Action Time

Despite in many ways being the fabled Career DM, I do play in games too. At the time of this writing, I'm playing in an ongoing superhero campaign using the Modern AGE ruleset. One quirk of the system that stands out to me is, perhaps, not really a difference in the system itself, but in the way it presents its rules. In particular, how it handles initiative.

Like many TRPGs, Modern AGE uses an initiative system to determine the turn order of when PCs take actions in situations when this is applicable. One key difference between this and other TRPGs is that in Modern AGE, initiative isn't tied to combat. It's tied to the broader concept of Action Time - that is, any time it matters what order people get to do things, you roll initiative.

This includes combat, yes, but it can also apply to any other time-sensitive situation in which it's important to figure out who acts before whom. This could apply to a chase scene, or a race, or even a time-based puzzle without any other active party opposing the PCs - if the party is trying to disarm a bomb before it explodes, for example, it can be helpful to establish a designated turn order so that players aren't tripping over each other trying to get their characters to do things, while you still get to build tension and create a sense of danger by having a set number of rounds until the bomb goes off. And how else would you do this but through initiative?

Technically, 5e does support this as well. It has chase rules which work on initiative, but the point still stands that when the DM tells you to roll initiative, you expect combat to occur. I'm willing to be that the majority of TRPG jokes out there use "roll initiative" as a punchline to this effect. But what's so elegant about the way Modern AGE does it is that, without changing anything about the mechanics, it decouples initiative from combat by explicitly grounding it in a system that doesn't necessarily presume attacks being traded.

I was able to use this recently in one of my 5e games. A PC had just alerted the undead guardians of a wizard's hut she was trespassing on, and was trying to reach shelter. She wasn't prepared for combat, and had taken some serious damage in a previous encounter that would have set her back in a head-to-head fight, so she was interested in staying out of trouble if at all possible. But it still would've mattered who would act first - would one of the zombies get a hit on her before she could use her move action to reach cover?

In this case, I had the player roll initiative, but I clarified that I was not necessarily anticipating combat, only trying to figure out who would take the first action. And I'd say it worked out pretty well - it created a sense of tension without anyone's assumptions defaulting to combat right away. If you tell your players to roll initiative, they'll often times expect to fight something, and this can color their actions going forward. But if you make it clear that they don't have to fight, even in Action Time, they can start thinking of other strategies - and in turn, you as the DM will see what other scenarios you can apply initiative rules in.