@nitsua60 Speed Factor Initiative: good.

Is this an old edition?

No, 5e.

I guess I need to look that up ...

IIRC, it's an optional rule in the 5e DMG?

@Shalvenay Yeah, I am looking at it.

Yeah. Simple enough to jot on a sheet of paper that they all took photos of, impactful enough to make a minigame of "what'm'I going to do next?"

It goes back to Greyhawk and AD&D 1e stuff that we tried and discarded back in the 80's at our tables. Same thing, different presentation. More fiddly. If everyone at the table has some game mastery it can work, but it slows down play a little.

@KorvinStarmast In this case with 7 L20 PCs going in turn, having something to fiddle with during off-time was useful.

You have to declare your action befor rolling init, and then roll a fresh init each round, with modifiers.

@nitsua60 fair enough

I didn't have them audibly declare, though--they were on their honor.

Glad it worked out for your group, sounds like fun

But it was fun watching the meta-worry when everyone noticed the wizard last in initiative. "Did he roll a 2, or is he casting meteor swarm?"

@KorvinStarmast I personally don't like SFI because it sort of...de-integrates the turn some

I do think the next time I run a big PC-battle I need to play with action economy a bit. Maybe give everyone two turns in the round, but only one additional action. (So there's the usual action, the "extra" action, one bonus action (used on either of but not both of the turns) and one reaction per round.) Help interleave/intercut the activity a bit more.

I feel like that advantages full casters, maybe? Because doubling the number of spells one can cast feels more impactful than doubling the number of Attack actions one can take? I dunno.

@nitsua60 Yikes.

@KorvinStarmast Well, no sides per se, so that's alright. (Since it's all for themselves, and initiative re-rolls every turn, anyway.) But focusing fire's a good point.

Not to mention the synergy of combinations ...

Guess what you guys... we just got our first question that necessitated the creation of a tag for Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage

waterdeep-dungeon-of-the-mad-mage

"On Irresistible Mind Control Spells (Really? Really?)" rant by Ryan Macklin. I'm amused that people never seem to think of mind control that retains player agency. It happened quite naturally several times in our Fate games.

@V2Blast See, I respect the hell out of that. It's so much better than their usual "wait until people are asking what's going on and then announce they missed it".

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword with email in answer, email in answer, pattern-matching email in answer, potentially bad keyword in answer (261): What qualifies a creature as being "widowed" for the purposes of Ceremony? by Felicia on rpg.SE (@doppelgreener)

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Bad keyword in body, blacklisted website in body, potentially bad ns for domain in body, potentially bad keyword in body (198): Therefore, the load of its weight will enlarge to at the present time by aejeshool on rpg.SE (@doppelgreener)

@BESW In particular given that it's such an obvious thing to do in Fate, which Ryan seems to blog about a lot: I mean, just conspiring against your characters should do it. Mechanically, take “aspects are always true” and the basic template ‘You have mind controlled aspect in ____ situation, so it makes sense that you’d decide to ____. This goes wrong when ____ happens.’, and it should be obvious that it can be done. Building up from there is just toolkitting.

> saying they're going to have much more fun under mind control.

Doing that is where you have an acquired skill, which someone just starting out might not have. That's why I tried to phrase it from first principles.

Yes, your mechanics are just right.

But I think the mutual trust is necessary or the mechanics won't ever get engaged.

Fair! That's the baggage I wanted to pull into my statement by referring to the adage of ‘conspiring against your characters’.

Totally.

Sup everyone

@KorvinStarmast well we're talking about 3e grognards here. I guess that as long as the goalpost keeps shifting to the new edition it also creates grognards of edtions that didn't have one till yesterday.

Grognard was a French term for "grumbler," used to describe veteran soldiers who complained a lot. It came to D&D via wargaming. The only reason the D&Dism was ever associated with a specific generation or era was that there weren't a lot of generations/eras to choose from when the term first came into common use.

@Zachiel @BESW I am aware of all that, I was making a joke in that comment. :)

@Zachiel hopping between chat and the Hearthstone game I am playing at the moment.

@BESW This looks like it's coming out of bizarro land to me.

(Not the point about player agency, but the linked blogpost)