Musings on Weapon-as-Initiative
I've been trying to keep my posts pretty structured, tho this one may ramble a little.
After an exchange with Miranda of In Places Deep over on Bluesky, I started thinking about weapon-as-initiative, and it quickly reached the point where I realized I wasn't going to get anything else done until I wrote a little blog post about it.
Weapon as Initiative
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| From Fantastic Medieval Campaigns by Marcia B. |
The basic system: In Chainmail, weapons are given a number from 1-12, abstractly representing length. For dungeon crawling, you can use that number as an initiative score, counting down from 12 on the first round (representing the reach advantage of long weapons) and then counting up each subsequent round (representing combat getting all close and claustrophobic). I believe Tonisborg uses a system like this, tho I haven't actually read it.
The cool side effect of this is it means daggers and other small weapons basically get a double-move when the initiative flips, before the order settles back out. This sort of makes me want to try variable weapon damage, a system I don't usually use (I love my d6s).
Some Thoughts
A lot of my DMing in the last couple years has been 1-to-1, so I've mostly been using a simple side-based initiative to reduce rolling. As I'm recently getting ready to play with a full group again, I thought this would be a good time to try out a new initiative system anyway. Then it clicked for me that going by weapon type would actually be even less rolling, which I'm maybe a little silly for not noticing.
This system really appeals to me as a DM, since I could just keep a little list of players numbered by weapon type, and then slot monsters in when combat starts, and either rolling to break ties or trying some kind of simultaneous resolution.
If your gonna use the table anyway...
This is the part where I shill for Big Matrix. I've never run a game using this table but now I really want to. I like that FMC provides a target number version of the table, rather then just listing attack bonuses vs every armour tier, since that math seems quicker, at least for me. Probably in practice I'd probably keep the chart behind the screen. Not everyone at my table has experience with od&d, and I don't want to scare anyone away with a player-facing matrix.
I also like that the weapon vs. AC table could kind of take the place of varying weapon damage, making weapons like longswords scary because they hit more, but with an interesting give-and-take with their speed.
Monster-as-Weapon
Obviously monsters that can wield weapons do initiative and attacks as the weapon they're using, but what about monsters that don't? Initially, I was just thinking of giving them an initiative score, but I actually really like the idea of assigning a weapon to "fight as." It would look like this:
Red Dragon. HD 10, AC as Plate, Combat as Longsword.
The idea here being that a dragon's claws are able to shred through armour as effectively as a longsword, and that it's reach would be loosely equivalent for initiative.
I could definitely see this being transferable to other monsters. Oozes could fight as Flail, representing pseudopods which could punch around shields at weird angles. A ghoul's claws could fight as daggers.
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That brings me to the end of my rambling I think! Thank you for reading :)
I’m about to start an open table using these rules as well and I’m curious about your experience so far. Also, have you been using the rule setting that using a weapon 4 or 8 categories lower grants extra attacks against a slower opponent?
ReplyDeletehey, thanks for reading and commenting!
Deletei haven't been getting to run as many games as I'd like to lately, but i was using a version of this system in my Hagfish Hall game. all of my players enjoyed it!
we used a pretty stripped down version, so no extra attacks and stuff, but i would be open to something crunchier in the future! if you end up using them, i would be curious to hear how they work out!
we stopped using the weapon vs. armour matrix pretty quickly, sadly. it proved pretty broken, even with the re-balancing in FMC. at some point i would like to do my own build of those tables, specifically balanced with this initiative system in mind.
in my experience players tended towards using pikes or daggers, with weapons in the middle feeling a bit neglected. that isn't necessarily bad, but definitely led me to throw more pike-wielding monsters at them, so that the players weren't always getting the first strike.
Sure! I’ll be happy to share our experience.
DeleteI’ve been looking into Seven Seas of Zylarthen, which happens to be a retroclone that use also use the weapon vs armor matrix. The numbers are different from the conversion in FMC (I.e. they seem harder to hit).
Also, higher weapon class is used to establish initiative in first round (no roll) and in subsequent round you roll and lower weapons class resolve ties in initiative.
To be frank, in our group we’ve been avoiding rolling initiative anyway, deciding who acts first based on the fiction, so the weapon classe would add a structure for such adjudication, I believe.
oh interesting, i should maybe check out the tables in that system!
Deletei forgot to mention it above, but the lack of initiative rolls has been a big part of my enjoyment of this type of system as well!