Roll for Initiative

During the past several months, I've been thinking a lot about the mechanics of rpg's.

A long time ago, I read an article written by Justin Achilli, in which he talked about the art of designing character sheets. He said that every skill you put on it, communicates with the players about what kind of characters the game is meant to have.

As an example, he mentioned the computer skill that snuk it's way onto all the OWoD sheets. This in turn led to hacker werewolves. That was never really in the game designers heads. But since it was on the character sheet, it was obviously ment to be used. So you get ferocious, nerdy, H4xx0r werewolves... Yeah. I have a hard time picturing it too.

But it made me think more about the things we take for granted when we home-brew our systems. In this particular case, Initiative, and whether or not we should get rid of it.

Not in all systems of course, but in some. If you're running a very combat-heavy game, you will need Initiative like you need Oxygen, but I'm starting to think it has no place in horror games. Now before you start screaming obscenities at your screen, or phoning the asylum to have me committed, let me explain.

Initiative is great for keeping track of combat, it's true, but it also creates a probability curve of success that is bad for suspense. If you want your character to be good at fighting, step one is always a high initiative, followed by a good combat skill, and finally you round off with lots of damage. Presto, an almost unbeatable war machine.

But take away Inititative, and suddenly things get scarier. It doesn't matter if you hit like a truck, or have the unerring accuracy of a laser if you're dead before you can swing. Suddenly every fight becomes edgy and uncertain. As a fight should be in a horror game.

Let's take a Jasonesque slasher villain as an example. How scary is he if;

1. you know you how likely you are to hit first?
2. you know the amount of damage you can pull off in a single round?

You now know if you should take him on or not. The best tactic has crystallized itself in your mind, and a good portion of the suspense is now dead.

If Initiative is a part of the rules, the usual way to resolve this dilemma is to make Jason very hard to kill, but in my experience, a ridiculously tough enemy is more annoying than frightening.

Getting rid of Initiative has the added benefit of making minor monsters nastier. You can't just yawn and mow down the gremlings, if you can't be certain to hit first.

This is the key, right here. The death of certainty and apathy.

Picture all the good horror movies you've seen. Or most good movies over all. Most have a scene where an unlikely person gets in a telling hit that changes the direction things are going. Translated to the table-top, this means that the Psychotic Granny actually becomes dangerous, without you having to explain why she had 6d10 Initiative!

The flip side is that characters who are not Masters of the Seven Secrets of Doom, can now make more of a difference in a desperate fight, than when they know for a fact that the villain will mulch them in the first round. Sure it's likely, but you can't be certain!

The problem really, is that I have no idea how to mechanically make combat work without the damn thing. But I'm working on it, and when I know, you'll know!