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Old 08-09-2011, 07:54 PM
leonpoi leonpoi is offline
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Join Date: May 2009
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Adm.Lee, I don't think you're alone thinking about initiative, and Legbreaker's summary pretty much echoes my thoughts.

There is one thing I’ll say about the v2.2 system; that it takes all of the accounting out of the system and therefore speeds things up. A while back I ran a session with 5 PCs (who had not played 2.2 before) in a firefight with about 10 marauders. There were explosions, automatic fire, vehicles, all kinds of things and the combat went so smoothly and felt very intense because the initiative system didn’t get in the way of the action.

Having said that, it’s got its problems – these are the big ones that I see.
1) Everyone pretty much gets one action per turn (the level playing field)
2) We had one PC with Init 7 = 2 actions, and he clearly dominated – it just didn’t feel right that he got to do twice as many things – the step change is just too sharp from 1 action to 2 actions.

To get around this I’d proposed a hybrid between v1 and v2.2 where characters got 1 action per 6 turns (phase) plus an extra action for every Init 4 or greater. i.e. a Init 5 character would get 8 actions in 6 turns. This would step up the granularity of actions. I never got to test this though because I moved country and haven’t played since. It would require book keeping though over a phase (which I would have handled with chips/counters), but at least you wouldn’t need to keep track of what’s been repeated. Most NPCs would have Inits <4, so it would only need book keeping for harder NPC fights.
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