving an advantages to the first player (my units shoot first!) and the second player (but I move after you, giving me more information to work with in developing my plans).

Dice are dramatic tools only when we understand their results before we roll. In early D&D, with its much higher lethality, initiative was critical. Characters had few enough hit points that they could drop before their turn.

In modern D&D, combat is designed to last about 3 rounds. While some monsters can take out a PC in one action, those are the exception.

Over time, the initiative roll has lost its dramatic power. In AD&D, going second might mean your character is dead before they can act. In modern D&D, it means that maybe you are stuck with a condition, but instant death is rare.

I think that, by and large, players and DMs like that. It means that fights build up in drama until we reach the end. In my game yesterday, the characters took on a solo monster. The fight ended with one PC down and two others bloodied. The party cleric dropped the monster with an inflict wounds spell. The rogue was up next, but they were under an effect that forced them to attack their allies. That inflict wounds was the difference between victory and a TPK.

Variable initiative for the DM undermines that. I think that all DM controlled elements should fire off on specific initiative numbers, always losing ties to players:

25: Very fast stuff, penalized in damage or defenses to account for their speed.

15: The typical monster, defaulting to 15 rather than 10 because the party is rolling multiple initiative checks.

5: Slow stuff, giving a boost to offense or defense since they are likely to see fewer actions than other monsters.

In designing encounters we can now establish a basic flow of play. Let's say you want to run a fight with a gang of goblins back up by an ogre:

Initiative 25: The goblin shaman picks a character and all their allies have advantage on attacks against that character.

Initiative 15: The mob of goblins goes.

Initiative 5: The goblins' ogre ally goes.

Do the characters focus on the shaman to shut down the buff, or do they try to whittle down the goblins before they can attack with advantage? What about the ogre? It does hefty damage. Should the players try to take it out before it goes?

From an encounter building standpoint, this makes DMing much easier. You have a basic plan before the action begins, and then you can adjust as play progresses.

Even better, initiative rolls now have meaning. The players know that beating a 15 is always good for them, and beating 25 gives them the chance to wreak havoc on the encounter. That adds drama to die rolls and makes them more meaningful.

That's simple stuff, but here is where things get fun. With monster abilities and terrain effects, we can do stuff like this:

Rolling Boulder: At the start of each round, randomly determine the direction and distance this moves. Mark that on the map. At the end of the round, the boulder moves and crushes everything in its path.

Telegraphing danger to the players gives them the chance to plan and react. Imagine the same boulder in an encounter with immaterial spirits that ignore the boulder's damage, or with a bunch of zombies that explode when they die. The players have a full round of actions to figure out how to minimize the boulder's threat.