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

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.

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

it seems to work out,

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

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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

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!

and how often do glitches and critical glitches happen?

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.

My group's rule is probably a lot more complicated than what most people want but here is what my group does.

We use your overall wound penalty as an initiative threshold. If your initiative roll is higher than it (we only use hits) then that's your initiative score. If you tie you act at 0. If you're one below you lose one simple action, two below you lose both simple actions if you're 3 below you cannot act at all.

Once per Combat we allow a "guts" roll to reduce the number of damage boxes used to calculate your wound penalty by the number of hits on a body+willpower roll. You can do extra "guts" rolls by using a point of edge.

There's probably some whacky edge cases where that blows up but it's worked so far for us.

I bring craziness and blasphemy.

Here's something crazy. In what combat in which I've been involved, the initiative usually went to the person who takes the initiative, not the one who reacts the fastest. For example, in a recent tournament, even though I lost, I was told that I "took the initiative" and "controlled the bouts." That suggests (to me, anyway) that Initiative should be Willpower + Charisma.

Here's something blasphemous. I like the way that one game named after a die does initiative. It's done once per combat, and then it's out of the way. Done with. Fini. Not dealt with any more. I like that.

I can see were some would like to have the wound modifiers & initiative, play more of a roll. In my line of work (law enforcement) I'm a trainer with all the studies and experience out there most people involved in a life and death conflict they will not know they have been injured till one of two things happens you loss consciousness or the conflict is over and you asses you’re self. This happens in sports also were the injury is not noticed till after the fact. So to me its fine as is, it gives me that feeling of injuries do have an impact but with a abstract reality of rules.

Thanks,
Brent Coomes

You're going to get a lot less predictability in initiative. We know this. Frank knows this. Whether that is a bug or a feature is an entirely subjective judgement.

Yes, there will be more ties. Not sure how you plan to handle that. IMG, when I get a tie, I almost never bother to "resolve" the tie. If people tie, they both go at the same time, unhindered by each other, and if they're attacking each other than injuries will pile on when both people are done acting. I figure it's close enough to simultaneous to not matter. I only resolve ties when ties really can't happen. (Unfortunately, it is very early in the morning and the only example that comes to my mind is Jeopardy buzzers.) Obviously, looking at the initial initiative of all characters involved will resolve a tie, exactly as normal. But you're going to be dealing with ties a lot more often. Again, bug or feature is entirely subjective.

Game mechanically, I see no problem with this. In terms of making problems for the game, I would be worried that all the ties would slow things down a little bit, but I'm not sure how much; it depends on how they're handled. As for the other effects, it sounds like it will have the desired effect. It also sounds like a fair number of people would not desire that effect in their games. And that's.....okay.

I don't think it's enough advantage to reaction enhanced characters, but it's worth testing.

This is what I do: Take your initiative as your initiative. Only roll if you have a tie. Then bump the initiative up or down by one to separate them out. If you roll surprise then start with a threshold of say 3. Subtract the difference from your initiative.

Or if you have to roll then roll initiative + 1d6. No success roll, just an old fashioned cumulative roll.

Add in the 3142 pass order and you are done.