Is the Initiative roll the single most important roll in the game?

[Qoltar]

Wow.

No wonder I felt lost in that recent D&D campaign.
I got bored with the lack of variety...and the monotony of rolling initiative at every darn encounter.

Right now I can't wait to start a new GURPS campaign as a GM and get back to what feels natural.


- Ed Charlton

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by Kromm

Yes. These things tend to be confused becase D&D used "initiative" to mean something that gamers took as the dictionary definition of the word, but which would have been more logically be called "order of individual action." GURPS uses "initiative" in the more traditional military sense, to mean which side in a conflict is acting, forcing the other side to react, and thus controlling the conflict. It has nothing to do with individuals.

Just to clarify here: In original D&D and AD&D, having the initiative means your side is the acting side, and the other side is the reacting side—like GURPS, though the implementation is different. In AD&D Second Edition's standard rules, initiative means the same thing, but the game adds options to change it to mean "order of individual action." In D&D Third Edition and D&D Fourth Edition, initiative means only "order of individual action."

[nik1979]

we have an initiative roll?!

Well not in the Mysteries i've been running.

>> the surprise rolls are more exiting when you take away Combat Reflexes +6 and use Soldier or appropriate Warrior skill w/ a TDM instead.

[nik1979]

Originally Posted by Qoltar

Wow.

No wonder I felt lost in that recent D&D campaign.
I got bored with the lack of variety...and the monotony of rolling initiative at every darn encounter.

Right now I can't wait to start a new GURPS campaign as a GM and get back to what feels natural.


- Ed Charlton

Same here I really hated it. It really slowed down the game. After a point, running so many combats and post game analysis. I realized clock wise or counter clock wise was just as good as an initiative roll, because of the wait maneuver making actions non-linear anyway.

Re-arranging order of every combat slows the game down by a few minutes each rearrangement and breaks the flow.

[The Benj]

Originally Posted by Athanbeli

Hi everyone.

I got the impression that the initiative roll that start hostile encounters might be the single most important roll in the game.
Has this been expanded somewhere, perhaps with a wider range of modifiers and more varied results? So far I checked martial arts and action 2, yet I couldn't find anything about that in those 2 volumes.

Here I discuss using a Quick Contest of Tactics instead of the d6 rolls in RAW. I've used it regularly since and it's worked well.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by nik1979

>> the surprise rolls are more exiting when you take away Combat Reflexes +6 and use Soldier or appropriate Warrior skill w/ a TDM instead.

Surprise is initiative in GURPS.

[Captain-Captain]

Originally Posted by Athanbeli

Hi everyone.

I got the impression that the initiative roll that start hostile encounters might be the single most important roll in the game.
Has this been expanded somewhere, perhaps with a wider range of modifiers and more varied results? So far I checked martial arts and action 2, yet I couldn't find anything about that in those 2 volumes.

There's an initiative roll in GURPS? I've been playing this game for 20 years now and no one told me about rolling initiative?