He doesn't use speed factor initiative

I used to use speed factor, but it just slows the game down too much. It's good if you have a few players with system mastery, horrible if you have nobooks. There's always a few players that NEVER remember the modifiers, even the super simple one for 5E.

What is popcorn initiative?

You roll normally, whomever wins decides who goes first. You pass initiative, either to enemy, ally or yourself if you go last. It changes the dynamics of a battle radically, going last can mean back to back turns to either do lots of things or help an ally recover quickly. Even going last and first might not be the best idea, since you'll miss out on reactions or legendary reactions.

It's very gamist, but extremely fun and gets every involved in the combat. I usually explain it as how aggressive you're being or creating openings for others or waiting until you see the whites of their eyes. I use playing cards to keep track of who went, they flip them face down if they already went.

>I really like Shadowrun 5E and its use of initiative as a resource to do actions with. It's great.

Can you explain a bit more?

not the same guy but in SR you roll init and then run in turn order from highest to lowest like DnD, however, after everyone has taken their turn you subtract ten from everyone's init rolls and if anyone with roll value still left then gets to go again, repeat until no one has any init value. Example: Player A rolls a 30, player B rolls and 18, and the mooks roll a 9. Player A goes first, followed by B, followed by mooks. Then you subtract 10 from those scores so Player A has a 20, Player B has an 8, and the mooks no longer have a score. Now Player A gets another round, followed by B. Repeat again and Player A has a roll of 10, so he gets one more turn.

It's a neat idea and I think it helps keep combat from becoming a slog fest when you've got enemies that take several rounds of continues fire to kill, also aided by the fact that it's tough to be durable in SR. On the other hand I think it make initiative one of the most important things dump into like every other game and rerolling init every round is cancer.

I like cWoD initiative, where the slowest people declare their actions first and the fastest last, but it actually unfolds according to speed.

Makes goin fast a lot more interesting.

Pic unrelated

Kek, just realized I saved the gif as a jpg somehow

Fuckin phoneposting

That seems a fairly reasonable way to do it, though it does make it very reactionary, and high-initiative can just go for an attack they know the low initiative will be very unlikely to block.
Depending on how easy it is to have (and retain) high initiative, I could see it being broken as shit

You can also take instant action defenses like diving to the ground, parrying attacks or focusing fighting off magic effects, which will eat 5 or 10 off your initiative score too. It really shows the difference between superfast characters and less fast ones.

Sounds like X-wing pilot values, I like it.

In a typical combat, what's the incentive to ever pass the initiative to the enemies before you have to?

Not that guy, but leaving the enemies til last is generally a bad idea in popcorn, because whoever has the last turn in a round has the power to dictate the flow of the next round because they choose who goes first in that round. If you leave the enemies to go last they could potentially have to 2 full rounds of actions before any of the players have a chance to react.

Though to be fair popcorn isn't that balanced anyway due to how it treats saving throws. All saving throws that happen "at the end of your next turn" instead happen at the end of the next round, which means that if you win initiative you can essentially get 2 rounds of effectiveness out of a debuff that's only meant to last for one round. This makes things like stunning fist monstrously powerful.

>muh initiative
IGOUGO with Action Points, or bust.

Sword path glory system is the best and dont need initiative.

>turns are 1/12 of a second.
>actions cost time according to skill and stats.
>at an turn you can wait, do nothing or tell you want to do some action.
>if you tell you want to do some action that cost X turns, at the end of Current Turn - 1 + X, the action will be made.
>everyone acts at the same time

Maybe the games I play (or the players I play with) are too lethal, but it seems like the party would try and hold onto initiative for their own side, to hopefully take out as many of their opponents as possible. The enemy might get two rounds worth of actions at the end, but if there's only one guy instead of five still standing, seems like a worthy trade.

This was my thinking, too. The optimal strategy should almost always be to just all-out-attack the enemies and let whoever survives take their back-to-back turns.

This would be true of a typical fight in almost any version of D&D, WoD, L5R, Traveller, any FFG rpg... Am I missing something?

The flip side, I guess, is that if the enemies outnumber the players things rapidly become unbalanced in the enemies' favor, since they're more likely to have at least one person win the initiative, and they'll be able to use their greater numbers to dictate the initiative order every round (i.e. they will always get to have at least one of their guys go first and one of their guys go last as long as they outnumber the party, so the players will never get to control the initiative order).

