While Mearls might not like rolling additional dice with disadvantage mid-round, I think it’s a reasonable improvement. I spent a solid hour talking about this initiative system at a local RPG convention, yesterday — it’s definitely getting a lot of attention in my area’s circle of 5e DMs.

Insofar as it matters, Mearls has directly rejected the extra mid-round die. He argues that THAT is what slows down play. Given that action denial is an explicit feature of the system for him, he would presumably also oppose adding a new die because it eliminates that feature.

Quarterbacking is a flaw in this system only insofar as the system sets aside a phase of play explicitly for coordination, and thus creates space for a QB player to dominate the conversation.

Classes with a denser action economy are often doing more only in the sense that they require more moving parts to do the same amount as other classes do with fewer actions – unless you just want to argue that some classes are outright better than others, which would be a much bigger problem than this system. For example, two-weapon fighting is really, really not better than wielding a great weapon (it has an edge up until 5th level, and then falls behind and never recovers unless you are dripping with magic weapons), but is more expensive on the action economy. Should a two-weapon fighter be slower and less effective to act?

Reducing the influence of Dex is fine by me, yes.

The way I’d handle it is that the new die is rolled with disadvantage – that cannot be cancelled out by advantage. So if Rath the dorf fighter is left standing there with bugger all to do after his target ran away he can roll a d6 with disadvantage, add it to his initiative and act a little later. It sucks but way less than sitting around like a dummy doing nothing.

I read the system and liked it (though wouldn’t) but your breakdown has revealed a lot wrong with it.

Your point about having a quarterback bully other players into his plan isn’t really a flaw about the system – as someone who has both accidentally been that person and played with people like that I can say that they’ll be causing issues in other places as well.

I also don’t think it’s really fair that “Some classes always have a more expensive action economy than others.” is a negative of the system. Those classes still have the advantage of doing more. I personally see it more as giving a buff to the simpler classes like barbarian and fighter that don’t really do a whole lot.

I mean, I’ll never use this but that’s because I always end up playing with newbies anyway.

One thing I think the system does have in it’s favour as well is that as your dex mod doesn’t (really) affect your initiative it goes a step towards ending the tyranny of the dexterity stat.

Mearls’s commentary on the system makes it abundantly clear that getting PCs to waste (or risk wasting) their actions in combat is a feature, not a bug. Which is, as it happens, the thing I object to most strongly.

That could be really annoying for some groups, certainly one I play with where the players aren’t that on top of where they are in the turn.

An alternate cure for the “lose a turn” problem would be to provide for some kind of menu of switch out actions that are useful if not amazing. Thus there are consequences for your plan not coming through but you’re not totally busted for it. For instance, allowing a character to use a throwing weapon, move (but not take an attack), drink a potion, second wind (yes this is a fighter thing, but activating a hit die could be a more broadly accessible thing), or activate a cantrip. If nothing else, it would encourage people to carry some throwing daggers!

His players haven’t capitalized on it….

I very much agree with regards to lose a turn abilities against PCs. A little “lose a turn” for players goes a long way. A bit here and there to really threaten the PCs is fine, but man there’s nothing to piss a player off like having their PC stun-locked for the majority of a combat after they’ve flown 1000 miles for a once every six months game with the college pals. (OK that player was me but I’ve seen a similar reaction from others.)

Because the action economy really matters for some PCs and less so for others, this is a massive issue with the “Greyhawk Initiative.”

I’m still running a heavily house-ruled 2E after all these years, and this is the system we ended up settling on, when we aren’t fighting the “wait, which system are we playing now?” with it.

-Reroll every round.
-Low is better.
-Every round roll D10-Dex attack modifier, so someone with an 18 Dex rolls D10-2, etc. Some characters or creatures roll a D8 or D6, similarly modified by Dex. One character, a lawful neutral extraplanar, always gets a 5 and I occasionally mess with monster abilities to represent themes with their initiative die in other ways.
-Ties are broken by Dex modifier.
-Weapons do not have speed ordinarily (though the DM might impose one due to circumstance).
-Spells take 1 initiative tick to cast per level (more or less, some vary), meaning you often need to plan for your big guns. Spells can be disrupted by damage so you can attack a caster while they’re casting. Most casters want to have a device as a backup as a consequence and non-casters often do things like step in the way to take a hit for a caster.
-Half movement is part of your action. If you want to move twice that’s your action.
-Extra attacks due to high level fighter-ness occur at the end of the round but extra attacks due to two weapon fighting, haste, etc., occur on your normal turn.
-Readying and delaying work pretty similarly to 3.x. Readying lets you interrupt someone else’s action while delaying does not. If you delay across a round, you automatically roll a 1 on the next round’s initiative.

In fact, the system actually addresses something that’s bugged me about initiative from a verisimilitude perspective for a while: how does everyone react so fast? Not even talking reaction actions, just normal, bonus, and movement. Since every turn exists as a discrete packet of time, it doesn’t matter if you’ve engaged one enemy that’s suddenly no longer relevant; if your teammate blasts them away right before your turn, doesn’t matter, since time doesn’t start for you until your turn. There’s no suddenness to the situation, no need for you to regroup, adjust your thinking, etc., just pick up and move all the same. Sure, it’s possible, and there are literary examples of high-dexterity characters with legendary reflexes to react instantly to change (I keep thinking Gourry Gabriev, for some reason), but it’s part-and-parcel of any D&D character.

Granted, there’s no way to simulate those characters under this system either (since Dex plays next-to-no part), I’m hardly looking for perfect verisimilitude anyway, and it looks like it takes extra houseruling work just to get rid of the potential headaches. So eh, just idle musing. Like hell am I going to try to make it work.