# Static vs Sequentialized vs Emergent Initiative Implementations - Or What is Daggerheart Initiative Actually Doing? tags: #articles #game/rpg/daggerheart #game/rpg/dungeons-and-dragons #game/rpg/ironsworn #game/rpg/blades-in-the-dark ![[Daggerheart Site.png]] With the announcement of the open beta of **[[Daggerheart]]**, Critical Role's intended dagger to the heart of **[[Dungeons and Dragons|D&D]]**, there has been much squawking and confusion about one particular part of the mechanics involved: Initiative. More generally, "how is turn-taking handled?" One section in particular is throwing off people who have only played one game in their life and never looked outside of that or thought about other ways things could be done. This one: > [!quote] **Daggerheart**, page 119 > > Combat in **Daggerheart** has no initiatives, no rounds, and no distinct number of actions you can take on your turn—instead, any fights that happen play out narratively moment-to-moment, just like any other action characters might take. This provides the players opportunities to team up together in their tactics, respond appropriately to narrative changes in the scene, and not be locked into only doing violence once the first strike happens. > > Similarly, enemies don’t have a set order in which they act-- instead, the GM will make moves in accordance with the fiction. Oftentimes, these moves will happen when a player rolls with Fear or fails the action they were attempting, but a GM can make a move any time the narrative demands it. When they make a move, they will usually escalate the scene in an exciting and dangerous way. A character might take an attack from some enemies, become Vulnerable, or anything else that significantly changes the scene. This creates a back-and-forth conversation that lets the story evolve organically between the players and the GM. People who have actually been paying attention to the last decade or more of tabletop RPG design already recognize what's being described here (and much of what the rest of the system in terms of architecture of resolution has been effectively derived from) because it's the way that almost every [[Powered by the Apocalypse|PbtA]] and [[Blades in the Dark|FitD]] system manages the flow of combat. Characters act in whatever sequence they want, taking into account the mechanical limitations on what they can expect to achieve. This differs from the mechanisms used in a lot of more traditional or even just earlier games in that it doesn't provide a set sequence of events for every round but instead allows organic transitions. I thought it was about time to sit down and actually discuss the mechanisms involved because way too few people (on all sides of the discussion) seem to have a grasp of how things work and how that impacts the flow of play. ## Antiparabolḗ tōn Systēmátōn By way of example, we are going to look at the three major different approaches to structuring turn-taking when it comes to initiative. We'll start in the days of yore with the **[Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cyclopedia](https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/17171/DD-Rules-Cyclopedia-Basic)**[^back] and **D&D 4th Edition** representing static initiative, proceed forward a bit and look at **[[Sorcerer]]** for a bit on sequentialized initiative, touch on **[[Blades in the Dark]]** and **[[Ironsworn]]** to discuss emergent initiative, then finally get back around to **Daggerheart** to talk about what it actually does. Hopefully this will be of use to people and bring them up-to-date with some new tools. ### D&D Rules Cyclopedia / D&D 4th Edition The **Cyclopedia** represents one of the purest examples of what I often refer to as purely static initiative determination. That is to say, a determination is made at the beginning of combat/each combat round as to when the PCs move versus their opposition. During the process of resolving that round, nothing changes that order. ![[Cyclopedia Group Initiative.png]] Ironically, initiative in the **Cyclopedia** – by default – is at group-level. The GM rolls initiative for the NPCs on 1d6 as one of the players does the same representing the PCs. If they roll the same number, all actions occur simultaneously and are resolved at the end. ![[Cyclopedia Individual Initiative.png]] The interesting thing is that individual initiative, characters being able to move independently and that time slice being determined by the mechanics, is an optional rule. By default, it was assumed that the players could work out their action on their own without having to be instructed by the mechanics between one another. In the optional version, every player rolls 1d6 and the GM rolls 1d6 for every NPC, none of which are modified rolls. In the optional *optional* individual initiative with dexterity adjustment, we finally see something specific about a character (their Dexterity bonus) be able to be applied in order to modify the initiative order. It's important to remember for the sake of this discussion that the order of combat in **D&D** is extremely constrained, particularly as it comes to what you can achieve in terms of attempts within a given round. Characters, both NPC and PC, specifically have only a single action. Their scope of effect is extremely limited but simultaneously their scope