I want to poll some opinions on rolling a single initiative for a group of enemies when the enemies are a coordinated unit.
The rule supporting this is in
The GM rolls initiative for anyone other than the player characters in the encounter. If these include a number of identical creatures, the GM could roll once for the group as a whole and have them take their turns within the group in any order. However, this can make battles less predictable and more dangerous, so the GM might want to roll initiative for some or all creatures individually unless it’s too much of a burden.
Mechanically, this is as if the enemies rolled and all delayed until they were ready to act together; however, they only roll once instead of rolling X number of times taking the lowest, so this is technically a tad better for the enemies.
I am particularly interested in Pathfinder Society play ramifications.
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You already got a great answer from Claxon in your other thread on it.
TL;DR; Avoid group initiative as much as possible. While it may make GMing slightly easier, it makes the player experience much worse.
And in the context of society games, unless such a tactic is written in to the scenario with description as to how its to be run, you shouldn't be changing the tactics of the monsters. Run as Written.
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TL;DR; Avoid group initiative as much as possible. While it may make GMing slightly easier, it makes the player experience much worse.
This.
Group initiative tends to create encounters where either the NPCs never get a chance to act due to a single bad roll, or a single PC gets horribly pummeled because they happen to be in a bad position when the NPC's good initiative roll comes up (either because that PC rolled better and moved up, but the NPCs beat everyone else, or just because all the PCs lost initiative). We saw both extremes in the first volume of Age of Ashes and our GM realized he always had to roll individual initiative to keep the battles from becoming too spiky.
I did not realize some people were so against group initiative. I use it all the time to make time management easier. Rolling initiative for 10 or 20 creatures individually and tracking it is a pain the ass, especially if have casting or some other ability that must be tracked. It slows down gameplay and turns encounters into slogs.
Then again I run very big battles with lots of creatures. I'm not sure how large the battles are for most players and GMs. Even yesterday I had 12 enemies in battle. I rolled six initiatives for the 12 creatures. Seven of the creatures were the same minion level enemy, so I rolled one initiative for the group. 12 separate initiatives would have been a pain.
It has its problems with the swing factor in combat. I find it a lot easier sometimes to roll once for a group of creatures. But not always.
As a GM I sometimes outright force initiative, if the players fail to detect an ambush. Yes that is harsh.
I do agree it is an enjoyment problem if a player goes down before their first action. For me that very rarely happens as the game itself is balanced. But if you get 3 critical hits on a PC in a round it is going to happen.
The biggest factor here is that Pathfinder 2 has removed the surprise round. So there is no chance of your enemy getting two rounds before you act. That was the far bigger problem.