Thanks to Kalizweb I've been reading The Savant's Rantings, a blog with a lot of posts on Twilight: 2000. It's usually v2.2, which I own but I'm less familiar with than with v1.0, the T2K I played originally.
One of the posts I really liked was this one about initiative:
Take the Initiative - Twilight: 2000 Initiative Mechanics and Options
What's interesting about T2K, in its original and later incarnations, is that physical agility and movement speed aren't relevant in initiative. What is, is a mental readiness to act based on several in-game factors. In the original game, which forced you to skip turns based on your "Coolness Under Fire," you could act quickly but not often if you weren't elite or a veteran. In the later game, it's not exactly like that but your experience matters a lot.
It's an interesting concept to think of for a game - basing when you act on your experience and not your dexterity. The analysis in the blog post is worth the time to read if you are mucking about with initiative house rules in your own games.
D6 Star Wars uses Perception as the init stat. I will at times in GURPS allow characters to take a perk to base their init off something else.
ReplyDeleteI have never played T2K so some of that was lost on me. I agree with the guy on not liking static init. Random init is my only hard and fast house rule to GURPS I consider 'I will not DM without this' requirement. (99% of my house rules are designed so if the players ignore them the game still works. That's a key element to my approach, make all house rules to encompass canon rules, so if the player defaults to canon the game rolls on).
I just simply cannot accept DMing a fight in a RPG without the ritual words 'Roll init'
I'm totally fine with static initiative, myself. I do like Per-based initiative.
DeleteThanks for the link sir, it was an enjoyable article to write and good to see people are finding it of value. Any further feedback welcome either here or in the comments over at the post itself!
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