of potential consequence is almost nothing for any character except for a wizard who casts a spell who has consumed a spell slot that they won't get back until they sleep. ![[Cyclopedia Order of Combat.png]] The constraints that lie on their action are externally imposed rather than rising naturally from the fiction. It doesn't matter if it would "make sense" from the perspective of verisimilitude for you to be able to jump up on the tavern table, kick a mug into the face of the nearest ork, leave his face bloodied, and begin to rouse your friends with an exciting song – you just can't do that. That narrow time slice tick of the metronome is the root of static initiative; it would be just as reasonable to call it "metronomic initiative." That brings us around to **4th Edition**, which many have derided as too much inspired by MMO gameplay but which I would describe as a return to form as the man-to-man-level rules for interaction in what is largely a tactical exercise.[^tact] Given the overall interesting tactical disposition of this edition of the mechanics, the discussion of initiative is surprisingly short. In the *Player's Handbook*, it's made clear that you only roll initiative once at the beginning of the combat and it will not be changing from round to round. Individual initiative is the order of the day (but hold on, we'll get back to that) rather than group initiative. ![[DnD 4th PH Initiative.png]] Players can affect the initiative order by making a particular combat action (delaying or readying an action), but the first only affects the current round and the latter is simply waiting for an event to occur and doesn't actually change your position in the initiative order. ![[DnD 4th DH Initiative 1.png]]![[DnD 4th DH Initiative-2.png]] We've returned to having a form of group initiative, by way of the DM advice being to *"roll once for each distinct kind of monster in the encounter,"* which allows the DM to get a bit of a break and not have to figure out individually who goes when – but it also comes with an interesting bit of fallout, in that within the group actions can be mutually supporting without having to work out which individual goes first and sets up things for the second – or the third – or the rest. **4th Edition** has even more metronomic initiative than the **Cyclopedia**. Where once initiative could flow back and forth every combat round, even on a by group basis, now the metronome ticks steadily for round after round for the duration of combat. Again, critically, it's important to recognize the specifically limited amount of effect an *"action on your turn"* is intended to accomplish. You can move, you can execute a single standard action, you can execute a minor action, and you can spend a resource in order to take another standard action. Things are starting to get interesting because this opens a way for the player to affect how much effect they have on the turn sequence. Combined with the increased emphasis on triggered actions which can occur outside of the expected turn order, there are clearly things that can upset the metronome but it continues to tick in a static way every turn until the end of combat. On top of this, **D&D** almost goes out of its way to avoid applying the same mechanical context when it comes to turn ordering and static initiative to anything outside of combat. Non-combat rules are much more fluid when it comes to the question of *"who does what when?"* One could argue that this is largely an issue of the level of stakes involved in most **D&D** play; combat could very much affect your character in a clear way so it was important to have the feeling of moment to moment control, whereas "unstructured role-play" was never really considered to have a serious impact on your character. That covers the ticking metronome, effectively the core of what **D&D** players (and much of the RPG industry by extension) think of as "initiative." Key elements of it are that it only applies to combat, individual actions which can result in effect are extremely limited, and it provides a specific cascade of particular expectations for every encounter in which it is engaged. ### Sorcerer Let's jump on up to 2001, a time when more narratively focused games were coming out of a site/community known as [the Forge](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/TheForge). Some people refer to this as *"story gamer bullshit,"* not without some degree of support. A lot of experimental designs which deliberately violated expectations flowed out of that bubbling cauldron. One of the earlier ones was **Sorcerer** by Ron Edwards. We won't get into the theoretical underpinnings of philosophy and motivation – mainly because they're covered well enough in **[The Annotated Sorcerer](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TabletopGame/Sorcerer2001)** which is what I'm going to be using as my reference right now – but we will talk about the naked mechanics and why I generally refer to the initiative system as sequentialized rather than metronomic. Luckily, this is extremely straightforward given the text. Let's look at what's effectively almost the totality of the combat system: > [!quote] **The Annotated Sorcerer**, p102 > > As in so many role-playing games, combat is organized into rounds, meaning segments of time in