I’ve been running a Swords & Wizardry play-by-post game for the past year or so and have been using dexterity (DEX)-based initiative. In the S&W Core and Complete rules, this is the “Blue Book” combat method, so-called as it is based on the blue covered Holmes Basic D&D, which described using DEX to order combat actions (while the 1977 Holmes Basic book is not freely available, the BLUEHOLME Prentice rules are both free and a decent clone of the original).
When combat begins, I’ll roll DEX on the spot for the monsters, and proceed from there. So rolling DEX and ordering the combatants is done just once – then, during each combat round, actions proceed in DEX order. In the event of tied dexterities, I consider the attacks to be simultaneous. The only exception to the DEX order is that prepared spells are always cast first in the round (this is part of the S&W rules-as-written). Because the DEX rolls and ordering are done up-front, after the first round, combat tends to be fast. I’ve noticed, however, some problems.
- Luck tends to have a longer lasting impact on combat, when compared to side-based initiative that is rolled every round. If the referee rolls high for monster DEX, and you have even average DEX rolls in the party, you will get stuck going last each round.
- Conversely, if the players got lucky and have PCs with a lot of high DEX scores, most of the combats will be unbalanced in favor of the party. This isn’t normally bad by itself, but you want the players to survive combats by using good tactics, not solely through one lucky roll at character creation.
- OD&D, upon which S&W is based, describes abstract combat. DEX-based initiative is at odds with that unless you treat all the monsters of the same type as having the same DEX (this is a suggested rule in S&W). It feels a little too precise to have an explicit order for every combatant in each round.
- OD&D also minimized the impact of both high and low ability scores, but using DEX-based initiative inflates the importance of DEX.
A method I’ve settled on when I’m running games for my gaming group is to use side-based, d6 initiative, but allow players with a high DEX (13 or more) to act first, or to make players with a low DEX (8 or less) act last, but only in the event of tied d6 rolls. This gives some players a slight advantage (or disadvantage), but doesn’t amplify the affects of a high or low DEX score either way.
If you wanted to keep DEX-based initiative, but fix some of the issues I listed above, you could use the method described in the Holmes rules – forego simultaneous attacks for matching DEX scores, and roll a d6 for scores within 1-2 points of each other, each round. This results in a lot more rolling (the average 3d6 roll is 9-12, so a good portion of the total initiative rolls will end up being be d6 opposed rolls with this method, and not all strictly DEX-based).
But we'll get there! I figure your rolled initiative is casting segment 1, and if you get hit between that segment and the time the spell goes off, you lose the spell. But I'm a rules light sorta DM, so it's been hard to get jazzed by that. But now that they've hit mid-levels, we've been playing since April 2020, it'll definitely be more important.