Give and Take Initiative

Imma give a surprise round to the monster tho.

It's a simple idea: There are no rolls for initiative. First, the players are given a chance. Any one of them may come forward and try an action, such as attacking. When that player is done, the GM has a foe attempt an action. Then it goes back to the players.

I suggest if your elfgame allows multiple attacks or spells or whatever, you resolve them all at once as your action. I also suggest that any movement allowed you be done on your go.

There are rounds. Each entity in the fight gets only one action per round. If one side runs out of able bodies, the other side gets all of its agents that haven't gone yet squared away in whatever order they like.

Example
Three PCs confront a behemoth. The GM asks who's up. Ser Twitchy asks the other players if it's okay for him to go, and they nod. Twitchy has two attacks, and rolls them both now. The monster takes them like a champ. 

Now the GM will go. She only has the behemoth to worry about. It has three attacks, so she rolls all three now, one against each PC. Sheela the Forgotten falls dead. 

Now it goes back to the PCs. Bob the Resuscitative was going to go in for an attack, but decides to use his action to shove a life cookie into Sheela's wound. 

Usually, the round would be over at that, but the GM has a surprise up her sleeve: Dread Maggots are popping into play from a nearby corpse, and they are going to try to burrow into everyone's wounds. The round finally ends with everyone rolling maggot-saves. As you do. 

This system favors the players' side a bit, but they need a break sometimes. One merit of the this system is that it could be used in either DnDs or Dungeon World pretty easily.

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Share good posts with good goblins. Claytonian at the gmails.