which everyone, more or less, gets to do one thing, more or less. The length of a round is completely situational. It is organized in the following way. > > 1. Everyone states intended actions in no particular order. Statements may be amended freely until everyone is satisfied. > > 2. The gm determines the relevant scores to use, and bonuses and penalties are assigned so that the number of dice to use is clear. > > 3. Everyone who’s doing something proactive (not just defending) rolls at once. The order of the highest values rolled, from highest to lowest, determines the order of the actions. > > 4. All actions are now resolved in order, meaning rolling defense or difficulty dice (it’s best to use other dice than those used in step #3, which should still be sitting on the table). Some characters will abort their upcoming actions in order to defend. Excepting that one specific thing, actions cannot be changed at this point in the round. > > 5. Record all damage, figure out where everyone’s been moved to, and otherwise resolve this combat round. Any unused actions are lost at this point. To repeat: unused actions cannot be “saved.” We have a situation where a game has a very traditional idea of what can be accomplished within a round and limits that very strongly, but within that round when actions actually go off is it determined until after the declaration of the actions and the mechanical resolution of determining whether they will be effective or not. This is a huge differentiator as it reduces the consistency of expectation from round to round of *when* your action will go off. You can never really know, except to know that characters with a higher Trait are more likely to succeed on a roll and have a higher value for their initiative order. Players discuss the actions that they intend to take before the round and the GM prepares their intents as well (without discussing them, of course). Then everyone rolls and actions began falling out. This applies even to failures because it can be important to know when your failure happens in sequence, not the least reason being that if there's something you want to defend against you can actually abort your failure, which may not be immediately obvious. But let's grab a bit of the text of the Annotations, because it's important here: > [!quote] **The Annotated Sorcerer**, p103 > Well, shoot, it’s not necessarily about “combat” at all, is it? It’s not even about complexity. It’s about orthogonality. So, for oppositional conflict, roll once, no matter how complex. The only complicating factor would be linear “feeder” rolls representing setup for bonus dice and accessory actions. But for orthogonal conflict, no matter how simple and using whatever scores apply, do the rounds, including the ordering, for all the actions going on. > > Consider that moment when everyone at the table realizes that we’re gearing up for a bunch of rolls. The tip-off is that spoken input becomes more proactive and the described actions or spoken words will affect other characters, and at least two people are talking rapidly. Here we have an understanding and communication of something that's implicit in the original text, that the sequentializing initiative is not just applicable to combat but more generally applicable to all interactions in which there are orthogonal interests being reified through the mechanical process of the game. I referred to this as *sequentializing initiative* because rather than set a static metronome for when things happen, it starts with a bag of things that happen and then sorts them into a sequence. Player intent is stated, resolutions are made manifest, and then the mechanics sort those resolutions into an order within which players have the power to abort an action for a defense against an action which has a higher successful roll against them and thus occurs sooner in the timeline. What does this mean for predictability? Again, that actions with a higher number of dice and thus more likely higher successes. But it's not guaranteed. This is another initiative system which minimizes the amount of effect that a player can have at a given time, and part of the way that it reduces that potential effect is to break things down into rounds because things don't happen just because a player attempts to accomplish something, it's expected that the GM must act themselves for the enemy/opposition to act. ### Blades in the Dark / Ironsworn Here we progress into the modern era, thank Hades, and talk about games which aren't quite old enough to drive yet. **[[Blades in the Dark]]**^[Which sparked the *Forged in the Dark* line of designs.] was released in 2017 while **[[Ironsworn]]** saw the light of day the following year. Both of them descend from a lineage which can reasonably be seen as born with **[[Powered by the Apocalypse|Apocalypse World]]**^[Giving rise to the *Powered by the Apocalypse* line.], though the design has drifted in the time since and become better refined. **BitD** is very much a GM'd game while **Ironsworn** is specifically designed to be able to be played solo, cooperatively (same side/GMless), and guided (traditional GM-centric). Considering how they both could come from the same inheritance is important to understanding how and why they approach initiative in a way which I refer to as *emergent*. One of the most important things to recognized about the **PbtA** inheritors is that they invert the traditional GM-leads understanding of how TTRPGs are played. Instead they focus on the players being active participants with characters who desire things, will work toward those things, and as such will engage with the mechanical architecture of the game to pursue those things, and as a result of that engagement open up the opportunity for the world to push back against their intent and be made manifest/reified in the fiction of the game through the mechanics. Or, more succinctly, *"only the players roll the dice, only the players choose to roll the dice, and the GM (if there is one) responds with the consequences of those successes, failures, or partial successes."