Initiative

One-pager. Initiative answers when do you act — and who knows what, when? It cuts a tense situation into brief rounds and orders who moves within one. It runs combat, but equally a quick-draw, an ambushed negotiation, a courtroom, a car chase. Its companion is Intense Action: Initiative sets the when, Intense Action prices the how much.

Tense situations run in rounds — brief bursts separated by waiting for someone to make a move. A round is as long as the contest's tempo demands: direct combat is roughly 3–5 seconds with random lulls (ducked behind cover, catching your breath); a pursuit or a negotiation runs longer. Don't track the clock — the GM sets the tempo to fit the scene.

Awareness: from narrative to "shit going down"

The hard, real moment is the transition out of story-telling into a fight. Every character enters it somewhere on a spectrum:

Surprised (woken by the attack) → Startled → Alert → Ready → Lying in wait (the ambusher)

Awareness and position drive Initiative. Coarse, obvious effects modify it: a visored helmet or a blind corner is a disadvantage; a sniper studying the scene in safety, or the enemy behind you with the height, is a large advantage. Ballpark each from about +4 (you see everything and they don't; you're behind them) to −4 (the reverse). Need a number for awareness? It's about ½ (Perception + Stealth). Once the fight is live it tends to level out to one question — can you see what's happening?

The round

  1. Roll Initiative (awareness/position-driven). Order everyone best to worst; ties broken by Score.
  2. Declare, in order, act or wait. Acting resolves when declared. Waiting holds for a trigger.
  3. Waiting persists. Anyone still waiting from last round stays waiting until their declaration comes round again. The totally unaware get no declaration on round one at all — which is why ambushes are murder.

A QR7 Initiative roll is panic: act all-out offensive or all-out defensive (go berserk, or run and hide) — no holding back. A QR10 is a freeze — you lose the three seconds. It's only three seconds; they may be your last.

Reaction & pre-emption

When a waiting character reacts to something (usually someone else acting), they may go immediately after it — or try to pre-empt and act just before:

Pre-emption = a Coordination roll, modified by your Initiative QR (ties: Initiative Score). Reflexes do the work; awareness only biases the odds — no good having lightning reflexes if you're confused. Succeed → just before; fail → just after. It's still a roll, so even a superb, well-placed shooter keeps real uncertainty.

A pre-emption can itself be pre-empted (the counter-sniper), but you'll rarely go deeper. And you never see each other's Initiative — that uncertainty is the whole point.

You never know for certain you'll act first. Pretty sure, never certain. The gunslinger probably draws first; the sniper probably fires before the hostage-taker reacts; neither is guaranteed. It's exactly why a police sniper in a standoff is loath to just shoot the other sniper — and why these scenes work here and collapse into "highest number wins" everywhere else.

E.g. an archer waits — trigger: "the mage does something." The mage starts a spell; the archer pre-empts (QR of Initiative). On success the arrow lands before the spell goes off — but a confident archer can still be a hair too slow.

Beyond combat

This is initiative for any tense situation where timing and nerve decide the outcome, not only when weapons come out:

Designer's Note: the experiments that drove this whole system were the Western shootout, the same shootout with a dastardly sniper, the Iai duel, and the hostage standoff. None of them resolve correctly in any other TTRPG — the nastiest edge cases of combat, which vastly more complex systems (Aftermath, I'm looking at you) never even tried to model. They cost one page here because the actor never knows they'll go first: every ruling is "make an Initiative roll and read its QR." Nothing to memorize, and the probability arrows all point the right way.