Initiative in AD&D, particularly when combined with the equally obscure rules regarding surprise, was one of those areas where, in my experience, most players back in the day simply ignored the official rules and adopted a variety of house rules. I know I did. My system was a variation on rolling 1d6 per side with modifiers and a dash of common sense. D&D's combat has always been pretty abstract, so it never made much sense to me to fixate on making one of its aspects more "realistic." Unfortunately, in this period of D&D's history, that opinion wasn't held by all, least of all those who wrote articles for Dragon. "Realism" was all the rage.
Hall introduces an attack priority system that makes good use of weapon speed factors -- another aspect of AD&D many gamers dropped -- in order to model advantage such "faster" weapons have in combat. His system is an individual initiative system rather than a group initiative one, which, right there, means it's going to be much more complex than the commonest house rules used at the time. Add to this that there many, many modifiers to a character's attack priority, such as weapon length, dexterity, size, hit dice, among others, and you have a recipe for a system that, despite its claims does require "more work." The other issue is that, like many such systems, Hall distinguishes between manufactured and natural weapons, which necessitates that there be seven pages of supplementary stats to cover the modifiers for all the creatures in the Monster Manual. What one is to do with the Fiend Folio monsters is never addressed.
Articles like this were no doubt extremely well-intentioned, but, even at my most obsessive, I never felt the desire to use them. I understood the logic that leads to creating an individualized initiative system with lots of modifiers and special cases, but, at the end of the day, the result always seems like more work than is necessary for a combat system as abstract as D&D's. I'll readily grant that AD&D is a mess when it comes to initiative and the other complexities it bolted on to OD&D's "alternative combat system." However, articles like this strike me as cures worse than the disease.
There was also a strike-rank like table in Judges Guilds Redy Ref sheets.
ReplyDeleteI'm not a fan of complex initiative systems. I do very much like RuneQuest strike ranks, but they're pretty simple and using the delay Strike Rank to adjust hit location adds an interesting choice for not that much effort. I also liked d6 initiative per side for my OD&D play by post. Cold Iron doesn't have initiative but it does have an order of things during a combat round that allow for some initiative type decisions (mostly regarding spell casting).
ReplyDeleteI've always done individual initiative unless the combat is "too large" -- which is defined as "whenever I've decided it's too large" -- but I've always done it as d12. I have no idea where I got that from, as no rulebook I'm aware of says to use d12 for initiative, but I always have. Probably it began because I like the d12 and don't think it gets enough use. :-)
ReplyDeleteI agree. There's a couple of other observations:
ReplyDelete(1) This article presumably went through an editorial review before being accepted, which tells me that there wasn't anything else available that they felt could fill those 7+ pages.
(2) There wasn't an over-arching design review process in TSR or Dragon to weigh up what was being added (the claim of realism) versus the detriment of slowing down each round of combat (having to look up tables for modifiers or effects - that's MERP/Rolemaster's niche).
This whole line of inquiry – initiative – and its unnecessary complexity is a consequence of Gary’s misreading of military history. Although I’m grateful for his monumental contributions to gaming, I have to admit he was way off on this element. As the primary pioneer of RPGs, he did many great things. One of the not-so-great was to establish this legacy of muss and fuss over nonsense.
ReplyDeleteSomehow, against all the evidence, he concluded that first strike was equally dependent on a host of variables such as weapon “speed” (ludicrous, Gary later abandoned the concept), personal dexterity, so forth and so on. Thousands of years of military history for fights large and small have demonstrated beyond doubt that the one initiative variable that overwhelms all others is weapon length, or range for projectiles. That’s it. The historical record clearly shows a trend first toward longer weapons, from gladius to pike, and then toward projectiles that could shoot further, from spear to ICBM. No army ever favored daggers or pistols (allegedly fast weapons) to achieve first strike; instead those were tools of last resort for self-defense.
Gary acknowledged as much in his rules for charging, where weapon length (and nothing else) determined first strike. He should have done the same for all combat. From there one could add a few protocols to account for natural weapons, the rank order of participants not using weapons, and ties.
Hmm, RuneQuest does factor in dexterity and size, though size implicates reach which should still be a valid factor, but maybe it should drop dexterity.
DeleteIn Cold Iron all that matters is length, spears attack first, then most weapons, then short weapons and natural weapons so maybe it gets it right.
But military weapon choice also considers battle. Small skirmishes might well be different, so perhaps RQ looking to the experience in SCA combat is looking at the right thing for RPG combat?
Jim Hodges--- Honestly, the longer we played, the looser we got with the rules (and the more fun we had), and strict adherence to the dictates of initiative rolls was probably the second thing to fall to the side after the overly-restrictive and sort of pointless guidelines of alignment. I think once we fourteen years old figured out Gary Gygax wasn't going to come to our house and take away our dice for disobeying his rules, the game got better, with less time spent pausing our play to consult the DMG, and less arguing. The books weren't the Talmud, after all, but a self described source of "suggestions."
ReplyDeleteThis was our experience as well. Keeping the Game Moving is what kept the game fun. Later it helped with managing your family on vacation.
Delete"Fixing" D&D combat and initiative, usually in the name of "realism" is a time-honored tradition among gamers, from the Perrin conventions and eventually RuneQuest, to Arms Law/Claw Law, which was originally conceived as a drop-in replacement for D&D combat before becoming RoleMaster.
ReplyDeleteThe only game system I can think of in those early days that went *more abstract* is Tunnels and Trolls, whose underlying combat system strikes me as closer to what Gygax and Arneson originally envisioned.
1d6 per side each round. That way combat is semi-random but there's not overhead. A side might have some kind of bonus to the roll on the first round. Combat should be random confusion, at least a little
ReplyDeleteWhen 2nd ed AD&D hit the market, I went with 1d10 with DEX modifiers. Seemed to make more sense to me (ten 6-second segments), probably because I suck at math. A ten-count system was easier to track who went when for me. I did add a house rule if there was a "Tie", highest DEX would roll first. That's just me.
ReplyDeleteI always used the Arduin system of counting down from 20 and everyone has their attack when it hits their Dex stat.
ReplyDeleteI always house ruled my games but I'd always like a game using the A.D.D.I.C.T rules of only for completion
ReplyDelete