Sequel Mechanics: Initiative (2025)

I know I had said previously that I would be interested in trying to make initiative checks back into a form of skill check, but I've since realized that's a bad idea.

The whole point with a d20 initiative roll is to actually provide some dispersion of the numbers, so there's less worrying about tie-breaking, or everyone's numbers being bunched up together. If you're doing a d6 pool and taking the highest 2, you're actually getting the opposite effect; similarly, this is why TNP still uses a d20 initiative roll, rather than a d10+d6 skill check.

Since the default mechanic for most rolls in the sequel will be some variation on 2d6, my first intuition is to have it so that initiative checks start with 2d6, and then add 1d6 "per plus" of Agility, to the pool. So a character with a +3 Agility would roll 5 dice, and the total of all of those 5 dice would be their initiative count. I feel like this would be a good compromise, providing the desired variance while also giving a tangible benefit to having a higher attribute.

The interesting thing with that idea, is you could then use the attribute as a tie-breaker if needed. For example, if someone with a +1 Agility rolls 18 on 3d6, and someone with a +3 Agility rolls 18 on 5d6, then the person with the +3 would win on the tie-breaker. It also makes my brain tingle a little bit, because instead of everyone randomly rolling a number between 1-20 and slapping a modifier on it, your attribute effectively determines the ceiling for how well you could possibly roll; a +0 would cap out at 12, while a +3 would cap out at 30.

Initiative sort of naturally avoids the pitfalls of needing a "release valve" for excessive dice, since the number can basically go infinitely higher. This makes it easy to have any initiative bonuses just add dice to the pool, rather than use something like advantage on a d20 roll, for example. Likewise, with 2d6 as the minimum roll, it's easy enough to have a -1 dice pool penalty as a baseline mechanic.

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Another relatively short post for today, since it's a pretty quick topic.
In the background, I'm still working out ways to get the other mechanics ironed out w/r/t weapon dice and spells and attributes and such.

Next post will hopefully be on or before June 17th, with one more post before the July break.