Bid on my initiative!

[Christoffer Lernö]

Ok, I think this has been done before, one way or the other. I'm kind of intrigued if it would work or not. And does people know what kind of games already use this mechanic?

I cut and paste from my Ygg combat thread:

Everyone gets like 4 markers or something they keep. Whenever they want to do something they spend a marker (or several). When everyone are out of markers everyone gets new markers and get to act again. The rule is that the one with the most markers get to go first. And if they have the same amount they can go at the same time (simultaneous result).

If you have a lot of markers but want to wait you still can do so, no problem, you don't have to act until you decide to. More markers just lets you call an action before everyone else with less markers.

This is not unlike Palladium's "attacks" system, with the difference that in Palladium everyone had different number of attacks (and each attack meant an action) and no markers or beads were used to keep track of things. For me personally I felt it was a pain to use Palladium's system because of those two factors.

Anyway, there were no solid rules for resolving the situation when someone had 5 attacks and another had like 2. Did the one with 5 attacks go 4 times before the 2-attack guy did? Or did they alternate the first two attacks and then the 5-attack guy got to do his remaining 3 actions last? Now, leaving everyone with the same amount of beads would pretty much create a sort of sub-divided rounds kind of thing which is not incredibly uncommon.

I was originally thinking it as a way to resolve the problem of having no firmly set combat rounds. No set combat rounds would work mostly, but sometimes a player get forgotten. The marker system would prevent that. Also the amount of markers are naturally few (give 20 markers to every player and experience what hell is like keeping track of things)

But enough of me saying the same thing. Does it work? Or more importantly - is it fun?