How do I handle non-cyclical turn order in a tabletop RPG?

How do I handle non-cyclical turn order in a tabletop RPG?
I mean like instead of going from highest to lowest initiative and back around, turn order is determined multiple times per fight, and faster characters might sometimes get two turns before slower characters get one.
There must be a way to make that kind of mechanic work on tabletop without it being overcomplicated or exploitable, right?

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There are a lot of systems that try that.

They're terrible.
When people are spending too much time thinking about what they're going to do because it's also going to affect turn order, it's not really all that fun.

It works best in video games, and even there it's not great.

Motherfuckin' card initiative, man.

It's slightly more complicated than just "take turns," but I think it's worth it. Here's the initiative system from original Deadlands:

When combat begins, everyone rolls Quickness. (Note: this is a separate stat from Nimbleness and Deftness. Be careful not to make just one "Dexterity" stat and have it be too powerful.)

Roll shitty, draw one card. Roll average, draw two. Roll fantastic, you might even draw three or four.

GM counts down. "Ace. King. Queen. Jack." When your number comes up, you act.

If you draw the red joker, you can use that action at any time, even interrupting someone else. Black joker? No action this round! The discard pile gets shuffled back into the deck at the end of any round when a joker was pulled.

As I said, slightly more complicated than standard initiative, but it effectively models a chaotic combat with faster and slower characters. It's fun as hell, and goes nice and quick once the group learns it.

An interesting side effect I've noticed from playing this way: the fact that players hold their own initiative cards and listen to the GM counting down means they naturally pay a little more attention and plan their action in advance, speeding up combat. Instead of just waiting for the GM to call your name, you're listening to the countdown, ready to jump in when he gets to your card. It feels more involved and tense.

The way hero system does.

>Quickness. (Note: this is a separate stat from Nimbleness and Deftness. Be careful not to make just one "Dexterity" stat and have it be too powerful.)

RuneQuest gives more Action Points to a quick player, so in one round of combat you can take more actions than a slow player. It's normally only one more action, but has a huge impact on a combat round.

That's not slightly more complicated, that's wacky shit.

Shadowrun 3rd Ed (probably other editions, but I only played 3rd) had you roll initiative, and everyone took turns in order. Then everyone subtracted 10 from their initiative, and anyone who still had a positive total took another action. Keep subtracting 10 until no one has any more actions to take. Roll initiative for the next round.

It does sound kinda wacky, but it'd probably go fairly quickly once everyone figures out how many cards they need for what they rolled.

ORE

Feng Shui.

Also popcorn initiative.

ORE has initiative that changes every single round and it is done in a way that is easy and the slower character won't get screwed every round either. Sometimes takes folks a round or two to get how it works but like the rest of ORE is easy when it clicks.

This.

Starts a thread about turn order RPGs.
Puts a picture of FFVII next to it which is ATB.

Condtional time battle.

What is Shadowrun (at least early editions, don't know current ones)?

It works in Shadowrun, faggot.

Too complicated.

One could just use the you know initiative stat. Then dex doesn't rule it alone.

Lucky charms would make an awesome combat system.

4th didn't have it and 5th got it back.

Exalted-style initiative? Take an action, move yourself down X ticks based on the action, if there's nobody in the current tick move everyone up one tick and check again.

Nechronica has a fairly interesting system.

It's a known issue that most often in RPGs the one stat to rule them all becomes Dexterity or Agility or equivalent.

The stat that both lets you hit more often, and evade more often, is very powerful in its own right, long before one considers related skills, secondary stats, etc.
tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OneStatToRuleThemAll

>Starts a thread about turn order RPGs.
>Puts a picture of FFVII next to it which is ATB.
>How do I handle non-cyclical turn order

FFVII's ATB is non-cyclical...

Something at the same time easy to implement and hard to balance :
Have everyone start with a certain pool of Action Points (AP), every proactive action requires to spend a certain amount of AP. Every round every character gets some amount of AP and decides to to something or not. Declarations are done in reverse Initiative/Speed/Whatever order and executed in Initiative/Speed/Whatever order.

To add to this, ORE (One Roll Engine) also handles Multiple Actions better than basically any game I've ever played. Anyone can attempt multiple actions in a single turn (like shooting while driving or blocking while attacking), but the way the dice pool works it's extremely difficult to pull off unless you're very good at both things, in which case it becomes quite feasible to execute extremely complex maneuvers, all with a single dice roll.

For real, One Roll Engine is probably the exact system you want.

>People advocating for Shadowrun's init system
We all know that Twilight 2013 has the best psuedo real time combat system.

GM counts up for turn order. Act on each multiple of your initiative score where lower is better. Roll 1d6 at the start of the round for a sort of 'lag' before you start taking turns to reduce overlap. Probably not explaining it right.

A has an initiative of 4
B has an initiative of 5
C has an initiative of 6
D has an initiative of 8

A rolls a 3
B rolls a 2
C rolls a 4
D rolls a 1

D acts on the count of one.
B acts on the count of two.
A acts on the count of three.
C acts on the count of four.
B and A act on the count of seven.
D acts on the count of nine.
C acts on the count of ten.
A acts on the count of eleven.
B acts on the count of twelve.
C acts on the count of sixteen.
D acts on the count of eighteen.
etc., might want more variance, etc.

