D&D 5e Initiative Sucks: Try These Initiative Variants Instead
by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
One of the largest gripes I have with Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition is Initiative because… well, you read the title. It sucks. It's awful. It's so bad that at my personal tables, I’ve stopped running it- I only run it rules as written as a convention DM where I don’t know who I’m DMing for ahead of time.
Here are core Initiative rules I’m recommending you throw in the trash, from the Combat section of the Player’s Handbook.
This article is in two sections: first, I'm going to break down why I find Turn-Based Random Initiative sucks. Then, I’ll provide some easy solutions I’ve found and used that make D&D combat better by addressing the issues I have with the base system.
What I Mean By “Initiative Sucks”
When I say this system sucks and has problems, they’re issues I find frustrating to manage as a DM and as a player. I’ve found the majority of players and DMs I play with tend to agree with my gripes.
D&D is fundamentally flexible, with different groups wanting different kinds of play out of the system. What are pain points for me and my players may be perks for you. That being said, I’d guess you’re more likely in my camp where the issues detract from your overall experience more than empower it.
Why It Sucks
There are the main reasons why the basic initiative sucks:
It works against cooperative strategy
It is a nightmare to track
It feels “choppy” in the narrative
The variance causes challenges in balancing a fight
It Works Against Cooperative Strategy
The worst offender of them all is how the system actively works against collaboration in a system aimed at telling epic tales of a band of adventurers overcoming adversity through teamwork.
On your turn, all you have to base your actions on in the first round of combat is what has already happened, and there is a ton of uncertainty about where creatures will be and what they’ll be doing in between you and your teammates turns. This uncertainty shifts your priority towards doing what you know will work right now; which tends to be independent of other creatures’ actions.
You likely don’t know what your allies intend to do on their turns, nor have much way to change your action by their potential actions given how varied their decision-making is going to be. Character sheets have a wide spread of abilities; a Wizard might opt to cast a Burning Hands against a group of goblins that prior weren’t grouped up, but moved in a fashion that sets up their spell. If they don’t move in that fashion, maybe they’ll throw out a Magic Missile, or cast a Hideous Laughter on the big bad bugbear.
Uncertainty of what a character will want to do on their turn later this round leads players to default to acting independently, agnostic of what the rest of the team is doing.
Example: Rogues and Sneak Attack
Let's look at a simple example: you’re a rogue with a fighter ally.
You’re going first in initiative, which is more likely thanks to Initiative only being adjusted by Dexterity and a handful of features; the fighter rolled an 11, and you have no idea when the three monsters you’re facing are going to act, nor what the monsters are capable of. Let's look at your options:
Option 1. You could ready an action to shoot a target the fighter engages with to get your Sneak Attack bonus, double teaming a single enemy in a cohesive strike.
There are some risks with this option. If the fighter fails a save against a save or die from an enemy spellcaster, who may or may not have a save or die and may or may not act before them, you’d end up forgoing your entire turn for nothing. Maybe the monsters flee or perform actions to keep the fighter off of them. Maybe your fighter opts not to engage after taking a stray bolt or two, not wanting to risk further harm, instead pulling out their own ranged weapons to attempt to skirmish away.
Any or none of these events could happen between your turn and your fighter ally. This uncertainty pushes you to take actions that are unaffected by the state of your fighter, leading us to Option 2.
Option 2. You use your bonus action to Hide or use Steady Aim, then attack with your Sneak Attack turned on anyway.
It may not seem like that big of a shift; at the end of the day, both the cooperative “readied action” line and the Steady Aim solitaire option can output a single attack with Sneak Attack bonus dice. You’ll favor defaulting to the option with no variance, the option that you know will work, not the one that’s shrouded in uncertainty. That option usually works independently of your allies' decisions.
This can result in a party defaulting to making independent decisions agnostic of other character’s actions.
This system creates fractured, messy fights that highlight power disparity between characters. The best independent characters excel on their turns while cooperative, supportive characters or characters with more conditions attached to their damage and power can flounder.
Features like Steady Aim put a bandage on a symptom that exists from variance created by Turn Based Initiative interfering with cooperation. Rogues can feel like they’re performing poorly, unable to consistently get Sneak Attack- Steady Aim helps them consistently get their Sneak Attack, but does so in a way that doesn’t address why they were struggling to get their allies to set them up in the first place.
Downtime Between Turns
The amount of downtime between when it’s your turn versus an ally’s turn encourages you to tune out what they’re doing. When your turn starts, it's often been fifteen to twenty minutes since the person furthest from you in initiative, especially in complex encounters focusing on groups of enemies and interesting objectives.
You have to get your bearings on what your character needs to do right now; one of your party members might have had a great idea ten minutes ago that you’ve now completely forgotten about or the circumstances have changed so much that you can’t execute on that plan in any meaningful fashion. All you can do is take the best action for you in the moment most turns.
