D&D Combat Rules- Initiative

What is Initiative?

Initiative determines who gets to attack first in D&D combat and in what order players and NPC’s get to take their turns

Initiative is important as without it their would be no structure to combat and the game would become a clusterf**k, making your life as a GM, a lot harder.

How to Use Initiative

Say for example, three player characters walk into a dark room, when they hear a roar from the back corner, suddenly, a great beast rears it’s head and rises from the darkness. All 3 players draw their weapons and the great beast unsheathes it’s claws.

Before the inevitable fight between the players and the monster can start, you must determine the order in which the players and the NPC (non-player-character) take their turns, as D&D combat is turn based. The order in which turns are taken is called the Order of Combat.

To determine the order of Combat each player must make a roll on their 20 sided dice. As an example lets say that:

Player One – rolled a 7

Player Two – rolled an 18

Player Three – rolled a 13.

The Game Master also needs to roll a 20 sided dice in order to determine the initiative of the Monster, because all NPC’s are controlled by the GM.

The Monster – rolled a 15

After all the of the values from 1-20 have been determined, to work out the order of combat, you must put the values in order of highest to lowest. For this hypothetical initiative roll, Player Two would get to attack first then the Monster, and then Players Three and One.

Player Two – 18 – attacks first

Monster – 15 – attacks second

Player Three – 13 attacks third

Player One – 7 attacks last

Once player One makes his attack, if the combat has not ended, the cycle will repeat again, and player two will start of the round by attacking first. This continues until one side either wins or loses.