Just spitballing, probably impractical, would need some kind of chart so you can just circle which turns are yours by circling the one you start on and every X (where X is initative) after that.

Shadowrun still does this, with fast characters getting 1-2 extra turns per round

I like shadowruns initiative system but to devil's advocate. In all versions with multiple initiative passes it becomes hyper-critical to have them on combat characters. Wired Reflexes and it's magic equivalents are more must-haves then anything else. Which massively reduces the freedom in what is otherwise usually a fairly open character creation system.

4th had multiple combat turns within a round for fast characters. It just was a pure "this gives you an extra combat turn" enhancement via cyberware for example. Which meant that high stats or initiative rolls could not grant extra turns. It also had a massive issue of no penalty for holding a trigger down across multiple combat actions in a round. Given that a round is about 3 seconds a super faster character holding a trigger was somehow able to get more bullets out of the gun without penalty.

In 5e recoil penalties are built up across actions/turns which massively offsets that problem.

Shadowrun has this exact issue with quickness. You can get a lot out of other stats but quickness just covers so much relevant stuff. On top of Dex or Agil being hit accuracy and evasion it is also often the stealth stat which makes a specific character archtype have one major stat.

Tabletop RPGs tend to do poorly with turn order because of an ideal of them being playable with only paper + pencil. A restriction that board games does not have. There are plenty of board games with interesting turn orders.

Robo Rally is a great example. Everyone flips a movement card at once and the movement with the highest # on it triggers first. Hard to explain but really easy to learn by playing.

Since nobody actually explained how turns work in One Roll Engine, here's the rundown:

Each round of combat is divided into three phases: Declare, Roll and Resolve.

>Declare
Players and NPCs take turns declaring what they will do in that round, in order of ascending Sense stat. This means that characters with higher Sense know what the characters with less Sense are going to do, giving them the advantage.

>Roll
Everyone rolls their dice at the same time. ORE uses a pool of d10s, made up of Stat+Skill most of the time. The goal is to get at least one matched Set-- such as 5,5 or 1,1,1. The number of dice in the Set is called its Width, and the number on the dice themselves is its Height. If the character is attempting to do multiple actions at once, they have to get one Set for each action.

>Resolve
Once everyone has rolled their dice, their actions take place in order of decreasing Width. This means that a character with excellent Sense, even though he has the advantage in the Declare phase, won't necessarily go ahead of anyone else in the Resolve phase. It also means there's no God Stat (Sense is vital in the Declare phase, but is rarely of any use when you're actually rolling dice), and it means that each round of combat can have a different flow and order of movement. It's incredibly dynamic and super interesting to watch unfold.

Honestly pretty surprised no one has talked about timing or tick systems. Exalted 2e is easily the most well known system that did this. Final Fantasy 3rd Edition has a 100 count based timing system.

The Warcraft minis game had a really good version of the idea.

The basic idea is that actions cost time, and as you move through the timing structure, the actions you take move you to a new spot in the timing structure. So, strong attacks generally cost more time than weak ones, and/or a character's stats could affect how much time they spend per action.

Old school D&D did this:

Each SIDE rolls 1d6. Winning SIDE has initiative. Reroll ties. (You may want to use a d20 since there are no modifiers anyway and this makes ties less likely).

>Casters on side with initiative declare spells they want to cast this round
>Casters on other side do the same
>Anyone on side with initiative not casting a spell may move OR fire a projectile if they have one readied (i.e., holding a bow in two hands and have a quiver of arrows, or have a quiver of javelins on one's back or whatever)
>Other side does the same
>Anyone not casting, who has also not fired a projectile, may make a melee attack
>Other side does the same
>Casters on side with initiative finish their spells (if they have taken any damage, they wasted that spell and nothing happens, and there is no save)
>Casters on other side do the same
This also made it not exactly "caster edition" since you needed your whole party strategizing together or the other team would just play "gank the caster" and you'd never finish a spell.

I'd love thoughts on this? It lets characters on a side act in any order they want to, which I guess you can see as good or bad.

ACKs (one of the many OSR games) does it. It has d6 initiative rerolled each combat round. Combatants who fail their surprise rolls and roll poorly on initiative might see their enemies get two turns in before their first one.

Rerolling initiative each round isn't so tedious because combat otherwise plays very quickly. Also the whole bit about having to declare certain actions in advance (such as spellcasting and disengaging from melee) adds some more uncertainty to the process.

What if you get both jokers?

Shadow of the Demon Lord has a pretty decent system. Combatants have Fast Turns and Slow Turns. Each fighter declares what sort of turn they're taking. Fast turns happen first, then slow turns. Players take their turns before monsters, and creatures go in any order they desire, typically determined before turns start being taken. Though nothing really to stop players from adjusting their order s long as they still take the type of turn they said they would.

Fast turns allow creatures to move or take an action, but not both. Slow turns allow creatures to move and take an action. It works pretty decently, and you can still have players roll against one another if they don't come to terms about who goes when in the turn order.