Initiative in 4E

[unipus]

That's true... and a reason why I prefer to avoid "roll for initiative every round" and, really, limit die rolls as much as possible.

I do think there are some worthwhile tradeoffs in something like the system Mahatatain proposed. Getting rid of "dead" rounds of combat being a big one, potentially, which all by itself could compensate for any amount of speed lost to adding the initiative roll.

I play online, so initiative is automatic, which is hard to beat... but with a little work it could be automatic using something like this system, too.