In July 2017, WotC posted an Unearthed Arcana article called “Greyhawk Initiative.” Greyhawk Initiative takes cues from previous editions of Dungeons & Dragons to rework 5e’s initiative system.

The original system in 5e is pretty simple: everyone rolls a d20 and adds their Dexterity modifier at the start of combat. Higher is better, and it stays the same all the way through the combat encounter.

Setting up in the Greyhawk Initiative has a few more steps to it. Players decide what they want to do at the start of each round and roll according to their course of action. Different actions correspond to different dice—some are faster than others. Here, a lower score acts first. And, it resets at the beginning of each round.

The SBotLL campaign used it for several months, using the weapon speed variant (daggers are faster than longswords, etc) and the spell disruption variant (if a spellcaster gets hit, their spell is interrupted, they have to cast a cantrip instead). We also used it in a few one-shots here and there.

The intent behind Greyhawk Initiative is to make your decisions in combat more tactical. It introduces a higher cost to more complex actions. Simply making an attack will usually go before moving and casting a spell. Also, the situation might change before your turn—meaning your enemy might move out of range for an attack if you didn’t roll to move. With more uncertainty comes more tension, at the cost of adding more complexity to the game.

After trying it out and hearing what people thought, our DM decided to return to the original system. I’m glad we tried it out, but I prefer the original initiative system.

Of course, I mostly play spellcasters. And, when we tried it out in SBotLL, my character was fighting alone, separated from the rest of the party. I needed to prioritize damage, so I ended up going for spells over a rapier attack most of the time. If I got hit, I couldn’t heal myself.

I felt like my decisions in combat were important, but in the end, I mostly chose the same actions. Choosing to try a spell made me more vulnerable, but I didn’t have much recourse as a single fighter. If I can’t heal, that’s one less round I can survive. (Though, in normal initiative, the same problem occurs if I can’t heal enough and am fighting alone.)

The spell disruption variant definitely makes magic much more precarious. There’s incentive for parties to try to protect the spellcaster to make sure the spell goes off without interruption. I think for certain groups, this modification to the initiative system adds more drama and tension to combat.

But, for me, it adds more complexity than I prefer. It’s one more document to pull out and consult when questions come up. Making the transition from the original to the Greyhawk system takes a little work, and the flow of combat shifts. It seemed to slow things down for our group.

The original initiative system is simple and gets out of the way easily. Combat already has a lot of moving parts for DMs and players to track, so I lean towards anything that speeds things along.

D&D is great because the rules are flexible enough to tinker with to suit your group. You can always give stuff like Greyhawk Initiative a shot, because it might work great for you! But, if it doesn’t, it’s pretty painless to switch back.

Have you used Greyhawk Initiative before? What about other rules variants?