A cap system is a mechanic or sub-system that’s designed to be used with many different roleplaying systems — either supplementing them or perhaps modifying them. (Not necessarily every RPG, though: It’s not unusual for a cap system to end up being fundamentally incompatible with some systems.) Dice of Destiny, a system for getting rich, non-binary information from dice pool resolution systems, is one example. The downtime system presented in the upcoming So You Want To Be a Game Master? is another.
This is a micro-cap system I’ve been experimenting with called miss-initiative, which is designed to replace the initiative system in your RPG of choice.
MISS-INITIATIVE
By default, at the beginning of combat, the PCs get to take their actions first. They can take their turns in whatever order they choose, but no PC can take a second turn until all of the PCs have taken their first turn.
If one of the PCs misses, however, this allows the GM to trigger one of the NPCs. Once the PCs’ turn is finished, one of the NPCs will take their turn for the round. (If all NPCs have already taken their turn for the current round, a miss has no effect.) This is referred to as seizing initiative.
A miss is generally considered to be any missed attack roll or failed action check. This can generally be characterized as the character’s failure or screw-up offering an opportunity for the enemy.
SURPRISE
If surprise is achieved at the beginning of a fight, this overrides normal miss-initiative:
- If the PCs surprise the NPCs, then they do NOT lose initiative on their first miss. Only on the second miss are the NPCs able to seize initiative.
- If the NPCs surprise the PCs, then the NPCs have seized initiative. They take their actions until one of them misses, which allows the players to trigger one of the PCs.
After the end of the surprise round, combat continues normally (with the PCs going first, followed by NPCs, and with misses triggering NPCs).
VARIANT: SIDE-BASED MISS-INITIATIVE
Miss-initiative can be used with side-based initiative (in which a single initiative check is made for each side in the fight; e.g., using the highest initiative modifier on each side or a group initiative check or some similar method).
If the PCs win the initiative check, miss-initiative continues normally.
If the NPCs win the initiative check, however, then they have initiative and take their actions first, triggering PC turns when they miss.
An initiative check might be made once at the beginning or the fight or repeated for each round, representing the ebb and flow of the battle. (The GM might grant advantage, penalties, and so forth for each round’s initiative check based on the outcome of the previous round.)
VARIANT: THE MISS CASCADE
As a variant, when the NPCs seize initiative from the PCs, they retain initiative. In other words, NPCs continue taking actions, in whatever order the GM chooses, until one of the NPCs misses, which allows the PCs to seize initiative (and continue taking actions until they miss and allow the NPCs to seize initiative).
Remember that, regardless of which side currently holds initiative, everyone in the fight must take their turn before any character gets their next turn.
This reminds me of PbtA systems such as Dungeon World where a miss for a player’s roll corresponds to when the GM is able to do a move (such as an NPC performing an attack).
The main question I have is: what’s the point? It’s rare on your blog to see new mechanics introduced without clarifying what problem they intend to solve and how so I think you’ve probably got an opinion on this.
One advantage I can see is that it gives weight to misses, which is in line with the concept of making every roll matter. But are there other pros/cons that you’ve discovered when thinking about or playtesting this?
I, too, find this interesting but somewhat surprising here. My recollection is that I’ve seen you talking about the same issue with “Popcorn Initiative” that I’ve found in practice, where dithering over who goes next slows down combat, offsetting any benefits.
What I do know is that I’d be incredibly hesitant to use this system with either 3rd or 5th edition D&D, or most other systems where common PC types make their main contributions to combat without rolling.
It’s an interesting system, and one I could see working for systems that are largely based on short combat rounds. It’s an interesting idea for system design.
But I’m not really sold. It has the same issue I have with PbtA type systems – it feels like you’re being punished for attempting things outside your specialty. PbtA has it even worse, in that the numbers feel stacked to make you fail (by design, since the monsters don’t get to act unless you fail, but it still feels bad to wait for your turn to come around only to lose a spell and/or take damage). But I very much wouldn’t want to use this in a system like D&D 5e or Pathfinder 2e which are balanced around your character doing multiple things per round. I feel like it would make players more conservative with their actions, afraid to try anything risky for fear of losing momentum, when usually you want them to be a bit more reckless to break up the combat conga line.
