Variant: Chunked InitiativeRule

24.11.2021

This is a variant to standard 5eS Fluid Initiative: it is still more fluid than 5e turn order, and more abstract and rule-based than Fluid Initiative. You can find a pdf of these rules in the digital library.

The underlying mechanic is fairly simple: initiative is rolled as normal.

If allies are moving back-to-back in the initiative order, that chunk of players takes their movements, actions, and bonus actions in any order they'd like at the same time.

Among other things, this drastically speeds up combat, cutting it by half or more!

Why Chunked Initiative?

There are a few really powerful benefits to this method.

First and foremost, it makes combat go really fast. While a player is busy thinking of the right spell to use, the other players might be taking their simple Actions like attacking in the meantime. There's no time to tune out just because it's not your turn; being in a chunk pressures action rather than waiting to think about it on your own turn.

Second, players have strong incentive to work together. Because it's so much easier to cooperate, players naturally start suggesting each ideas, moving together, strategizing healing, and more. No need for a reliance on Readied actions to do the same thing.

Third, much less getting screwed by the initiative order. A lot of really cool cooperative moments are messed up by the order of the initiative, which creates some really weird interactions sometimes. Ever been healed to full, but immediately knocked down again, just by virtue of the initiative order? It can still happen under Chunked Initiative, but it's much less common and much less unintuitive.

Rules

To run Chunked Initiative, you need the following few changes:

• Before anything else, all Death Saves happen at the beginning of a chunk. This prevents players from just delaying their action to delay their death saving throw.
• Effects that happen at "the start of your turn" occur at the start of the character's chunk. Effects that apply at the end of a character's turn apply as soon as they have finished acting. Effects such as casting a spell that require a full turn means a character does nothing during their chunk.
• Legendary Actions are taken after any character's action, similar to a Reaction, since player's turns don't have concrete endings. This gives legendary actions a little more flexibility.

Some Nuances

Chunked Initiative runs best when there are only around 2 monster types. When more monster types are added, more of the benefits disappear (until the monster type is wiped out anyway), because it becomes close to turn order again.

If there's only one type of Monster, you don't really need to track initiative much; all players who roll initiative above the monster go first, then the monster moves, and now all the players have their turn in one huge Player Chunk.

Monsters can also benefit from Chunked Initiative, though it's less likely because there tend to be fewer kinds of them.