initiative

I've talked about initiative before, albeit in a slanted way, and I noticed while self-examining my GM style of DCC RPG that I no longer treat initiative as stringently and compulsory as I had in the past.

A situation arose in my last game session where the PCs were confronted with a second monster at the tail end of a round where they just finished dealing with another monster, and instead of rolling initiative and bringing in the second adversary I let the players dictate what they would do before attacks were launched. It resulted in a temporary end to combat and a need to re-roll initiative later when it started again. A later scene in the same game had a player announcing his character's attack in order to initiate combat, and rather than roll for surprise or initiative, as the rules of D&D and it's many variants usually calls for, I had him roll his attack to see what would happen first. He managed to score a critical hit and ended the combat before it had a chance to begin.

I still think surprise and reaction rules have their place, but I just believe a game is more fun for everybody involved if the GM maintains that the players drive the action of the story. In purely mechanical terms, when a player declares an attack than they should be allowed to complete it before moving on to reaction, surprise or initiative rolls.

Initiative vs. Reaction

The real beauty of Apocalypse World, and the thing that has most changed my outlook, is that there's no initiative. Since the GM never rolls dice but only reacts to players' rolls, initiative is a non-entity. If somebody declares they want to do something, they simply do it, unless asked to roll for it. Then they either succeed and do it, partially succeed and get a little fuckery on the side, or they fail and the GM gets to make their own move against the PC. There's no binary of succeed/failure. I may actually adopt this GMing technique for every game I run from now on, because now I can't shake the feeling that initiative is a cudgel used to parse the story into a sequence of actions that don't really make any sense.

The "GM only reacts to rolls" style would seem to massage what a player wants to do with their character as well. If a player wanted to attack somebody and the GM called for initiative, what would happen if he rolled the lowest? An entire turn of combat would happen around him in reaction to an attack he had yet to make. The narrative of the story is now forced into "Everybody could tell Baker was about to attack Gogol, and so everybody started shooting around Baker, leaving him and his gun useless." when the story should be "Baker pulled his gun and shot Gogol in the face, and that's when all hell broke loose..."