#215 – Rules Talk: The Initiative Bubble Theory

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All right, folks, we're about to kick off a series of shorter episodes where we focus on various mechanical options within the Palladium role playing megaversal game system, with a heavier focus on Rift's ultimate edition and I guess by extension, the more modernized ruleset that they then also ported into Like Dead Rain. And we're going to kick this off with a re recording of an episode that didn't quite turn out right. So we're going to give this another shot. This topic to kick everything off is revisiting initiative and how the initiative flow works in the Palladium role playing game system. Now, my theory with this discussion is it's possible, potentially possible, that there's another way of doing initiative that might actually be the underlying intention of the system that a lot of us have been missing this whole time.

Yeah, and the underlying, what most of us think we know is that combat is done in a very linear fashion. Everyone rolls initiative. You rank those in top, highest to lowest, and then each player does their action as you go down. Now, you might round robin until people are out of actions. You, you might do the horrible way that we did when I started playing, which was one person takes all their actions on their initiative and then the next person and the next person and those, either of those can be accepted as how you would run initiative in a Palladium game. In a lot of different role playing games, sometimes Palladium is that it's a linear progression of highest to lowest, and you have those each encounters. And if someone attacks another person in Palladium, they get the parry and they have that happen, or the dodge and what have you, and then you move on to the next. Seems very logical if you read it. Okay, that must be how it works. But that might be because a lot of the games before it or at the same time handled it the same exact way NPC has stumbled upon. Maybe we all misinterpreted some things and I don't know if he's convinced me yet, but I have sat at one of Kevin's tables and watched him run a game. I've had that privilege. It was an incredible experience and I'm pondering that maybe you might be onto something.

And I will go ahead and note here that I haven't even 100% convinced myself that this is how it's supposed to work. All of this comes from a few key points that have always stuck with me that I think we might have been misinterpreting the whole time. Possibly. Again, this is just a theory. One of those things is the concept of losing the initiative. It's heavily used in the system, but it's never really deeply explained what that means. I've never seen any other role playing game use that term, lose the initiative. What does that mean? When you look it up in the book, it just says they lose the initiative, as if it's self explanatory. Does it mean they lose an action? No, it doesn't. Because oftentimes when someone loses the initiative, it's explicitly stated, comma, and they lose an action. Or the two are different mechanics.

Or it'll say they go to the bottom of the initiative. When they lose initiative, they don't lose an action, they just are bumped to the lower rank. Which is an interesting perspective. Oh yeah, I didn't lose an action, but now I'm at the bottom of the stack. Well, what does that mean? Okay, I didn't lose a turn, but does it mean you don't lose a turn? Because sometimes when it's phrased you lose initiative and go to the bottom or something like in that phrasing. There's more of an implication there. It's not just that you're no longer second, you're now fifth. It's something else has happened. Like you may not get to do anything until you regain the initiative, which again, isn't described real clearly in the rules on how you would do that.