* This is a much larger change in stance than it is often credited with because it means that many of the expected "game design elements" from traditional **D&D** are no longer even remotely applicable. For instance, there's no real need for secrecy; play is improved the more that the players understand what elements are in play in the world, even if their characters wouldn't have that knowledge. They can help guide consequences with actual meaning rather than depending on someone else at the table to do all of that. Absent need for secrecy, there is a much quieter call for a centralized GM to be the shield that maintains that secrecy; instead the GM role gets shifted over away from being "the storyteller" necessarily to being very much more "facilitator and inspiration".[^faci] The impact of this becomes much clearer when we start looking at **Blades in the Dark** and consider what it means for opposition to really only progress in response to PC action. [**BitD** has a SRD online for easy consultation](https://bladesinthedark.com/action-roll), so if you don't have a copy of the game itself go ahead and pull that up and consider the section on action rolls. The player starts with a goal, stated clearly and directly, then states at a mechanical level how they are going about making that happen. The GM decides on the position and effect. You throw in any bonus dice you might have (which is where we start talking about stress, which is going to become very important shortly), then you roll the dice and figure out whether the goal was pursued, complicated, or stymied. Partial successes and failures lead to consequences, both fictional and mechanical. That brings us around to [resistance rolls](https://bladesinthedark.com/resistance-armor), which is what you do when a consequence comes up that you want to say *"no, that doesn't happen"* to. It could be a fictional consequence or it could be a mechanical consequence; both of them can be resisted. Note: There is no question that whatever you want to resist will be resisted. If you can do it, you just do it. The price is what's on the table, derived from the highest die rolled as that attribute pool. Roll a six and there is no price. Roll a one and you're going to be paying five stress. Stress is the mechanical limiter. Typically the only limiters on an RPG character are health by some rating, mana/magic, and occasionally sanity. In **BitD**, stress really is the limiter which keeps you from taking all of the actions that you want because it acts as the mechanical system by which you can avoid health damage, mental damage, and fictional damage. Stress is relatively easy to burn off – but only during downtime, between scores. While you're out and about planning to achieve things, stress only accumulates (except in very particular circumstances). **Ironsworn** provides a different mechanism; momentum is the mechanical interface through which you can effectively resist negative mechanical outcomes; it is represented by a track which goes from -6 to +10. Many moves when successful will let you gain momentum, representing better fictional placement, enthusiasm, uplifted spirits, or just a general note of how you're doing in the pursuit of your quests. A weak hit or a miss on a move can lower your momentum. This is important because burning momentum is how you change the value of challenge dice from a miss to a hit. You burn momentum to cancel challenge dice which are higher than your action die but lower than your momentum, moving momentum to the reset value which is usually +2. Then you'll need to build it back up before you can use it again. Negative momentum actually cancels your action die altogether if it matches in value. **Ironsworn** also has health, stress, and supply as things which can be harmed, diminished, and threatened, and since the game is designed to be able to be played solo you have a fair number of resources that you can call on in order to "take the hit" when something goes awry and still remain part of the story. What both **Blades** and **Ironsworn** have in common is that taking an action has the potential to reduce an important resource which allows you to take further actions. This doesn't happen because someone else decides to do it to you, it only happens when you decide to act in the pursuit of your interest and have a mechanical consequence imposed on you because of that action. You can see where this differs from the assumptions of traditional RPG action budget design in a very elemental way. Choosing to take an action