>Turn order is often illogical and even when fluffed to be "more" than standing around while giving and taking hits (FFG Star Wars, for example), mechanically it seems illogical and redundant.
What are your favorite ways of fixing this conundrum? Are there some not even considered by game designers?
Putting all lower tier "minion" type enemies in a single bracket seems to fix a lot of issues
there's no real way to fix it beyond the statment that its not really happening in turns pretty much every game gives.
the practicalities of playing with people mean that you can only have 1 person actually doing things and rolling dice at a time.
Consider these two alternatives.
First, each action is given a time completion value with a very small increment time to allow for small actions and make the system fluid. Actions specify whether their effects are applied at beginning, end, between our as a partial degree when using them. As time passes, anyone not currently in an action can start a new action. Some actions allow you to cease using them to switch to something else. Turn order is only used as a rare tiebreaker.
Second, a system that takes all turns and resolves them simultaneously each round.
deal with it.
in 5e i just go by dex modifier. helps the characters plan their actions better. keeps me from burning a scratch sheet every encounter.
I also group all the mobs together, usually last, unless the mob has a ridiculous dex stat or got the drop on the party. Again, more worried about my sanity than any sort of logicalness.
so be honest order doesn't really matter, so long as the monks and rangers and thieves are going before the hard tanks and wizards. which is how it turns out anyway. unless someone burns a feat on alert.
As someone who has tried to implement both of these they are hell to track if the combat system is not otherwise dead fucking simple.
Mistborn Adventure Game has an interesting take on turn order: There is a static initiative type stat that determines what order you declare your actions. The actions themselves determine what order they actually resolve.
They would both require the system to be built with them in mind. The first is just stupid because you're better off with a video game to simulate fluid time. I could only see it being used by certain extreme dwarf fort enthusiasts, or as a hybrid system with computer assistance
The second could work for a lighter game and could open up a lot of interesting dynamics like poker style prediction and and simultaneous KOs.
Wackamole>chess
Add more granularity and actions that you can take on an opponents turn. GURPS for example has 1 second turns and with the active defense system you can actually respond smartly to an opponents actions.
System I've been thinking about, but haven't actually tested yet:
--Everybody rolls 2d6, maybe modified by up to +/-3 for high/low "Dex".
--Anyone who rolls doubles is "out" and can't act again until next turn.
--The player who gets the highest roll, without getting doubles, gets to act.
--Everybody, including the player who just acted, rolls again. Doubles out, highest roll acts, same as before.
--Turn ends when everybody--or possibly all but one player--is out. Start a new turn.
The idea is to simulate the random, confused nature of close-in combat, but, I dunno, it might be *too* random...
Don't the savage world games not have a specific turn order? I know DW just has people say stuff and resolve it whenever.
I do disagree with OP's greentext. I think that conventional turn orders are the best framework for resolving combat in tabletop games that we know of. It works with limitations of human attention (can't effectively listen to two people at once, talking over each other usually means a shouting match, etc), allows each belligerent time to think through, declare, and resolve all the their actions in an organized and reasonable manner. With sufficient options to act during others' turns when appropriate for special counters, interrupts, dodges, and the like, it can make things seem a lot more active and dynamic.
For the prospect of metagaming a turn order and becoming too comfortable in it (i.e. the cleric can heal me before the monster attacks, so I can do this risky thing every turn and be okay), I find that games which randomize each turn-cycles and have more-realistic combat rules can adequately deal with that problem.
metal gear AC!D did things pretty awesomely: every action you take is based solely in terms of time it takes to perform them, with the character's next turn occuring only after that amount of in-game time has passed. As an example:
Snake gets two moves per turn. He loads his already equipped AK-47, and fires, taking a total of 7 seconds, then moves to cover, costing another 4 seconds. Following these actions his turn ends, and will not occur again until every other character on the field has taken at least 11 seconds worth of actions, and passing a turn is 6 seconds.
All that remains prior to this is to decide initiative, and for further flavor, you could say that casters spells only take effect after they count down, but they can still plan actions following their spells going off, though their turn ended before any actions took place.
When in doubt, always think "would this be fun as a player."
This rolling system seems extremely tedious, to be honest.
I keep meaning to play that....