And another point that makes this kind of grow as a potential option in my brain is there's a very well known chunk of text in the rules. I think we've all read it. It's in Rift's Ultimate Edition. It's also in Dead Rain. At least in Rift's Ultimate Edition. That's on page 342. And that is the very well known spreading out combat among several pairs of fighters section of the rules. It signed Kevin Sambida at the end. And when you read over this, a lot of people kind of roll their eyes or just hand wave it as just being, oh, that's just one of the weird things Kevin does or something. But I think actually this is a key insight into correcting what could be a misunderstanding of how initiative might actually be intended to work in Kevin's brain without him ever just sitting down and spelling this out. So here's my theory. I'm calling this the Initiative Bubble Theory. The idea being that when you start a combat Scene Everyone begins by saying what it is that they're planning to do that lets the GM determine which groupings of characters are going to be directly affecting each other. This lets you then do the whole pairing off thing. So Dave, the Cyber Knight, is going to go fight the fallen Cyber Knight over there. So they're going to engage in direct combat. Jimmy the juicer is going to run and try and charge against this embankment of grunts that are firing down upon him and so on. So you kind of break these people out into the groups of who is directly affecting each other. Then in each of those groups, you have the participants role initiative. Now, here's the first key point. They're rolling initiative relative to their group, not relative to any other characters in the scene. So Dave and the fallen Cyber Knight, they're together and their initiative is rolled, but it doesn't affect Jimmy, who's running up against a group of grunts. They are rolled the same way, the same time even, but they do not directly affect each other. So going with what this several pairs of fighters thing describes, the bubble theory is that each of these groupings is acting in its own comic book time bubble, where multiple rounds can happen within this bubble before we ever even move to another bubble. And look at those participants. Again with this example, we have the Cyber Knight and the fallen Cyber Knight. They've rolled initiative. They're going back and forth and back and forth. And you know what? This is actually a pretty exciting, sweet fight. We're gonna focus on this. Let's focus on this fight for three rounds because it just keeps getting better. Keeps getting better. And then at the end of a round, something cool is about to happen. Like, we don't really know, but it's foreshadowing that one of the two of them is about to either make a decisive blow or turn the tables. And then we move over to the other bubble. Whatever Jimmy and the coalition grunts rolled, we go through that back and forth and back and forth, and we handle that. So that's the first part of my theory, is that the bubbles are meant to act independent of each other. What do you think about that?

It's very cinematic, and it's very much how a lot of movies or comic books are kind of done, right? You'll have these big combats, and big combats are kind of boring to watch. In reality, if you have a mash of people fighting a mash of people, like take Avengers endgame, right? You had the big setup scene where you had the thanos was people on one side, and all the Avengers and all their friends show up on the other side. But it doesn't stay a big mashup for very long at all. It very quickly, people pair off and you watch the pair off fights and then they cut right as something dramatic is going to happen, and you jump to another pair off. And so from a very thematic perspective, it's really interesting, especially when you jump away, when the player's like, okay, roll to parry, but hold that thought. Jump over here, you know, or something like that. Or, okay, you've hit, but you're not going to roll damage yet. We're not going to see the outcome of this until this other scene resolves. And if you can do it as a GM and the players and help them kind of get this mindset, it could be really interesting because you're constantly having little mini cliffhangers all throughout the same combat scene. And Kevin even mentions that, right? You. You jump to the scene or to the scene or away from the scene when the really impactful thing is gonna happen. But how do you formulate this in a way that. And I'm going to use the word that keeps it fair, the phrase fair for all the players. If you have a couple of players who combat isn't really their thing, do they get a chance to shine? How do you let them shine in this bubble kind of concept? Because it could be hard.

I think actually this is the best way to let those characters shine. So we've got these two pairings we've already established. We've got the Cyber Knight, the Fallen Knight. We've got the Juicer charging that firmly embedded group of grunts just firing down upon the battlefield. But then we've got Juan Carlo. He is the rogue scholar, and he is trying to figure out some kind of crucial piece of information on this weird mechanical biomechanical door that they are all stationed in front of. But he needs to, like, solve this puzzle or something. So we cut back to him outside of initiative flow. Again, all of this stuff is going on, but we keep cutting back over to Juan Carlo while he's trying to work on this thing. Or the vagabond who just happens to, in his former life, know a whole lot about engineering, is trying to disable some mechanical system that's important to the conflict at the moment. Instead of making those characters roll initiative, just don't, okay, play with the bubble. Switch over to these guys, okay, we're working on something. What are you thinking? You know, take time out of the moment. Don't Feel the need to just snap, snap, snap, snap, snap. Every round. There's bullets. There's bullets. They're flying everywhere. There's some screams. There's some gunfire. There's the sounds of swords and shields clashing. Tell me what's going on over here. Okay, well, your theory is this. Let's roll this. Well, that didn't quite work out. Oh, we need to run over there. Let's just go ahead and make an active dodge roll. You might get hit by some stray gunfire or something. But we keep working on that, and then we go back into an initiative bubble and handle some combat and some action. That's my answer to your question.