has a cost, and that cost may be variable, but it could cost something that you will want more of in the future. In **Blades**, you want to have stress available so that you can say no to things which keep you from achieving your goals and the more actions that you take before your goal is achieved, the more likely you are to have to burn stress in order to continue moving forward. In **Ironsworn**, every time you take an action you are essentially risking that you won't have momentum to deal with a weak hit or a miss that would otherwise cost you fictional positioning, health, stress, or damage to one of your assets. In both games, though the latter more than the former, the action economy is not purely the results of a single action. For example, in **Ironsworn**, Battle is a move. ![[Ironsworn Battle Move.png]] Battle abstracts an entire fight into a single roll and the outcome of that roll determines the narrative results that your characters find themselves in. This flies directly in the face of the traditional initiative architecture because it focuses on the literal intent of the players and not placing actions on a metronome or simply deciding the sequential order. Given that elemental shift in the position of intended effect and outcome, what use then is there for combat rounds? There isn't one. There are merely a series of actions which have consequences, one of which can be the depletion of a resource fairly frequently which will be needed for future success. Moreover, an experienced player recognizes that this is a resource that needs to be marshaled and given the opportunity will definitely want the risk represented by the loss of that resource to be spread across as many characters as possible, giving rise to natural turn-taking behaviors in all of the reified mechanical interactions. This is why I refer to what happens in this kind of game as *emergent initiative*, because the order of play emerges naturally from an interaction of the rules without being defined by the rules. It's a third-order effect as opposed to metronomic initiative which is always a first-order effect and sequentialized initiative which is always a second-order effect. ## Dagger in the Heart Which brings us all the way back around to **Daggerheart**, having made a survey of types of initiative, how they work, why they work, as well as some terminology to use when talking about them. It's a long way to go and we only had a short time to get there, but here we are.^[Watch ol' Bandit run.] The first thing to be aware of is that **Daggerheart** is clearly, incontrovertibly, 100%, *Powered by the Apocalypse*. I don't mean that purely as a source of inspiration; I literally mean that a game presented more honestly would have a **PbtA** or **FitD** tag blazoned on the front and it would be a significant part of discussion of what the game is, rather than the near continuous chant that it is intended to be *"a **D&D** killer"* to the point of being easy to convert your **D&D** characters into.  (Yes, the Touchstones list both **Apocalypse World** and **Blades in the Dark** as inspirations, buried in a lot of others which have very little mechanical relationship to the game as presented. The fact that they give so little credit to what is obviously a significant mechanical influence bothers me and already puts them on the back foot when it comes to how I feel about them.) But specifically back to flow of combat, having gone the long way around, and seeing how aggressively and frequently **Daggerheart** makes reference to *"player moves"* and *"GM moves"*, it becomes relatively obvious how and why combat is said to have no initiatives, no rounds, and no distinct number of actions you can take – because that is true. Like **Blades**, the primary action limiter is not a metronome and because actions aren't resolved in order to determine the degree of success in order to sort when they go off it's not sequentialized. Instead, the order of actions emerges naturally from the players and the GM looking at the resources available to them (ironically, stress for the players) and deciding to distribute it across the group in order to maximize the possibility of long-term positive outcomes. If it were just that and that alone, we'd have an action economy based on a limited resource and that would work all by itself. However, simultaneously, we have page 120 which I don't think anybody who has written about this seriously read before they started writing because it introduces the most obvious and on the nose mechanic which I can pretty much guarantee every single GM running **Daggerheart** is going to use: *the Action Tracker.