Volleyball Initiative

     Volleyball Initiative is a tweak of the well-known Elective Initiative method, used to decide who-goes-when in combat and other scenes where the order of action matters. This works best in games where each character has a simple “action” or more to spend each round of combat. The name reflects the act of passing a volleyball, which may be either passed to one’s own team or the opposition.

This encourages a change of tactics from elective initiative, making fight sequences less predictable and pile-ons less-effective. It still dispenses with tedious tracking of initiative numbers, keeps players on their toes, and favors interesting choices over fickle dice. Volleyball Initiative may be a poor fit for games with complex initiative and action rules, but it is an excellent tweak for more robust engines, such as early versions of D&D and its many old-school kin.

An earlier version of this was  a one page cc-by 4.0 submission for the Tech Jam.