No less fun than, "everybody rolls initiative, GM takes a moment to determine turn order, 4 people wait while one player acts, repeat 4 more times, roll initiative for next turn."
Or, you know, "two or three slow characters twiddle their thumbs while the Ranger and the guy with Wired Reflexes carry the entire combat", which is how a lot of games seem to run things.
Trust me, that does not work well for tabletop. There's a system that does this, and it's often regarded as a real pain to run.
Would that work inversely then? The higher your initiative, the later you choose your actions, due to being able to assess the situation better?
Applying this to DnD, or any other class based system is rather simple, you need only decide how many actions each class gets (naturally faster classes getting more actions, but no less than 2, no more than 4.) and what time frame those actions move on (with rogue specialties taking less time, casters taking more time than normal.)
So the rogue can move three times in one turn, but takes additional time to do so, and will only move again when everyone else consume the same amount of time.
Which one, if you don't mind my asking?
play a fucking videogame if you want to play something without turns.
You're never going to get something like Frozen Synapse' system to translate into a tabletop RPG ever. At best you can base a gimicky robot-program/command card game but lo and behold, even videogames that do that kind of mechanic aren't held in high regard.
Not that user, but probably Exalted 2nd.
>Lose a turn 1/6th of the time
I'm not even going to explain why this is horrible.
Change it to something based on the numbers rolled. If the doubles were...
1. Surprised, nearest enemy gets free strike. You may counter-attack for half damage.
2. Surprised, targeted at range by an enemy...
...
6. You surprise the enemy, roll to do critical damage.
You'd need to do its own equivalent for magic. I'm too stoned to finish this thought. I hope you like my idea.
Pretty much.
Whoever has the highest initiative (I forget what it's actually called) gets to choose their action last.
In the game I'm working on, there are essentially two "turns". Under normal circumstances, the party goes first; if the players are being ambushed, they go second.
On the party's turn, they decide among themselves what their strategy will be. Instead of taking individual turns, they say, "This round, Keno is going to cast fireball, Markon is going to defend him while he sets up, and Linel is going to keep picking the lock." They make their checks in the order they choose, and the situation evolves.
Then the GM does similar for the enemies on their turn, but most of the time small groups of weak enemies will only use one action altogether.
I like to think of it as shots in a movie: cut to what the players are doing, then cut to how the world reacts.
That's actually a pretty smart system. And then some bloke like implies such smart systems are not possible.
wut
HackMaster
Nope
Well, Exalted 2nd does have a similar system, and even though it has its fans, it's broken as fuck.
That's more of a failure of games becoming rocket tag by the mechanics. I mean, what problem are you solving for? For the record, I am in no way defending D&D style initiative, it's kinda boring, but it's very simple turn system.
The metal gear system mentioned previously is pretty decent, and as said, losing a turn so often is even worse than "sitting twiddling thumbs".
I switched over to "all players go, then all monsters go" and it's fine. Players can interlace parts of their turns however they like, which makes it feel a bit more simultaneous. And everything takes less real-world time ("oh it's my turn?" takes way more time than you might think) so it feels more simultaneous.
A series of ambush/perception checks at the start of the fight tell which team goes first and who gets to act in the surprise round. So being speedy or sneaky still has a benefit.
Hohoho. That sounds like first editions of D&D, of all things.
Why is it mechanically illogical and redundant?
Mechanically is the only way it makes sense, and if you want to complain that it doesn't make sense in-character, surprise! Few mechanics do. That's what we call "abstraction".
It's not redundant either, if speed is mechanically meaningful and especially if you have mechanics that directly interact with turn order.
That said, there are plenty of systems without fixed turn order, as evidenced by the other posters in the thread.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is Popcorn Initiative.
You just need to determine a starting character and from there, the active player/GM decides who gets to go next, until everyone had a turn. This makes for some interesting decisions, because whoever goes last in a round has the most options for the beginning of the next round.
FATE.
Everyone rolls their action then we take a moment to compare rolls and figure out just what the fuck happened. Defense rolls are for babies.
Most ORE engine games do it that way too. Declaration (in ascending order of the Sense stat), Roll (everybody once actions are declared), Resolution (successes with the greatest width go off first, height is used as a tie-breaker otherwise it's simultaneous).
