All Systems Considered: Initiative
What is Initiative?
From a mechanical perspective, initiative is the way we regulate actions in conflict resolution. Even if all action is considered simultaneous, we still need some way to parse out those actions so we can judge the results.
Yes, but What Does Initiative Represent?
Initiative represents a character’s ability to comprehend a situation and decide how to act.
Initiative should be influenced by a participant’s intelligence, agility, training, experience and to some degree, luck. A modern soldier or police officer is drilled on how to react in various dangerous situations. That training is augmented by real-world experience. Higher intelligence helps a participant judge the nature of a situation and evaluate courses of action in a split second. And better agility allows a participant to put the resulting decision into action swiftly. Most game systems utilize some or all of these factors in judging who has the best initiative.
But, what comes next is generally wrong. One of the most popular ways of handling initiative is to have participants act in the order of the best-to-worst initiative dice rolls. This strikes me as a simplistic compromise that actually detracts from the illusion of reality. It doesn’t actually provide participants with a higher initiative result with any real benefit. They go first without knowledge of what’s happening around them. Now, many game systems attempt to fix this by letting a character ready an action with some sort of trigger event. Or they can delay their action until later, but without round-by-round initiative rolls, they lose their good initiative result.
I think a better system is to determine an order of initiative first, and then from the worst score to the best, have each participant state in general terms what they will do that round. Then play proceeds from the highest score down to the lowest. Participants must perform the action they stated, or suffer some major penalty. The penalty would represent the split second hesitation that should give an enemy an advantage. The participant could add to or adjust his actions with no penalty, as long as he has fulfilled his stated intent for the round.
Example
Roland and Grigory are in a running gun battle with two guards inside a data center. Initiatives are rolled and the results from highest to lowest are: Roland, Guard #2, Guard #1 and Grigory.
In the normal system, Roland would go first.
1) Roland knows Grigory is going to take the lead, so he provides covering fire at Guard #2 in the hallway where Grigory is headed.
2) Guard #2, if still able, fires at Grigory, who is closer and headed his way.
3) Guard #1, fires at Roland.
4) Grigory, if still able, moves toward the door, firing at Guard #1
Note that Grigory, despite having the worst initiative, already knows what’s happened before he acts, so he can make a decision then on which Guard to shoot at that round. Yes, he could be down, but if he isn’t, he’s gaining a great advantage.
In the system I like, everyone state’s their intentions first. Note that the better your initiative, the more you’ll know about what’s happening before you make a decision.
1) Grigory: “I will move toward the door, and shoot at Guard #2 down the hall.”
2) Guard #1: “I’ll hide behind a desk and fire at Grigory.”
3) Guard #2: “I’m going pull back inside the doorway.”
4) Roland: “I’ll shoot at Guard #1″
Then, they act. Roland shoots at Guard #1. He knows no one is aiming his direction, so he doesn’t need to take any defensive precautions. Guard #2 knows he’s a target, so he conceals himself. Guard #1, if Roland didn’t drop him, has no way of knowing that Guard #2 would be safe, so he’d still shoot at Grigory instead of Roland. Grigory, if he’s still alive, must move toward the doorway, and must take a shot at Guard #2, who now is covered by the wall. The GM might allow him to throw himself prone at the end of his round because he knows he’s come under fire from the other Guard.
Options
As GM, you might allow some form of Initiative check to allow a participant to change their actions after Intents have been stated. I’d allow this, but only to change to a completely defensive action. If the character passes the check, they take a defensive action (seek cover, drop prone, crawl away, etc) without penalty. If they fail, they’d take some penalty for hesitating too long.
Or perhaps, you’d allow a participant to take cover instead of taking their action without penalty. Very few combatants in reality are going to wait to take a shot when they know they’re going to be a target for several enemies!
Implementation
I’ve not had a chance to put this house rule into play yet. I think it would work for pretty much any game that uses initiative rules. And I think it could apply to social conflict in addition to combat. I think it could potentially lengthen a combat encounter. However, in games I’ve played, some players won’t even think about their actions until their turn comes up, which slows things down considerably (and drives me mad).
Adapting the basic concept to different game systems would take some engineering, but I don’t think it would be anything too painful.
