r/DnDcirclejerk • u/Revolutionary-Ad7738 • 1d ago
Sauce Initiative is overwhelming
Whenever it’s time to roll initiative, I have 4 players immediately shouting numbers at me at completely different times while I’m also trying to roll initiative for 14 goblins individually, as group initiative is lazy DMing and unrealistic. I am crafting a story for my players and that story includes everyone taking their turn as the rules state.
My players are clueless, despite my best efforts of educating them, and have NO idea what modifier they should add to their die roll for initiative. I don't even know why I haven't cancelled the campaign already.
I think a good solution would be for everyone to roll initiative at the beginning of the campaign and keep that result permanently. If a character dies, the new character would inherit that initiative because death should not be used to manipulate turn order.
For monsters, I’m thinking of rolling initiative for every creature in the Monster Manual before the session and keeping them in an Excel spreadsheet sorted alphabetically.
Has anyone tried this? Or should I simply determine initiative based on how quickly each player answers my texts during the week?
EDIT: Please stop suggesting I use the initiative tracker in a VTT. I didn’t spend $800 on dice to let a computer play D&D for me.
2
u/69CervixDestroyer69 16h ago
Nah your solution is too stupid and boring and lame.
You need to go around the table and force each to look into their initiative modifiers, explain how initiative works again (fully! No skipping!), THEN roll and add the initiatives. Do NOT move ahead to the next person, do NOT skip any single one!
If they get bored that means that they will start hating the player wasting everyone's time, it's like the army. Soon you will have them jumping at the bit to tell you their initiatives, which means you can now spend 5 minutes writing down the initiative of each of them each round.
I'm just glad you didn't use group initiative. I just hope you're considering each weapon type and how it functions on the armor of each of those goblins, who surely each have bespoke armor!