Feng Shui:

All characters have a Speed stat; everyone rolls D6+Speed, generating a

number of action points for the coming turn. Highest Speeds act first.

Actions usually use up three 'speed points' each, occasionally less or more.

A defensive action uses up one speed point. Hence if you rolled 15 for

initiative, and the mooks you were facing rolled 10, you might get the

character acting on initiative 15, 12, 9, 5, 1, having used a couple of action

points for defence (defending once moved the character's next action from

speed 6 to speed 5, and defending twice more moved his last action of the

round from speed 3 to speed 1). The mooks would act on 10, 7, 4, 1. This

works well at intermixing the actions of the two sides and is easy to track.

And it fits the Feng Shui genre very well.

What other systems out there handle initiative in a notably elegant way?

Nor am I a fan of Action Points and other similar mechanics, or

limited defensive options common to these systems.as they produce very

counter-productive play due to their very nature. For example,

requiring the spending of an Action for each use of the game's primary

defensive options results in the tradition MMORPGs style of combat

when each side focuses all their fire upon a single target- something

not seen in reality or fiction outside those games when use such

mechanics.

In message <c9e58ed7-b3d5-42bd­-a38d-f5f916a3c...@m­44g2000hsc.googlegro­ups.com>

DougL <lampert.d...@gmail­.com> wrote:

Sounds like a typical example of a rule system working against itself; you

have to combine fire to have a chance of piercing a force wall, therefore

the scaling rules for combined fire adopt a very gentle slope, and hence a

couple of points of difference in the value of a defence code requires a

factor of ten more attackers to counteract. But if the only thing that can

threaten a PC is an equal NPC or 1000 mooks, then your opponents will either

be an NPC or 1000 mooks, and the PCs won't be too scared even when

confronted with tens of thousands of them. If 10 mooks can threaten a PC,

I'm thinking we need to turn the hit point system on its head and replace it

with a damage point system. Hurting everybody a little needs to be a more

effective tactic that hurting one guy lots, but without provoking a

party-wide death spiral. PCs and NPCs can survive getting hurt a little and

be driven off. But as soon as the PCs have one of their guys down (a likely

consequence of ganging up), they're chained to the area, because they won't

generally want to abandon a fallen comrade.

Simon Smith posts, in part:

Qucik follow-up before I forget; maybe something to

look at is to give unengaged opponents a significant

skill bonus? Then there's an incentive to spread

one's attacks as widely as possible.

I think that would help. In real infantry battles, most ammunition is

expended just to force the opponents to keep their heads down so they

can't shoot back at you as accurately.

The example is somewhat (that is, very) contrived,

However, quite a few games have used predeclared actions or penalize

switching targets.

It does point out one direction to go in to encourage spreading fire:

Include the possibilities of quick kills and wasted fire.

AD&D had predeclared actions, I find it strange that you don't remember

that.

It doesn't matter if you would use the class of solutions suggested, that

such a class was suggested is all that was required to disprove your

dismissal of the example.

Another idea along these lines that comes to my mind is the possibility of

getting results, (like stunning the target), which will hamper the targets

next action by some absolute amount. If you don't know that you have

stunned the target, and there is a reasonable chance of getting such a

result, there is a benefit in spreading the party's fire.

(2ed DMG)

That entirely depends on how stunning, (or whatever), is determined. For

instance, basing stun resistance on a statistic that tends to be higher

in PCs and major NPCs.

I have also seen games that give a very high chance of significant

penalty resulting from an attack.