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As far as the sausages go, I'll stick with it on pizza. (Scarfs down two slices and sighs contentedly.)

Wandering back in the general direction of thread topic...

I use a home brew version of initiative for my 1E campaign. My first major AD&D group in the early 1990's (I was a player then and not a GM) kept scratching their collective heads over resolving the D6 system from the 1E DMG - the examples given were pretty confusing. (Add in weapon speeds and stir for added consternation.)

What our GM cooked up on the spot was to grid out our and the monsters actions on a 10 segment basis. It worked on the following reasoning:

1. Weapons speed is reflected by the size, mass and "weildability" of the weapon in question.

2. Weapon damage is also based on size and mass.

Based on that, and the fact that weapon blows could happen at any time in a real battle, we cooked this up:

1. Use the weapon damage dice to decide the initiative - I.E. a short sword does 1d6 versus small and medium sizes (a large number of the creatures encountered overall in a campaign) - so roll 1d6 for the wielder's intuitive amount (in segments). For a long sword, roll 1d8 and so on. The number generated is when the weapon blow has a chance of landing in a combat round. Multiple attacks for higher level PC's require multiple initiative rolls.

2. For spells use the standard casting time, but roll 1d4 to add some randomness and add it in. (Spells requiring a full round or more to cast ignore this rule for the sake of sanity - they are treated the same as magical devices with set discharge times.)

3. For non-combat actions roll a normal 1d10.

4. Items that have a set action time (like a wand of MM which requires 3 segments to discharge) go according to the activation time given in their descriptions.

5. Dexterity modifiers, good or bad, apply to weapon attacks, the d4 rolled on spell casting times and non-combat actions (at the GM's option and depending on the action of course). Devices with a set discharge time are not affected by dexterity. (IE, they go off when they go off.)

6. For monsters a similar principle applies - a claw/claw/bite attack of 1d4x2/1d10 tells you what dice to roll for initiative on each attack. Any damage dice larger then 1d10 defaults to a d10 to fit within the 10 segment system. (Note that this does NOT affect the actual damage - just the time when it has a chance of happening.) Dexterity applies here too, speeding up or slowing down the attacks by the number of segments equal to the RAA adjustment.

7. Spell-like abilities can be handled by the normal d10 (dex applying or not, to fit the nature of the creature/ability in question) or at the time given in the monster's description (similar to the above-mentioned magical items).

10. As for things like weapon specialization, simply subtract any applicable bonuses to initiative from the initiative roll. By this system, a long sword can go in the first segment, if the wielder rolls decently, with or without a good dex and specialization. (The latter two just insure it happens more often for specialized/dexterous wielders.) On average though, a fast weapon like dagger will hit earlier in a round more frequently then a larger weapon and vice versa for big brutes like pole arms and 2H swords.

Sounds complex, but its actually fairly simple in play. I still use this system today and my players like the fairness of it. (They also enjoy thinking too, so that adds to the fun - I always seem to hook up with fairly cerebral players for some reason.) They know their PC's weapons and spells and they roll their initiatives on the table for me to see. They only have to worry about their PC's, I handle the rest.

As for the monsters - well, the players find that out in combat.



We played through the ToEE, perfecting the system as we went in the 1990's. Since then, I've run it with different homebrew groups through the Saltmarsh series, the slaver modules, and the giants series, as just a few examples. I never know exactly how a rolled melee initiative will work out and neither do my players, but we have a lot of fun. Everyone does know when their PC's act, down to the segment, so we get far less player objection regarding timing then we used to way back when. Big battles take a bit more time to set up, but not impossibly so.