Elective Action Order – An Initiative Variant for your Toolbox

Preorder Rise of the Lazy Gamemaster! There are lots of ways to handle initiative in different RPGs. D&D has a variant which many of us use — roll a d20, add your dex mod, and go in order from highest to lowest. Shadowdark has an around-the-table initiative that's always on. It's hard to beat for its simplicity. Dragonbane has an easy system we can port over to other RPGs. You deal out numbered cards for each of the characters and each monster or group of monsters. Flip them over and you know who goes first and who goes last – from lowest to highest number. A simple suit of a deck of cards works well for this, or you can use the almighty index card. Daggerheart has no initiative at all. Characters just go when it makes sense for the story. I ran a Daggerheart game recently, online with six people. With so many players and the typical issues with voice lag, I worried we'd either have people talking over one another regularly or people staying silent to avoid interrupting someone. So I…