>Don't the savage world games not have a specific turn order?
Savage world draws from a 52 card deck, and some perks let you draw more cards.
This is theoretically a good system, but the problem is that it's too fucking hard to book keep.
GURPS does something similar by simply chunking up turns into 1s segments. The problem here is that this makes every action very short, and turns can start feeling a bit unsatisfying if you are reloading your revolver for 10 seconds.
That depends, really. If you have a paper with sections and tokens, it suddenly isn't that bad.
The problem with that is that that kind of systems are easily breakable most of the time.
Vampire: the masquerade does that. At the start of every round you roll initiative, everyone declares actions in reverse order, and then act in the standard order.
If you want simulation, chopping everything into seconds like GURPS is theoretically best. If you want player friendly flow, unrealistic shit works best.
Maybe write down actions and pull them from a hat
I came up with something I quite like, which is action -- reaction -- follow up. After you attack somebody, they can immediately make a counterattack. After the counterattack, you can make a follow-up attack. So basically:
you attack X
X attacks you
you attack X again
This gives you some of the back-and-forth feeling of combat so it doesn't just seem like you're sitting there while they strike at you... and then waiting for your turn to come around so you can do the same. On top of this, if the attacked person intends to spend his turn retaliated against his attacker, the GM can move his turn forward so that he goes next. So if I'm attacking you:
My Turn:
I attack you
You counterattack
I follow up
Your Turn:
You attack me
I counterattack
You follow up
With each person getting in three strikes, there's a real feeling of engagement as you trade blows back and forth.
second is just the way every roguelike handles stuff
This sounds like Anima - Beyond Fantasy's system.
When you attack me, you roll offense and I roll defence. If my defence roll is better than your offense roll, I get the option to make a counterattack, with a bonus proportional to the amount I beat you by. That attack is resolved in the same way as normal, so if I fail my attack you can counter my counter. This keeps going until one of us runs out of attacks to make in the round or chooses not to counter. You declare the number of attacks you want to make at the start of your turn.
That sounds like a convoluted way of doing things, with an extra roll at each step, and a carried-over bonus to deal with, but otherwise similar.
It's also incredibly shitty in practice.
>mechanically it seems illogical and redundant
Do you even know what those words mean?
Because I don't think that you do.
>roll doubles
>skip your turn
>twiddle your thumbs
>next turn, roll doubles
>twiddle thumbs
so engaging
I'm wondering about turn order in a miniature wargaming setting like WH40k
The game moves pretty slow, and I'm finding the problems are the same for RPGs
Use action points (they're called Tempo in my system). You spend an arbitrary amount of tempo to determine the size of the dice pool you'll get to use for an action, and the action is placed on the stack a la MTG. You can fill that action with any amount of movement, success, or effect dice you want. Movement let you move, successful success rolls let you use one of that action's effect rolls.
A big difference from MTG is that the stack is organized by the size of the actions, with the smallest ones going on top.
Everytime an action resolves, everybody else gains tempo equal to that action.
Alternating activations are hip these days. Also if you make it so that turns move very fast IE Kings of War then it is hardly a problem.
That's not actually true. Every monster's action is evaluated on its own, and they do happen in a particular order. It's just that the display doesn't update until all the final result of the moves has been evaluated, or else they do update one at a time but it's all too fast to notice.
Depending on the game, sometimes the order in which different behaviors of the monsters and the environment get evaluated creates weird edge cases like pic related (the game is Brogue).
for the second one, that sounds promising, if a little complicated.
>everyone secretly selects an action
>different actions have different initiative values representing how fast they complete
>you can get feats that speed up your actions
Shit, based on the books? I've been reading those and I'm pretty seriously addicted.
No, actually, it is less fun because with a standard system I don't have to wait with my thumb up my ass because the dice said so. What the fuck does losing a turn even represent in game anyway? Does the fighter just zone out for a few seconds and look at his boots? Does the wizard just decide to sit down and pick grass like a child who really doesn't want to be playing baseball?
You're retarded and so is your stupid system.
Why not just not check for people dying till end of round? That way, it is all happening at once, just only one person can easily act at once on the actual table?
>Wizards with low dex
Step up that game, senpai.