Okay, I can see that it's kind of like the scene in Empires or Return of the Jedi.

Right, Exactly.

When they're working on the door. Right. And R2, there's a straight fire. Well, R2 didn't make his dodge roll because he was connected to the thing. He gets hit. Blasted across. You really don't know what. Where that shot came from.

Don't.

Right.

It just hits into that little scene. Okay, I could see that. So now the next complication that I can see is the assist you have. You know, the Cyber Knight and the fallen Cyber Knight. Well, the fallen. The fallen Cyber knight's getting his ass kicked.

Right.

As he should. He's a fallen Cyber knight. Well, the fall. You know, the Cyber Knight doesn't know that the fallen Cyber knight has a buddy that's hiding behind a Brock and now wants to jump into the scene. The mini bubble. How do they do that? How do you enter someone else's bubble when you see something happening? And it could be an NPC or it could be a PC.

That's mainly just a moment of dramatic timing. First off, we have to go ahead. This should go without saying, but this is a Palladium game, and therefore GM Fiat is the rule.

Absolutely, Absolutely.

GM can do anything that they want at any time. And there's really no checks and balances in there in a game like this. So the GM ultimately can just say, okay, end of this round, something's about to change. And then the thing explodes and the Incredible Hulk jumps out and just starts smashing or something. You know, that's just insert a new moment. Now this other dude has appeared. Give him a surprise action. Because surprise is a thing in Palladium.

Oh, yeah.

Sean was very, very keen on letting us know in our last discussion that surprise is very important in the system.

Yes, it is.

So give him a surprise action. Or. Or if you want to balance it out, let any character, player character who could potentially interfere with the. Give him a perception check or, or ambush, spot ambush or spot concealment or any of one of those skills that are in the game specifically for that moment. Let that skill potentially change the outcome. And if it fails, well, the Big Bad's best friend has just joined the party and is now beating back the Cyber Knight. And so now that's a three way bubble.

Right. Which Kevin specifically calls out. You know, two against one. Everyone loves parry because pretty much any hand to hand has auto parry. But there's a limit. You can auto parry three times. So if you have four Foot Clan, three attackers.

Two.

Three attackers.

Specifically three attackers. So you can auto parry seven attacks from three attackers. But if it's eight attacks from four, that fourth one, you can't parry that fourth attacker stuff.

Yeah, thank you for the clarification. So, and you see that in turtles all the time. There's always like four or five foot clan beating on Donatello. Right. And he takes a couple of hits from 4 and 5, but he's able to deflect easily. 1, 2 and 3. Yeah.

Teenage mutant Ninja Turtles of the movie, the original, the Jim Henson one.

The.

That's a key turning point in that fight against the Foot Clan at that apartment building, which, you know, they're kicking ass, kicking ass. But eventually they get overwhelmed and there you go.

And so now you've entered the 2:1 bubble or multiple versus single or multiple multiple bubble. Well, let's keep it simple. The multiple versus one bubble. Because I think if you add multiple

versus multiple, you should break those out into different bubbles.

You may have to break those out.

Yeah. By, should I say, if you're using the system, you should. I'm not telling you at home that this is how it has to be, but just follow along.

Right. So it's a, it's an interesting. From a high level, it's a very interesting concept. And it would require, I think, some rethinking of how you ran it. And the players would have to be really aware that that's how it's being done as well. And I often, for me, it comes down to that assist. Because a lot of times in games that I've been in, one player is getting his ass kicked and the other players want to help. And making sure they have the ability to interrupt the other person's bubble and help in some way, I think would be the key. Because I could see how you could real easily have three bubbles or four bubbles or what have you and all that action is really cool inside the bubble. And people get too siloed off and they don't realize that, oh, wait, maybe I could help that person. Right? You know, that type of thing. Because it's just a different way of thinking about it because you're not as focused. I think this could lead to players being really focused just on their bubble and not realizing, oh, while we are all in our own individual bubbles, we're still a group and can help each other in a group setting. Right? That. That would be interesting to me. That's kind of the interesting perspective.