Feedback
Have you house ruled initiative? If so, what have you tried, and how has it worked?
Lost to the Answer
I find myself nearly overwhelmed by questions these days. Questions, visions and dreams. Either I’m mad, or I’m in the midst of a profound personal crisis. Or both. I can’t say, because I really don’t understand what’s happening to me right now. I know that I am unsettled, anxious and sad.
I want to attribute it to being 47. I’m really only 46, but my head is convinced that I’m 47. 46! How did I get that old? How did I get here? What have I missed?
Does my choice of music reflect my state of mind, or does my state of mind reflect my choice of music? Either way, the Talking Heads inhabit my aural environment completely. And like a charismatic high priest, David Byrne prophesies the challenges and questions that haunt my waking moments and stir my sleeping hours. These are questions I don’t want to consider; they are too hard. Too painful.
My restlessness could be a natural extension of my thoughts on God and religion. More and more, I grow convinced that there is no God, that all of creation is the result of a progression of natural processes that we do not completely understand. There is no greater power in the universe, there is no afterlife, no reincarnation. What we experience in the narrow margin between birth and death is all we get. Everything else is imaginary.
You may ask yourself
What is that beautiful house?
You may ask yourself
Where does that highway lead to?
You may ask yourself
Am I right?… Am I wrong?
You may say to yourself
My God!… what have I done?
Set Sail on the Website Sea
The history of the Internet is filled with a variety of wild stories and crazy rumors. Heck, the Internet would be pretty much empty without rumor, mistruths, innuendo and vices that will go unnamed here.
But there is some good stuff to be found, if you know where to look. And that’s where I come in. I’m ready to lead you into the great ocean of the information age.
So strap yourselves in and avail yourselves of the free peanuts. We’re going to make three stops on this voyage:
Because I can’t remember much of anything any more, I can highly recommend Memorize Now, a website that can help you remember stuff. For example, I just learned all of the lines of Shakespeare’s Richard III. It wasn’t easy. But… now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by this sun of York.
Five Minute Cake. A String Map. A Snuggie. You can learn to make all of these and so much more, thanks to the geeks of at Instructables.com. They’re snarky folks, but awfully smart. I liked the instructions on how to turn $15 into a pen like the ones that cost $200. Cool, huh?
Finally, Ted.com. I thought this was going to be Ted Danson’s personal site, filled with his snapshots and memories of Cheers. Snap! Wrong! Ted began life more than 25 years ago as a conference about Technology, Entertainment and Design. Now as website, you can watch recorded lectures and performances by a huge variety of people. I gotta bookmark this place and come back later to hear Natalie Merchant singing old poems.
I don’t make this stuff up folks: it comes to me in a box made out of mud and straw. So go out there and enjoy the internet. And make sure to report in any discoveries you make!
The history of the Internet is filled with a variety of wild stories and crazy rumors. Heck, the Internet would be pretty much empty without rumor, mistruths, innuendo and vices that will go unnamed here.
But there is some good stuff to be found, if you know where to look. And that’s where I come in. I’m ready to lead you into the great wilderness of the information age.
So strap yourselves in and avail yourselves of the free peanuts. We’re going to make three stops on this voyage:
Learn Something
First stop is Ted.com. I thought this was going to be Ted Danson’s personal site, filled with his snapshots and memories of Cheers. Snap! Wrong! Ted began life more than 25 years ago as a conference about Technology, Entertainment and Design. Now as website, you can watch recorded lectures and performances by a huge variety of people. I gotta bookmark this place and come back later to hear Natalie Merchant singing old poems.
Read Something
There’s a world of the world’s greatest books at Project Gutenberg. Something like 30,000 books are freely and legally available for download in a variety of formats. I just snagged a copy of Antonio Feliciano de Castilho’s A Chave do Enigma in the original Portuguese. Sweet!
Make Something
Five Minute Cake. A String Map. A Snuggie. You can learn to make all of these and so much more, thanks to the geeks of at Instructables.com. They’re snarky folks, but awfully smart. I liked the instructions on how to turn $15 into a pen like the ones that cost $200. Cool, huh?
I don’t make this stuff up folks: it comes to me in a box made out of mud and straw. So go out there and enjoy the internet. And make sure to report in any discoveries you make!
