Initiative House Rule, For Consideration Options

[FrankTrollman]

If you're like me, you're fairly annoyed that wound penalties rarely do a god damned thing to peoples' initiative counts. Seriously, the rule where you don't get to act if you don't get an initiative penalty that drops you to zero really never comes up, because people have iniative counts of 10+ and initiative penalties are all small enough to be counted on one hand.

So here's something I've been thinking of: why not make peoples' Initiative count just be their actual hits instead of their Initiative Plus their hits? It would make peoples' initiative counts way more random of course, an Initiative 14 Street Sam who rolled zero hits would go off at count zero just like an initiative 4 wage slave who scored no hits. But it would also make people lose actions due to wound penalties ever - since a lot of people would be going off at count zero, one, or two, it is pretty easy to imagine characters hitting negative Initiative with wound penalties and losing actions.

I consider the following to be advantages:

• Easier to explain. For some reason people get confused by rolling Initiative and adding the hits to the numeric value of Initiative. Asking people for their hits on a test is much more in line with the rest of the mechanics.
• Wound Penalties loom larger and people lose actions now and again. This also makes Damage Compensators a much bigger deal.
• Very fast individuals (such as Force 8+ spirits) are now capable of not going first.

So, anyone have observations or objections?

-Frank

[DireRadiant]

Looks well thought out to me and achieves what you set out to have it do.

Actually I'm kind of surprised it isn't the way initiative is run to begin with. I don't see where the mechanic for Attribute + Attribute + Hits comes from, whereas we do see where Attribute + Attribute comes up in things like composure and judge intentions checks.

[Larsine]

I too have been anmnoyed with the Initiative rule, especially having to explain to add the hits to the initiative score.

Your suggestion seems fine, and I'll try it out at the next oppertunity.

Thanks

Lars

[djinni]

it seems to work out,

[sunnyside]

I think the origional rules are to make things like reaction enhancers significant. But your thing should work just fine.

[lunchbox311]

[Dashifen]

Well, statistically speaking, reaction enhancers are effective because (a) they give you more passes and (b) they generally increase your reaction and, thus, can increase your initiative, too. So with reaction enhancements (including wired reflexes, reaction enhancers, improved reflexes, etc.) are all still extremely valuable.

I like this a lot. I probably won't get to run SR for some months (stupid summer) but I might try this out as well.

[jklst14]

I was actually thinking of adopting the exact same house rule! I say go for it. I think you may also get more Initiative Ties - which would result in more simultaneous actions and would certainly make things more interesting.

[Dashifen]

Reaction Enhancers as the cyberware don't, but I was refering to a general classification of cyber/bio/magic all of which enhance a character's reaction, the attribute and their passess.

[Wakshaani]

I wonder, however, if you won't see an awful lot of "Initiative Bog", where everyone's going at the same time? "Alright, everyone with 2 hits, raise your hand."

[Aaron]

Actually, I suspect that the "add your hits to your Initiative" rule exists to reduce ties. Switching to hits only would roughly triple the instances of ties that would then need a second step to be broken. That being said, I see no reason why one can't just use the original Initiative Rating to break those ties, other than the fact that Initiative would be slowed down.

[2bit]

alternatively, you could make every box of damage, or every other, count against initiative instead of every third.

[FriendoftheDork]

[Naysayer]

[Buster]

[FriendoftheDork]

[Narmio]

I was going to suggest "Or you could just double the effect of wound penalties on initiative?" as soon as I got to the bottom of this thread, but it seems that's been proposed already. I second!

[Buster]

[odinson]

[mfb]

[raphabonelli]

[odinson]

and how often do glitches and critical glitches happen?

[mfb]

[kzt]

[Buster]

Which is why it makes sense to add the random roll to initiative, but on average an experienced fighter is going to be quicker on the draw than a noncom.