Doesn't seem like a very good system at all.

Well you could always gank the guy who goes last. That's all I have. It really doesn't sound like a good system.

>It's very gamist...
I've actually always thought of it more as something that empowers narrative, as me and my group have usually handed it off to whoever makes the most sense to act without really thinking about it. For us it makes the proceedings of an RPG less preoccupied with crunch, because the absence of tallying and counting through initiative.

I like popcorn but it isn't for every group or every system. It really works well if playing more of an action adventure type game or if you're trying to emulate the chaotic messiness of an action movie. As both a player and GM I've found that popcorn can be fantastic when combining combat encounters with environmental challenges or other general action movie beats like chases.

It also does a really good job when there's more than one focal point in a scene e.g. The monk is duelling his evil ninja archival on a trip wire, while far below the fighter and barbarian are fighting off hordes of zombies, and the wizard is trying to decipher this ancient code which will break the curse and put the zombies back at rest. using most regular initiative systems you'd be jumping between each of these points multiple times a round at random based on the initiative rolls but in popcorn, at least in my experience, players tend to want to see each scene play out before moving onto the next one, so you see monk and ninja fight, then the fighter and the barbarian desperately holding off the hordes of the dead, and then the wizard doing his scholar thing.

It's not very good at doing a standard "fight five other guys in 20X20 room" type of fight, and it messes with class balance a bit. In popcorn you're not supposed to strategise during combat beyond what your character could actually do in six seconds so essentially when you pass to another player you can say a sentence or two like "take out that ogre" or "help me with this guy" All in all it's a good system if your players want to play an action movie a bad system if you want to play a more simulationist game.

You have a good group.

My GM makes us decide what we're going to do first, then roll initiative. We then use an Initiative Check (he averages out Dex and Wisdom for Initiative to represent a mix of reflexes and awareness, plus modifiers for class/feat options) DC our own initiative result to cancel an action if it turns out to be a horrible idea. Things that are impossible (attacking a target the guy before you just killed) allow you to change your action's target, burn it for an additional bonus action or hold it as a reaction you can fire off as an interrupt until the start of your next turn.

Sidenote: We also use the 5E speed factor rules. Overall the combat is pretty interesting; the game requires us to communicate a basic idea with each other of what's gonna happen to avoid friendly fire or wasting our turns all targeting a dude who's gonna be dead in one or two hits, and our GM is pretty forgiving on communication between players determining our actions as long as we keep it sensible.

It's an element of tension we felt the game was kind of lacking and enjoy it, YMMV.

Weapon speed was the single most garbage rule in all of AD&D

>2016 + 1
>Using initiative

See, this is the sketchiest system I saw in SR and why I am still leery about playing it. You are heavily encouraged to max the initiative stats, which breaks elves. When one stat offers you extra actions, it is the correct stat to minmax.

Elves aren't broken, other than potentially being undercosted in prioritygen (depending on how much you value edge), and they have no real advantage to initiative.

The way to go for max init is to get more dice, which means Wired Reflexes or similar 'ware or init-boosting magic. If you don't have either of those, then you either need drugs or you just keep your head down and offer suppressing fire. There's a reason initiative monsters are their own archetype as the dedicated fightguys.

I don't like this anime girl. Her smug aura mocks me

Smug is the best kind of anime girl.

You mean where someone with a dagger or some shit will hit someone before someone with a spear or two handed sword or polearm will hit them? Sounds pretty garbage, m8

To be fair, cWoD also brought us VtM's Celerity, which broke the action economy so hard it made Greek banks look good.

How does D&D 4e's combat hold up to other systems?

Yo, do you have the weapon speed tables?

I gotchu bro
This one is for 5e. I like it desu

It's more tactical than many other systems, but it can get a little slow if you or the other players/DM aren't paying as much attention to it as one should and you need to remember that the more powerful foes often have actions that pop up on occasion (once bloodied, 1-in-6, every other turn, every x number of rounds, etc)

>Playing any version of DnD or using it's rules.

Enjoy your lifeless static combats.

Probably the best D&D gets.

Honestly haven't seen many games where combat is as fun; but then, I don't really know of many other games that embrace the gamist/narrativist approach and a combat focus to this degree. Heck, many of the ones that do have been inspired by 4e to begin with.

Just play The Riddle of Steel, senpai

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