I Removed Initiative from D&D Combat, and It Made Combat Faster

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Recently I ran a combat where the classical idea of initiative and taking turns was eliminated altogether. Nobody waited 5 minutes—or 15!—to do something. The players did not hold a committee meeting after every attack to determine the most optimal thing for the next player to do.

The result was that each round of combat felt like it was happening simultaneously, thus simulating reality. But that wasn’t the important part. Verisimilitude wasn’t what I cared about.

What happened is that we got through an entire round of combat—all characters and the enemies doing something—in about 5 minutes instead of 15 or whatever the current standard is in D&D and similar games that have initiative-based combat systems.

However, I don’t believe that speed is everything. Fast combat does not de facto mean good combat. But this combat WAS fun, and it WAS satisfying.

As you probably well know, a classical problem in TTRPGs is combat taking too long, where “too long” is defined as however long it takes to make a combat feel like a slog instead of an exhilarating experience. So, this is very much a case of “your mileage may vary.”

I, for instance, have run many a combat that took HOURS—usually D&D at higher levels—and we all had an amazing time. I’ve also run combats that took hours and SUCKED. Just because I have a YouTube channel and decades of GM experience doesn’t make me immune to running crappy games from time to time. It happens, it’s like.

But the point is, many times long combats CAN feel like slogs, and if we were able to make them go a bit faster, they’d be more enjoyable.

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No Initiative, No Turns

Now, the game I was referencing in my opening used the Mothership game system. If you’re not familiar, it’s a rules light sci-fi horror game system that I highly recommend. I picked it up at the Philadelphia Area Gaming Expo—known as PAGE for short—back in January, and I just started running it for my in-person gaming group.

By the way, I’ll be PAGE again in January 2027, if you’d like to play in some games with me and hang out.

Anyway, in the Mothership system, there is no initiative, and there are no turns. All the players declare what they’re going to do during the round, and the game master decides what the monsters will do. And then the GM resolves all the actions, using the assumption that everything happens SIMULTANEOUSLY.

In the first (and only) combat in our game session, the Carc—that’s the monster they were fighting—literally ripped the head off a player’s character in the first round. However, that character was still able to squeeze off a few rounds with her SMG before she died. If this had been D&D, she would have just been dead and would not have acted.

But then another character had declared he was going to grab the first character and drag her back to the APC where two other characters were gearing up to drive away. Of course, she died during the round, so he ended up just dragging her headless corpse to the APC.

Did you see that—the player didn’t get to change what he did during the turn. It didn’t matter that the Carc had killed the character first according to how we narrated the actions, because even though the FICTION and the STORYTELLING has a sequence, everything was actually happening SIMULTANEOUSLY.

The beauty of this initiative-less system is that the players first discuss what they should do and then they declare their individual actions—and that generally only takes a couple minutes during which time the GM is deciding what the monsters do—and then everything is resolved, taking another couple minutes.

Of course, if the players were to take too long discussing what they should do, I would just have the monster take an action and rule that the characters spent their first round discussing what to do instead of acting. Perfectly reasonable and fair when you have a flesh-rending monstrosity coming at you.

By the way, if you want to watch my in-person group play Mothership and other TTRPG, you can watch it on the DM Lair Plays YouTube channel.

However, the result of REMOVING INIATIVE ENTIRELY was that a lot of the committee discussions between each player’s turn was also removed from the game. That sped things up so much.

But something else got better, too. You’re probably familiar with this scenario: you’re working through everyone’s turn in combat, and then you get to a player and they say something like, “Crap, what she did just completely changed what I was going to do. Give me a second.” And then they shuffle through their character sheet or book trying to figure out which spell to cast instead of fireball.

That situation KILLS pacing in combat, but when you don’t have initiative, it doesn’t happen. The fireball just goes off, and if Sally moved into the area of effect, well sucks to suck I guess.

Now, I fully respect if this method of play may not be your cup of tea, and that’s okay. To each his own, but here’s another way you could do it that preserves initiative and individual turns, but still speeds things up considerably.

Cornered Rats Initiative

I’m currently developing my own game system called No Quarter, and we’ve developed an initiative system which I call Cornered Rats. Once I explain how it works, the name might make sense.

In No Quarter, you don’t roll initiative and carry out turns in a set sequence. Instead, the first person to declare that they attack, attacks. They kick off the combat. This could be a player or a monster; it doesn’t matter. Then after they attack, someone from the other side gets to take a turn. Then it switches back to the other side, and so on and so forth. Each side just alternates taking turns.

But I have one big rule for players: if you don’t know what you’re doing yet, you can’t take a turn. Someone else goes. I was playtesting this at GenCon and a player was going to take his turn, but when an ability turned out to behave differently than he expected, he was no longer sure what he was going to do. So, WE DID NOT WAIT FOR HIM; instead, I asked if another player was ready, and then he got to go later.

The effect of this rule is that indecisive players can’t hold up the game for everyone else. Either know what you’re going to do—or know what your spells are and what they do—or you don’t get to take your turn until you do know.

This is like another topic and a mini rant, but I am so tired of waiting for spellcasters to figure their crap out. You made the decision to pick a more complicated class to play. No one forced it on you. So, cowboy up and learn how your spells work.

However, the defining characteristic of my Cornered Rats initiative system is that you ALWAYS alternate the two sides taking turns. What I mean is that if there are 4 characters and only 1 enemy left, that enemy still takes a turn after every single character. Basically, as the tide of combat shifts against that one remaining enemy, his adrenaline surges and he fights more frantically to survive, much like a cornered rat.

I think this is really cool, and it makes it so that one or two remaining enemies are still a threat to the characters. It removes the boring mop-up phase of your typical D&D combat where you know you’ll win but you still need to go through the motions. Yes, it does change action economy, but the system is obviously being designed to account for that.

By the way, if you want to playtest No Quarter, I run games every couple weeks on my gaming Discord server. It’s free, too. You just show up and play. I’ll also be at the Philadelphia Gaming Expo this January and Gary Con in March.

Okay, so what do you do if you play D&D 5e or another game system that has an initiative system with strict turn orders?  Well, I think you could EASILY run combats the way Mothership does—everyone declares actions, then you resolve, and no one can change what they declared they were doing—with minimal to no impact to other game mechanics.

Alternating sides like I do in No Quarter might be a little more challenging because of the shift in action economy, but I bet with a little experimenting you could figure things out.

I think one thing I’ve learned after decades of playing TTRPGs is that balance is overrated. A perfectly balanced game is often a boring game. So, I would worry much less about that and more about having fun and trying new things out. You never know when the grass on the other side actually is greener.