5E Greyhawk Initiative

[Scott]

5E released some alternate initiative rules today, Greyhawk Initiative. I haven't had time to read it all yet, but it adds more complexity to existing 5E initiative. More weight of an action involved.

[GRWelsh]

Have you played 5E? I leafed through the books down at Eric's shop, but I haven't played it yet. I'm curious about how close it is to 1E, and whether they are compatible. Can you run a 1E module in 5E with no or minimal conversion?

[davegibsongreyhawkdm]

There are variants for weapon speed and spell disruption, but the spell disruption variant doesn't cause a spell to be lost, nor do you have to declare a specific spell to be cast during the combat round.

1e weapon speed was always clunky, so the weapon speed variant proposed here could improve combat mechanics somewhat.

This also uses individual initiative excepting homogeneous monsters who are choosing the same actions during a round.

I don't see any provision for weapon length initiative advantage?

[foster1941]

This is weird because it's clunky and complicated and seems likely to slow down the pace of the game but is not really at all like (any of the various interpretations of) 1E initiative. So their basis for calling it "Greyhawk initiative" seems to be solely that to them "clunky and complicated and likely to slow down the pace of the game" = "old-school"?

[Scott]

I was part of the D&D Next process and followed the development of 5E from very early, and I've watched a few 5E games, but haven't run it yet. I was working a bad schedule and when I did get to play the players were looking for 1E.
The group I am DMing now is up for trying it out, so I will probably run something after we finish up the current arc.
On paper it's closer to 1E than 3E was mechanics-wise, but I'll have to run it to see how close in feel it can get.

[davegibsongreyhawkdm]

I am interested in some of the 5e mechanics ideas, but I also have not tried them, since I like and am accustomed to the 1e mechanics - I just house-ruled to drop out some 1e mechanics such as multiple attacks on tied initiative for wide spread of weapon speed factors. And it does seem like these proposed 'Greyhawk initiative' rules aren't that close to 1e initiative and yet having some pretty burdensome clunkiness to run combat.

And I still have never gotten accustomed to using critical hits, and 5e uses critical hits mechanics.