I could see this working with a system like Planet Mercenary (if anyone ever played that one), where your primary character had “fire teams” that they would use for support. A system balanced around having both heroes and mooks in the same combat, and treated both with the same rules, could make this miss-initiative much more tactical. But it would have to be designed around this style of initiative, I feel like this one would break a lot of combat systems in half. It would work better in a more wargame heavy system than a RPG heavy system is all.
I really really like this. Yeah, it’s a bit odd to be introduced with very little context for why it was designed, but sometimes stuff can just be designed because it’s a neat idea. Next time I play with a large enough group, this is definitely something I’d really like to try.
Especially at low levels in a lot of games where PCs have very few options on their turn other than to just attack, when they miss, it can feel like their entire turn was wasted. Now, when they miss, it changes the flow of battle. It’s not a good change for the PCs, but it makes something happen, and that’s the important part.
It also makes me think of a few video game turn-based systems where it shows you the order of who is moving on the right hand side of the screen, and sometimes the enemies don’t get the chance to move if you kill them before their turn.
Cool system. I really want to try it.
Reminds me of the WW2 wargame crossfire and its initiative.
In essence, one side has the initiative. When you have the initiative you can perform actions (Moving, Firing, Rallying). Whereas, the other side is only allowed to react (Firing at enemies moving through line of sight, fighting in close combat).
When either side can perform an action/reaction, a roll happens. If the initiative side fails to score any successes, then the initiative is passed to the other side.
I believe Lindybeige has a video on how it exactly works.
But your blog post really reminded me of how it works in that setting, and it is quite interesting if you want to create a dynamic initiative without the fiddliness of rolling for it
@Jon: You pretty much nailed the exact motivation on this article. “Here’s a cool idea. Let’s toss it out into the world and see what people do with it.”
For a similar take on the same concept, check out Infinity and other 2d20 RPGs: Rather than a dice-based trigger, the GM can spend their pool of Heat points to have specific NPCs jump their action up into the PC resolution phase.
@Highbrowbarian: IME, side-based initiative doesn’t have the same systemic problems as popcorn initiative.
Popcorn initiative gives the decision of, “Who goes next?” to a specific player (and cycles that decision point through all players at the table). This requires every player at the table to keep track of every character who has gone in the current combat round (both PC and and NPC). This creates mental load and/or the hassle of public bookkeeping; it also introduces a new tactical component (of when to swap which side has the potato).
Because popcorn initiative demands that each player be put in the hot seat, any player at the table who doesn’t want to make that decision or is overwhelmed by that decision or just prone to analysis paralysis when making that decision will slow down combat every single time the system puts that player on the spot.
(Conversely, if you get an entire group of people who can make popcorn initiative decisions rapidly and efficiently, it probably works just fine! … I have never experienced this.)
Popcorn initiative ALSO puts players on the spot: Someone tosses you the hot potato and you need to make a fast decision about what your character is going to do! GO GO GO GO! And, unlike cyclical individual initiative, you can’t even be aware that your turn is coming. So you end up with even more decision paralysis.
Side-based initiative, on the other hand, lends itself systemically to volunteerism: “I want to go next!” For some groups this can even be smoother than cyclic individual initiative, because people are rarely if ever put on the spot and forced to take action when they are uncertain what to do. Instead you more often get, “Oh! I see a thing I can do!” And then you get to immediately do it.
Side-based initiative also has the huge advantage of making it much, much easier for the players to coordinate and make tactical plans.
In some group dynamics, you can end up with some difficulties where players are constantly jockeying to go first. Those are certainly situations where I might consider moving away from side-based initiative, but often these are speed bumps that can be smoothed out by implementing some other method to situationally resolve such deadlocks (e.g., highest pool total goes first or the disputing characters make individual initiative checks to figure out priority for these actions). Even more problematic is when the group coordination leads to alpha-quarterbacking, but that’s a broader social issue at the table that should be resolved regardless.
