Brazen Wolfe Tabletop

A Mixed bag on Saturday

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So before we look at some notes on last weeks update – A different Initiative I want to add another contender to the adventure. It’s not a strange occurrence of even for adventurers to have knowledge that black dragons spit acid and have a thick scaly hide. These adversaries are tough, smart and deadly let alone being trapped in an arena with one.

But as they are stronger than the average creature you wouldn’t want to fight these after a long day of fighting other creatures in the arena.

Trying out Playing cards

Last weekend I had the opportunity to be able to try out the initiative system of using paying cards. By assigning everyone a playing card and then randomly drawing a card to determine order. For the party members who had a high modifier (feats or high dexterity) I gave an extra card and put it into the deck.

So for the four players I had 5 cards in total, 1 base card each (a suit card) and then an additional card that was for the higher dexterity of the character. For each creature I assigned a different colour suit and for minions I had just numbers (2-10) and for bosses I used a suit card. This meant that generally I had around 7 or 8 cards at play at any one time and every round I had a different initiative order that represented the chaos on the battlefield.

For lair actions or special actions from bosses I used the joker cards which meant something happened but it wasn’t the full suite of attacks that it could used. When a creature died, or when the lair action/special action could not be used any more then I removed the card.

The Pros.

The randomness was enjoyable for myself and the party. The concept was simple and there was no rolling of dice or punishing the strength based martial classes who may have a lower initiative than normal.

This flowed on into the lair actions which felt thematic in a chaotic battlefield and meant that the encounters felt more intense than when the party would just steam roll through the creatures. In this instance where the lair action was tremors in a slippery ice cavern and could (and did) result in half the party falling prone it meant that the party members who went last in the turn order weren’t getting prone-locked and would have chances to break out of being on the ground constantly.

Having a simple visual aid (and I know other initiative trackers like pegs and character portraits / names on the screen work too) helped people realise it was their turn – however not knowing what their turn would look like next round was one of the cons.

The Cons.

The Randomness made it hard to plan for and implement turn-to-turn strategy as the party couldn’t reliably work out if their next turn would appear early or late in the next turns order. This meant de-buffs could have less usefulness when they resulted in something ending on the start of the party members next turn. This could be mitigated by saying “for x number of cards” but this was discussed later.

The lack of guaranteed order also impacted what people decided to do during the round but it did have some great moments where the character got one or two turns off before the boss could retaliate.

The time between rounds shuffling the cards did also loose some of the time efficiencies that was gained by not rolling initiative and recording the order at the start of combat. So this would be seen as a Con in the long term.

Closing notes.

The party enjoyed the change up and spent the next day discussing other ways of tracking or managing initiative. This was overall healthy and led to some great discussions which all led to moving away from Dungeons and Dragons combat AND exploring what other RPGs did. OR, tantalisingly so, exploring the creation of a new RPG system.

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