Topic: Simplified Initiative

[Falconer]

RoCoIII presents a “Simplified Initiative” system. You roll 1d10 and add a small Init Bonus (Qu bonus ÷ 5); the total is your initiative, with a minimum of 1 and a maximum of 10. There’s a bit more, but that’s the essence of it.

I thought I would take a crack at porting this system to HARP. It’s similar to HARP’s system, but just a degree simpler. I didn’t suppose HARP’s 2-second round needed to be broken down with greater granularity than what Simplified Initiative offers.


Calculating a Character’s Initiative Bonus

Simply look up your Init. Bonus on the following table:



I wanted final Init Bonuses to be mostly zeroes, but possible to max out if you want to. The only way I could see to achieve this is to calculate your Quickness Bonus on the “HARP side” (i.e., get your “total” Qu Bonus with race and spec modifiers added in) before going to the table as basically your last step to find your RM-style (RoCoIII-style) Init Bonus.


Converting a Monster’s Initiative Bonus

To convert the Init of a monster natively designed for HARP, I’m not 100% sure, but I think dividing by 5 is a pretty good rule of thumb.

But I am using the RMSS Creatures & Monsters Conversion to HARP, so it was a relatively simple thing to convert the given Inits back to RM, and from thence to the Simplified system. Thus:



It should take about ten minutes to go through the PDF and edit it to the new numbers using Acrobat.


Lightning Reflexes

Instead of giving a +5 to your Init, it only gives +1.

[terefang]

nicey

[craig]

I don't get it, this doesn't seem "simplified" at all...quite the opposite.

It seems much more complicated than just "Roll initiative and add your initiative bonus".  Instead of just rolling and adding, you have to look up a table, divide your initiative bonus by 5 before adding it and limiting it to a max of 10.  The fact that it's weighted towards usually giving an Init bonus of 0 also makes it seem like it's a complicated way of just removing initiative differences entirely.

The max 10 limit also breaks spells like Boost Quickness and items/potions/etc that increase the Qu bonus.  Dunno how it would interact with the Haste spell (which is kind of broken/pointless anyway - use one round to cast a spell that gives you, or someone you can touch, two actions in the next round...and scaling it up for more actions or duration just increases the casting time)

And, yes, monster initiatives in original and 2004 HARP and M:AFG are way too high because monsters are all built as Fighters with Lightning Reflexes, and all have at least Qu 75 (even Zombies have an init bonus of +17 in M:AFG, or +15 as a basic "Class I Undead" in HARP 2004), but that's easy enough to fix - start by not giving them Lightning Reflexes unless they're sapient creatures who actually are Fighters or have some other reason to have that talent. And don't build all monsters/animals as Fighters. Make profession-like templates for them such as Herbivore, Hunter, Pack Hunter, Ambush Predator, etc which outline stats, talents, skill ranks/level, etc for particular types of creatures.

From what I've read, the monster initiative problem is at least partially fixed in the 2013 edition of HARP and in the Bestiary (but still tends to give excessive Init bonuses to creatures)