Conversely, as groups get more comfortable with side-based initiative, you’ll often see them fall naturally and comfortably into simultaneous action resolution. (Where multiple PCs are rolling their checks simultaneous.) The miss-initiative system does disrupt this dynamic, unfortunately, but has the advantage of injecting potential uncertainty into even the best-laid plans.
i like this rule, simply because playtesters were unhappy with my “players go first unless ambushed” system. worth testing, but i guess it’d sate their tactical appetite
I’ve never heard the term “cap system” before. Where did you get it from?
I don’t know about this. I feel like initiative always slows down combat and prefer simpler approaches. I’m also not a fan of the initiative test (i.e. your side wins or loses), as this takes away from the versimilatude of the game.
I prefer to go with a “rest based” initiative order. This adds a little RP into the concept and can be handled at the beginning of a session or after characters rest for a period of time. The concept that getting a good rest directly correlates to a character’s subsequent performance is one that PC’s intuitively understand and can feed RP flavor for upcoming encounters.
There are many ways to change this mechanic to incorporate it into the game in a fun way. For larger parties, I’ll give the people in the lower half of the initiative order a bonus die of my choice (usually a d4) to add to their next roll based on the thinking that “you’re exhausted and will find rest easier”.
Using this strategy for a set period of adventuring time I find combat flows quickly and this also helps with the role playing part of the game. It doesn’t take away any of the surprise mechanics but instead mirrors a realistic view of how we perform IRL. We all know how it feels to try and get something done after pulling a all nighter.
It’s weird, my experience clearly differs from a lot of people. Of all the things that slow down combat, I’ve never thought of initiative as being even in the top five. Maybe it’s because my groups are smaller? I try to avoid having more than four PCs — for a lot of reasons, but slow combat is a big one, along with general lack of spotlight time for everyone.
That said, I like this idea. I’m a fan of “*something* should happen every time you roll the dice, hit or miss”, and this seems like an interesting angle for bringing that idea into d20 combat. It’s simple, and doesn’t change the fundamental action economy that combat is balanced for, but might add some sense of narrative momentum.
Wrath and Glory has the players pick one person to go, then the GM, then the players, which I like for its simplicity. The downside I see to it is that in a game with big power disparity between characters, the players often pick the same character to go first. I played in a game with a *lot* of players and the combat was often over before the less powerful characters (who always elected to go last) even got a single turn. Plus there was this weird strategic element where you’d always want to try to attack someone who hadn’t gone yet, in case you killed them before they got a turn.
I think this could be modified into a pretty simple system: always have the players go around the table instead of picking their order (but starting at a different seat each round). And after a player goes, the NPC they attacked goes next, unless that NPC has already activated. In a system like Wrath and Glory where one-shot-kills are common, this works out a bit like miss initiative. But if you attack someone who has already been attacked (and thus already taken their turn), then you won’t be activating the GM’s side. So you’re more incentivized just to attack the target you are best suited for, or to focus fire, instead of everyone just attacking whoever is going to take the next turn.
@RatherDashing, I think it’s interesting that I see people mention “attack characters which haven’t acted” pretty consistently when W&G comes up (didn’t that even get called out in those old rules preview comics?), but I almost never hear the same point about D&D, even though it’s also true there – maybe moreso, since you generally know the EXACT number of actions until a given character gets a turn, and can plan accordingly.
Sometimes, I wonder what it would look like to have a combat system designed to reward the way I’ve seen most players naively act during RPG combat (even many of the ones who are fiercely tactical playing war games or board games) – mostly reacting to either the closest enemy or the one who had a turn most recently, and (outside of AoEs and support stuff) the battlefield quickly breaking down into a number of small skirmishes with little attempt to focus fire or prioritize any target short of an obviously plot-relevant NPC.
