New GM to PbP: how do you handle Initiative?

[OberonViking]

I'm curious to hear ideas for how to handle initiative.
Thanking you in advance.

[DM Alexander Kilcoyne]

Roll everyones in a 'DM Only' spoiler, ask your players ahead of time if they are ok with you rolling their initiative for them. It will save weeks of playing time in the long run and everyone still gets their bonuses.

I'd recommend playing through a round in initiative 'blocks' when possible- for example-

Big Stupid Fighter- 20
Stereotypical Arrogant Elf Wizard- 16
Murderous Halfling Rogue- 15
Horde of Orcs- 14
Band-Aid the Cleric- 10

In the above combat, ask BSF, SAEW and MHR to declare their actions, resolve them and the Orc's, then the cleric's turn to post.

You can ask everyone to declare actions then resolve everything in one big post BUT this nearly always gets messy.

At the start of each combat round, I do what I call a 'Round Starter'. Heres one from my Serpents Skull PbP (OOC is my annotations for the purpose of this post)-

Confrontation with the Red Mountain Devil

Round 1-

Ordered Initiative-

Red Mountain Devil- 15
Chi- 15
Mawj- 14
Tun'ada- 13
Ambroze (Dying)- 11
Marcus- 6
Gwenyth- 6

Obvious conditions like dying are tracked in initiative above.

Map, Map Features & Notes-

I put a map link here, usually to an exported Maptools image uploaded via imageshack.

Bolts of lightning are currently emanating from the pillar and shooting up into the sky.

Yup it is large sized and has reach.

Image of your foe-
Not always necessary but when introducing a big bad its nice to have a good image.

Active Effects-
Ambroze deafened until round six.
Tun'ada deafened until round seven.
Chi deafened until round nine.

You WILL find yourself forgetting effects on NPC's and PC's in complex combats and so will your players. Keep it all under 'active effects'.

[Zyren Zemerys]

My combat handling looks pretty similar.

[Benicio Del Espada]

It may seem strange, but I roll initiative with real dice, then post the order I got. I do that with monster attacks, too. It makes it feel more like I'm playing a "real" game, and the players don't seem to mind.

It's faster than waiting for everyone, since I know all the modifiers. If someone is close to dying, I'll use the dice roller so there's no question of me fudging, but I don't do that, anyway. It just seems faster and more "real" to play with my dice! I don't have any tabletop game going at the moment, so I like rolling it old school. Otherwise, my dice would be sitting unused, and they'd go stale, for sure. Can't have that! lol

I think as long as everyone's cool with it, you can do it any way you want, but I play in another game where we each roll, and it does take longer to get to the action.

[LazarX]

OberonViking wrote:

I'm curious to hear ideas for how to handle initiative.

Thanking you in advance.

Get yourself one of those boards with magnetic stickers. That'll help you keep things in order. If you want to streamline the process just ask the players their intended actions and then resolve them all at once after they've all responded.