* > [!quote] **Daggerheart**, p120 > > Whenever there is a combat scenario that is likely to last more than a roll or two (or when play moves to maps and miniatures, at the GM’s discretion), the GM should place the action tracker card on the table within everyone’s reach. Whenever PCs make an action roll, they must place a character token on the action tracker. While on the tracker, these are known as action tokens. It’s important to note that tokens are not limited—if a player ever runs out, they should just grab more. > > The PCs aren’t the only ones who use the action tracker, however! The GM spends action tokens to activate adversaries. See “GM Turns” below for details on using it as a GM. > > While the action tracker is on the table, it is important to remember that players may still act in any order they’d like and take action multiple times in a row as the narrative flow demands it. The game should continue as normal, the GM just has an additional tool at their disposal to help guide the combat encounter. However, players are encouraged to give others turns with the spotlight; if another player hasn't placed any tokens on the action tracker recently, consider letting them act—if they want to—before you do anything else This is a transparent resource management architecture for dealing with turn-taking in the absence of rounds. Ironically, it's actually a pretty *good* one which reminds me of the inverse of Chi in the TTRPG **[[Wushu]]**, which is explicitly used for pacing scenes but rather than building up as a result of player action it is a pool which is expended by player success. Here is an inherently emergent turn-taking management initiative system literally on the facing page from where the text which is sending traditional **D&D** players who are theoretically the target demographic and intended audience for this game into paroxysms.^[What this says about the traditional **D&D** player is left as an exercise for the reader.] Here's the problem, and it's not the problem that has been rambled about at great length. The problem is *not* that the game doesn't provide metronomic initiative for combat. We've already seen enough good examples of games which don't; it's not necessary for a good game. No, the problem is that **Daggerheart** doesn't commit to the bit. It's a sprawling mess that truly wants to be a *Powered by the Apocalypse* game to the point of lifting fairly broad chunks of the GM advice from **Apocalypse World**. All they need to do is stick in *"vomit forth apocrypha"* and they might as well put in sex moves. All of that being the case, **Daggerheart** can't seal the deal and go with *"here are your moves and here are the how they are related to gameplay, the GM never rolls the dice or initiates a move, only does so in reaction to player actions."*[^combat] They get so very close, however. > [!quote] **Daggerheart**, p172 > > Knowing when to make moves and what kind of moves to make are almost certainly the biggest part of learning to GM Daggerheart. How often you make moves and what the severity of that move is will depend a lot on the kind of story you’re telling, the kinds of actions your players take, and the tone of the session you’re running, but the general rule of thumb is: You can make a GM Move whenever you want. That’s right! You’re the GM– your job is not to crush the PC’s or always act adversarially; your job is to help tell a story, so you should be making moves anytime you see an opportunity to do that. > > That being said, always make a GM move when a PC: > > - Rolls with Fear. > - Rolls a Failure. > - Takes an action that has consequences. > - Gives you a golden opportunity. > - Looks to you for what happens next. I think this single excerpt explains the biggest problem with **Daggerheart** and why it's never going to be the D&D killer; the best it can hope to be is *"a TTRPG that some people play."* **Daggerheart** is schizophrenic. It can't decide if it wants to be a super traditionally architected GM-centric pseudo-tactical game or a modern PbtA-derived fiction-first story game, and because it can't pick where it wants to stand it does both of them poorly, writes the descriptions in ways which don't communicate well to either group, and consistently stands there pounding on its own scrotum with a hammer. It is in the worst of all possible places. But it does have emergent initiative mechanical reification! I hope this has been a useful tour through TTRPG initiative systems and has given you things to chew on when it comes to thinking about the games that you play, the games that you enjoy, and even the games that you don't get on with, and you have a few more tools for talking about those things and maybe even get inspired to play with things you wouldn't otherwise. [^back]: Yes, we're going *all* the way back. I'm no piker. [^tact]: We'll be coming back around to that in short order, I assure you. [^faci]: This is probably a big enough deal that it deserves an article all of its own, quite honestly. It not only means that you can largely do away with the underlying idea of a GM being responsible for bringing the story to the table every week, it means you can do away with the entire idea of premade scenarios or vast amounts of preparation. Or any amount of preparation. The actions of the players literally give rise to the responses of the setting and those responses can be delivered either through the person of a GM or via the inspirational mechanism of a randomly presented Oracle. It's a significant thing. [^combat]: There's actually a good argument that there is one more significant problem with the way play is described: initiative is limited specifically to a discussion of combat only. If they had truly committed to the bit and said *"all of these rules apply to social interaction, social conflict, and everything else – including the Action Tracker"* – it would have been immediately obvious how turn-taking was intended to be managed. They couldn't even do that.