Once the turn order has been established, some planning can come together, but often that initial mess of a first round puts a lot of players apart from each other with independent plans and goals for the fight. People take on individual monsters and react as the battle shifts, but aren’t looking to shift their game plan to collaborate with somebody else for all the reasons I highlighted above.
It's a Tracking Nightmare
Running a moderate-sized party of five or more usually means running similarly sized groups of monsters with somewhat diverse abilities. Random, individual turn-based initiative results in at least ten random positions on this turn tracker that flow in order over and over again. At a physical table, many reach for digital resources just to help track this, adding yet another tool you have to set up and bring with you just to facilitate a game that’s taking place in our collective imaginations.
Many monsters will be the same- a band of gnolls might have four warriors and one spellcaster. Which warrior dies when matters for the initiative order. Remembering which warrior goes where is an additional hassle to keep track of as a DM on top of their hit points.
I’ve never played with a DM, myself included, that hasn’t forgotten a player or monster turn in initiative. Even online, sometimes you click the initiative tab button to go to the next turn, somebody pipes in that they also have a bonus action they want to do, they take it, and then you tab the tracker again, skipping a turn. In paper it happens even more.
All of this tracking slows the game to a halt. This compounds with the next issue…
It Feels “Choppy”
Random initiative doesn’t serve to tell a coherent, flowing narrative. Playing in it feels like a programmed sequence of events where events happen somewhere on the battle map while everyone else is frozen in time, waiting for their turn.
The big bad Beholder stands perfectly still while two players go before it; then, they freeze, it moves, blasting them with some beams and floating around a bit, then freezes again as the remaining two players react to its moved anti-magic zone and act appropriately.
A lot of characters will start their turn with the combat in one state; between their next turn and now, the encounter changes radically while they sit there frozen in time they suddenly find themselves needing to make radically different decisions than they initially planned to, especially when few reactions exist in the system to help you engage dynamically throughout a round.
When three monsters act in a row, and a fourth is left behind as it goes last in initiative, what happens between its turn and its allies radically shifts how it can engage. It can feel like it's not able to be a part of the team simply by its inability to act- it sits helplessly while some of its allies are freely flanked, whereas prior that extra body would sure up their line as they collectively advance. I’d expect coordinated enemies to advance somewhat simultaneously; the variance makes weird moments where creatures flash into a space that a monster absolutely should have been in because of some varied rolls.
There aren’t coordinated charges, no simultaneous breaks or disengagements. The time between a call to disengage and the creature who went just before their boss will feel like an eternity and is a problem turn-based games will always have. Random, team-based initiative’s variance highlights this and adds an extra layer of clunkiness on top of the already flawed method of facilitating simultaneous action.
It's a Balancing Mess
The final issue I have with random turn-based initiative is trying to account for it when designing encounters; when “who goes first” is unaccounted for, deciding how many actions the enemy team should have to reasonably challenge the group is harder. Encounters can easily become lopsided with status conditions whose power is relative to which side gets to use theirs first; if both parties are packing Dominate Monster, whoever lands first has a two-character action swing, wildly adjusting how a fight can play out and how difficult that fight will be.
That lopsidedness can’t easily be accounted for. This is an element I can’t stress enough; when the entire enemy group rolls higher than the entire party, an encounter that may have been planned to be a casual showcase of the player’s new abilities could end up killing somebody when all of the monsters surge onto the players who are frozen in place, helpless to act outside of a reaction even if they saw the encounter coming from a mile away.
That same encounter may be a complete joke if the majority of the party ends up acting first; they’d shred down monsters’ hit points and deny their actions with charms, stuns, and paralysis. They can get their status boons and banes down and impose disadvantage on the monsters’ attacks before the monsters get a chance to swing. It can turn a high-stakes fight intended to top off a large story arch into something you’re frantically needing to improvise out of to either up the challenge by dumping more creatures into it or let the air deflate out of the encounter.
Variant Options (And Why They Work)
These four problems have varied solutions that will work based on you and your group's pain with said problems. Some groups don’t care too much for the cooperative element of the game and don’t mind the independent nature of combat rules as written. They may instead prioritize a system that removes the tracking problems.
Some groups like initiative systems that exacerbate these “problems”; random initiative determined every round adds even more barriers between cooperation while radically increasing the time it takes to run encounters while dragging combat speed down even further. The trade-off is additional variance, and having to make quick decisions constantly. If you can’t ever predict who will go next, you may have to change how you engage frequently.
There are two solutions I’ve used that I think many could benefit from adding to their DM toolbox: Team Initiative as the default way to run encounters, and Alternating Initiative as a potential replacement for the base, highly random initiative.
Team Initiative
Team initiative largely lumps together initiative where each “side” acts as a group; some versions have each team’s order still determined randomly. Some open up turns so each member of one side can take moves, actions, and bonus actions intermingled among each other.
How I Run Team Initiative
The players always go before the enemies.
The players choose which of them goes first.
Each subsequent player's turn is chosen at the end of the current player’s turn.
Summoned allies act immediately after their summoner; the summoner chooses their order in cases of multiple summoned allies.