On first blush, it does sound silly to reward seemingly thoughtless non-tactical choices, but then again: this is how group vs group fights tend to go in most movies and TV shows – it’s also a bit silly to consistently punish players for taking inspiration from a game’s inspirations.
I’m sure there are systems where it would work well, but it’d break our Pathfinder v1 games badly, because the net effect would be that everyone who has a useful action which can’t miss goes first–support casters for sure, and unless you change the mechanics, most other casters as well–and only then the people who can miss. Front-loading the support actions in this way, with zero chance of allowing an enemy action, gives the PCs an enormous advantage, very close to PCs-go-first. We already have a lot of trouble with how overwhelmingly lethal high level Pathfinder v1 characters are; PCs-go-first makes this so much worse.
I swore never again after carefully statting up a fight with over 30 varied and interesting NPCs, none of whom got to take an action. Not my idea of a good time.
If the NPCs are designed to be effective (Paizo almost never does this, for good reasons) NPC surprise will behave the same in reverse. NPCs get their buff spells, their haste, their battlefield control spells; they get their most effective attack; *then* the PCs try to recover.
In our Shadowrun v1 games we encountered an unexpected different way in which a system like this can fail. Say, the PCs are highly successful and get to take all their actions first. Then all the NPCs go. The dice-pool mechanic in Shadowrun v1 meant that multiple attacks on a single character before they got to act again would exhaust their defense pool and (if the enemy were capable of hurting them at all) probably maim or kill them. We had to change from the system’s original idea that cybernetically enhanced reflexes made you go *first* to a setup in which they made you go *more often* (they changed how many ticks you counted down to your next action). The initiative in our modified system was a pain in the ass to implement but it did make wired-reflexes characters feel appropriately scary. Before the mod, they got a burst of being scary at the top of the round, and then if there were any decent number of ranged-attack NPCs left, they died –having clearly shown themselves to be high value targets. I’ve never played another game with this type of active defense, so it was a big surprise.
Hi, not sure if I understand correctly the main idea (English is not my first language).
If I get it right, PCs start with initiative, they act and either:
A) All of them are successful, and then the NPCs act or
B) One of the PCs fail a roll, then an NPC acts and this is where I get confused. Do all NPCs start taking turns until there’s a failure, or is just that NPC the one who gets to act and then initiative goes back to PCs until there’s another miss? Or is something else I am missing?
@Ramón
> Do all NPCs start taking turns until there’s a failure,
That way of doing things is what’s discussed as “Variant: Cascade” but it is not the main thing discussed in the article.
> or is just that NPC the one who gets to act and then initiative goes back to PCs until there’s another miss?
This is the main thing discussed in the article: one failure, one NPC acts, then back to the PCs. And after the PCs have ended their turns the remaining NPCs take their turns.
So all in all, both ways of doing things are discussed but the second one is the core idea.
We’ve been playing with Miss-Based initiative in our 5e game for about two years now, although our variant has the missed-opponent taking a turn, and preferably targetting the PC that missed it. Sometimes on a miss I’ll say “you get one more PC action before the boss moves”.
To the commenters that mention this feels like PbtA — well, I was inspired to experiment with it after playing Magical Kitties Save the Day 🙂 Started noodling around with it and discussing it on the Alexandrian Discord and it’s neat to see a polished up version here.
It gets a little strange on some effects that end on a PC turn. For some I don’t care, for particularly strong ones (stunning strike) I’ll just politely ask the PC to take their turn at the same time next time. They self-manage that very well, “Ok, you’re the third player to act this time, please make sure you’re the third player to act again next time.”
It has sped things up A LOT for our game. Mainly because when a player has formed a plan, they can just take that action right away. They don’t have to wait until their turn and have that plan potentially not be as effective (and therefore feel like they have to think of a new plan).
We’re never going back, if we can help it, to regular initiative 🙂
One implementation tip: to track it, I lay out some cards on the table with the identifiers of various enemies/PCs on them (we use numbered tokens at our table, so I have corresponding cards 1–30), and just turn them face-down once the enemy has acted.
I think this could work well in systems like Technoir that don’t have initiative.