You can tell by the way I use my voice, I’m a … oh… wait, wrong blog. Today’s blog is about my hobby: Recreating the Historical Voyages of Internet Explorers. That’s right! Every Friday, I put on my best Commodore uniform… no, not The Commodores. Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry. You know, the Hero of Lake Erie? No, huh? Well, more on that in a minute.
As I said, on Fridays I like to re-enact the great voyages into the frontiers of the internet. It’s all been explored before of course. Craig Allen was the first one to get to the end and safely back in 2007.
Today, I headed out to discover something new, and I’ve come back with three things for you.
Why actually leave your house to buy greeting cards, when you can go to enGreet instead? This is a site where you can browse for, choose, sign and send a greeting card. No, I don’t mean by email, I mean by that old fashioned method where they stick stuff in a mailbox or through a door slot! Cool stuff!
If you are planning to get off the couch, maybe you should learn a language. Remedial English might be a good start. But, if you’re set on learning a foreign language, why not try Livemocha. The list of languages available is astounding. The only thing they seem to lack is Klingon!
And finally, for those of you who didn’t know that Oliver Hazard Perry was a Commodore before he was a great big Navy ship, I offer you WikiPedia. If you don’t know it, shame on you. It’s a huge repository of online information that anyone can add to, and everyone can edit. So while there are occasional information vandals, for the most part, you can learn just about anything from the site.
I don’t make this stuff up folks: it comes to me in a box made out of mud and straw. So go out there and enjoy the internet. And make sure to report in any discoveries you make!
As most of you know, I am an adventurer. I come from a long, long line of adventurous folks stretching back to my grandfather Charles who bought a farm in Missouri 75 years ago. Now that was adventure! Of course, there are only two frontiers left to us these days. I can’t afford a ticket to the space station, so I’m stuck exploring the furthest fringes of the internet.
Most of my journeys there are the stuff of legend, best saved for folks with stern constitutions and hearty dispositions.
But I can tell you about today’s exploration. We set sail from our home port shortly after sunrise, heading into calm, charted waters. There, off to the left, was the great Island of Facebook. And just on the horizon at 13 degrees to starboard were the lurking bulwarks of Google. Just before we arrived off the coast of Youtube, we turned hard to port into the part of the map that says “There Be Virii Here.”
Fortunately, no Virii attacked. But I did discover three things that might be of interest to you.
First port of call, Bubble.Us, where I was invited to create a map of my mind. Mind maps, as you know, are a brainstorming tool. You place and connect your ideas, and somehow that tells you what the winning lottery numbers will be. In the image below, a normal mind map is on the left. What I came up with is on the right. Brilliant!
Speaking of works of art, Jackson Pollock is a pretty famous art. He made pictures that look a lot like my mind map. Wanna see what it was like to be Jackson Pollock at work? Try this, the Jackson Pollock Simulator. Maybe you can be a master of the abstract form, without getting paint all over yourself!
And finally, because I can’t remember much of anything any more (because of all the paint fumes, I’m sure) I can highly recommend Memorize Now, a website that can help you remember stuff. For example, I just learned all of the lines of Shakespeare’s Richard III. It wasn’t easy. But… now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by this sun of York.
I don’t make this stuff up folks: it comes to me in a box made out of mud and straw. So go out there and enjoy the internet. And make sure to report in any discoveries you make!
If you’ve watched the Discovery channel, you may have seen me out in the wilderness, exploring the far ends of the Internet to bring you back stories and useful tips. I’ve struggled through heavy over-coded jungles of HTML and battled javascript with my bare hands. If Discovery doesn’t have a show about my adventures, shame on them!
Anyway, without further ado, here are the Top Three Things I Discovered Today!
First stop… Microsoft. Yes, I know. I’ve heard it all before. But occasionally they do something right, like Windows 7 or the thing I discovered this morning: SkyDrive. It’s a service of Windows Live, so you do have to sign up for that. But SkyDrive gives you 25 gigabytes of free online storage!
I can’t help it, being a man, I forget stuff. Usually stuff my wife has told me to do, which leads to all sorts of trouble. I’ve tried writing notes to myself, but I lose most of them. Especially the ones about things my wife has told me to do. So, along comes Remember the Milk, a web services devoted to helping me remember my to do list. I can get reminders through email and on my cell phone. Which is the same way my wife reminds me of things!