The DM chooses the enemy’s turn order in the same way.
Surprised creatures skip their first turn.
How it Fixes Initiative
Players are empowered to take cooperative actions by knowing who can go next. Everyone is talking together about what’s happening, how they can contribute, and how best the entire group can approach a fight. Players are engaged, being asked constantly “How can I follow up this turn with my kit of abilities?”
Tracking is a breeze; you don’t need to write down any order, as your players determine their order in combat, and you determine the enemies on a whim.
The choppy-ness still persists but is alleviated by the cinematic nature cooperative play tends to highlight. Actions flow together to paint a picture of a round with some allies leading a charge followed up by arrows and spells you’d expect to follow in sequence. It doesn’t solve the core problem of enemies feeling “frozen”- I tend to add a boatload of reactions and legendary actions to monsters to address this specific grievance.
Balancing encounters is way easier. I know with certainty what the players are capable of, and know they’re going first. The uncertainty of when something like a Mind Flayer will have an opportunity to Mind Blast is removed from the equation when I’m preparing an encounter; it will act after the players, and the players usually will have time to plan for it.
Problems With My Team Initiative
This system isn’t perfect, of course. Some problems include:
Players snowball more often with a mix of great rolls alongside always going first.
Bands of attacks pointed at one person can feel debilitating and unfun, and are highlighted when every enemy acts in a row.
Fights are “cleaner”- being caught off-guard doesn’t tend to feel as frantic, which can be what you want that fight to feel like.
Initiative-based features have their balance altered- Assassinate becomes always on every fight while Alert loses half of its text.
It’s easy to forget similar small enemies in complicated encounters.
Other Variants of Team Initiative to Consider
Some changes to my style can adjust how an encounter feels and is engaged with.
The entire team takes their turn simultaneously. This removes even more of the “choppy” feeling while offering even more opportunities to collaborate.
Initiative Rolls remain, but determine the order within a team, and which team goes first. This keeps the initiative modifier in the game, giving some players who really want to act before their teammates a way to do it.
For the first variant, I find tracking who has used what over a five to six-player turn taxing and needlessly complicated, but it might be great for groups that really want to lean into collaborative combats.
The second option might be more digestible for some groups, as you still “roll initiative” when a fight breaks out, and have some rewards for players having a high initiative bonus. Depending on how you want to calculate which team goes first (I’d advocate for higher average initiative within the team), this can allow the initiative modifier to matter still, keeping feats like Alert alive. I think if you’re switching to Team Initiative, it's probably not worth the effort to keep the rolls and modifier around.
Alternating Initiative
This system is a great middle ground between the two if you’re not sold on letting all the players act in any order they want, but want to address some of the encounter design challenges the variance of random turn-based initiative has.
How I Ran Alternating Initiative
The players roll initiative.
Instead of rolling initiative for monsters, place them evenly spaced between the player turns each round.
That’s it. That is the entirety of how I ran Alternating Initiative.
Solutions It Offers
How does this version address my issues with initiative? Well…
It doesn’t meaningfully address cooperative play. Without player agency in who goes when, and without knowing what is going to act between turns, you’re still heavily incentivized to take independent action.
Tracking is slightly easier, but there are some hiccups; either you have to commit to changing your monsters’ initiative each round, or you have to record where you put them all in the first place, putting this in about the same spot as the base initiative system as far as tracking goes.
This version has felt the least “choppy” to me. Each side evenly is throwing punches; often, this results in a consistent back and forth that feels more reactive.
Encounter balance is even easier with this system. By having monsters evenly distributed throughout the encounter, you don’t need to account for as major a player advantage as you have to with team initiative. The players act slightly earlier, but you know some monsters will get turns before some players, and can decide where you want those monsters to go to best impact a fight.
Why I Stopped Using Alternating Initiative
I started using Alternating Initiative out of convenience; I didn’t want to have to roll for the fifteen enemies populating a complicated battle map, I liked how it flowed and kept doing it for a while. Its failure to address some of my other pain points led me to try out other methods for initiative.
Once I tried Team, I was hooked. The excitement and engagement I got from players was on another level; not only were they engaged with what their character would do, but also what their team was doing. It also massively sped up getting into and running encounters.
Biggest Takeaways
Agnostic of what initiative system you end up preferring, I can’t recommend enough at least trying out other initiative systems for your RPGs. Having an understanding of the purpose initiative has in shaping how an encounter will feel and how it will impact your game design decisions can radically improve your DMing abilities.
I’d recommend mixing and matching- for planned out, front to back fights, Team Initiative is perfect. For a scrappy, spontaneous bar brawl, the basic initiative system can work beautifully. If a fight breaks out in a tense dungeon, and both parties are moderately prepared, but still somewhat surprised, Alternating Initiative can be the option for the job!
Think of these initiative options like tools in your DM toolbox; pull out the one you need for the situation.
Now take these ideas with you, and make a better D&D game for all!
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