Years ago, I used to fall asleep to music. Then I started buying CDs with an hour of recorded nature sounds: You know the ones, with the sound of the surf at the beach or a jungle at night. But during this morning’s voyages, I discovered Rainy Mood. The website streams a thirty-minute loop of a heavy rain storm. Just the thing to help me drift off to sleep or drown out the drone of the office when I’m on deadline!
I don’t make this stuff up folks: it comes to me in a box made out of mud and straw. So go out there and enjoy the internet. Just make sure your anti-virus is up to date and don’t fall for any spam, hoaxes or Trojan horses!
The Story of the Man With The Golden Arm
Before we get to the story itself, I thought I’d talk about how you can save some lives.
Chances are very good that at some time in your life, you (or someone you love) will need a transfusion of blood. In fact, according to the American Red Cross, every two seconds, someone in the United States needs blood to stay alive. It’s such a common thing in cases of accidents or surgery, and the need for blood donations has never been higher. One donation can save the lives of up to three people.
Here are three places in Albuquerque where you can donate blood or plasma:
- The American Red Cross at 142 Monroe Street Northeast.
- ZLB Plasma Services at 204 San Mateo Boulevard Southeast.
- United Blood Services on 1515 University Boulevard.
Now, the story of the Man with the Golden Arm:
Australian James Harrison is special. At age 74, he’s donated 984 times since he was 18 years old. And that alone is worthy of mention. But Harrison has a unique blood type that contains a rare antibody. It can be used to save infants born with Rhesus disease. And his donations have kept more than two million babies alive.
Two million!
The Wall Returns 30 Years Later
I’m betting this is going to be one of the biggest shows of the year. Roger Waters is bringing The Wall Live to the Pepsi Center on November 23rd. If you’re even remotely aware of Pink Floyd, you’ll already know that The Wall was the group’s 1979 double album.
Waters conceived of the idea in 1977, after completing a tour of large stadiums that left him and the other band members feeling alienated from their audience. Thus the idea of building a wall on stage during the course of a concert.
That was exactly what happened when the band toured to support The Wall in 1980: A forty-foot high wall was built between the band and the audience. At the end, the wall collapses, once again revealing the band.
The show was reborn on July 21st, 1990 on ground that had been part of the Berlin Wall. More than 350,000 thousand people watched the concert in Berlin, and it was broadcast to 52 countries around the world.
On his website, Waters says he was quoted in 1988 talking about the themes of the Wall, asking: “Will the technologies of communication in our culture, serve to enlighten us and help us to understand one another better, or will they deceive us and keep us apart?” Waters says he still thinks the question is very relevant.
Tickets go on sale in May.
If you let it, your television will slowly rot your mind. Although there is no science to back up my claim, my theory is that if you sit in front of a television set 24/7 for the next ten years, you will be a zombie. A very dirty, smelly, emaciated zombie. And that’s really no life to lead, is it?
To avoid such a terrible fate, I suggest you could to the following five things instead of watching television:
Read a Book
You might be shocked to discover that books still exist. And there are a lot of really good ones to read. They still have libraries where you can check them out for free! Remember libraries? Here’s some bonus fun… read a book to children.
Learn to Play a Music Instrument
Some time ago, my brother decided he was going to learn to play guitar. I thought he was crazy: have you ever seen all the little strings you have to hold down to make it sound right? But he learned, and a few years later, I did too. I’m no Eddie Van Halen, but it’s a lot of fun.
Learn Another Language
Wow your friends and family with your knowledge of a language they can’t speak. Imagine the fun of going to a foreign country and actually being able to talk to the residents in their own language!
Get to Know Your Neighbors
You’ll be surprised how rewarding it can be just to get to know the people you live near. New friends are never a bad thing, especially when they might someday be able to walk your dog when you’re on vacation!
Talk a Walk
You can restore a little sanity to you life by taking a nice long walk in the evening. Look at the stars, walk your dog, stop and smell the flowers. Taking a walk is a wonderful way to wind down your day, not to mention burn off those calories from dessert!
If you didn’t have a television in front of you, how would you fill your time?
Twitter: mwbay
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