I think one of the benefits of this as the whole group at the table gets to become spectators, you get to become that person in the audience watching that Marvel movie in the theater. There's something happening in front of you, and it's pretty cool. And the fact that the GM now isn't having to go around the whole damn table and remember everything that's happening at all times. The, the GM could now let themselves focus on one set of actions. They're in the moment.

They.

They're starting to pick up on more ideas. The, you know, and if you're adhd, that's pretty helpful, being able to focus on something for more than a few moments at least. I think that the other players can then appreciate that as a moment of cinema. And then when it switches to somebody else acting again, it's. It's like watching a movie or a TV show. They get to participate by observing. And I think that's a crucial, important role in a game. I think oftentimes in the classic round robin roll down the go down the table initiative, I think all too often players end up waiting for their turn.

They don't actually pay attention. They're just waiting for their turn.

And in this, they don't have to wait. Their turn is going to happen at some point. They don't have to keep track of it. The GMs got it because he's keeping track of these pairs of these little bubbles so the players can sit back and enjoy the spectacle of action before them. Now, let me get to part two of my theory. Okay, Part two of this theory, which honestly is a side thing, you can use this with the bubbles or not. And I think it works very well. And I think it's meant to work this way. If you use bubbles, this is about what the term losing the initiative means. And if you read over the initiative breakdown rules and then you read over the breaking them into pairs bit after that, you might come up with this Theory as well, and that is that in every bubble, there exists two states of action. You have the initiative or you don't have the initiative. It can be your turn and you have the initiative, but it can also be your turn and you don't have the initiative. The only thing that determines that initially is how well you rolled. Whoever rolled the highest has the initiative, and whoever didn't roll the highest doesn't have the initiative. So if we go by this bubble theory and pair everybody off, we can break them down into 1 versus 1 or 2 versus 1 and turn it into sides. So all that really matters is who, which side got the highest initiative. So the Cyber Knight versus the two. They all three roll initiative, and whoever got the highest, their side starts with the initiative and the other side doesn't. Okay, so this is how this comes into play. You won the initiative roll, you start the round, and you take your turn. Let's say as the initiative rules here, the flow presented assumes you're going to attack someone, and they're going to get to choose whether or not they want to defend. And then we resolve that attack, and then it moves to the defender, right? The defender being the person who didn't have the initiative. So you had the initiative, and now it's moved to the person who doesn't have the initiative, and then they take their action. The person who doesn't have the initiative finishes, and now it moves back to the person who does have the initiative. So we go back and forth between the sides, have the initiative, don't have the initiative, half the initiative don't have the initiative.

At this point, the numbers don't matter.

Numbers don't matter anymore. All I'm in is you have it or you don't.

And as we've talked about, if we do a body block or a tackle and all of a sudden that other side loses the initiative, there might be a situation, I think, if I'm following you, where you would get two actions in a row.

Now here's. Here's where my theory comes into play. Lets say you don't have the initiative. So, combat round starts. Your opponent who has the initiative has taken their action. It's your turn to act. Because now the person who doesn't have the initiative gets to go, and that's you. And you do a body block, and you succeed at that. Well, your opponent has lost the initiative as part of that attack, which means by nature of one person losing the initiative, the other person has gained the initiative. Now you have the initiative. Okay? Your attack has Just finished. Well, the turn now goes to the person who has the initiative. Who is that?

That's you.

Guess what, you can now go again. Right, because you have the initiative and they don't. So it's like playing the skip card in a two person game of Uno, right?

Which if you read it carefully, you can see them trying to convey. I don't think it's as like that scenario. Had they given an example specifically of that scenario, and I don't think they do, I've never seen it. Doesn't mean it's not there. It would have helped people go, oh, now as we were talking about not all of these your opponent loses the initiative tactics immediately make them lose a turn or take an action from them. Some of them do, some of them don't. And so that means it's very distinct. As you're pointing out, those are two distinct things. Losing an action or losing your attack or prone or whatever is distinctly different than you lose the initiative.

Now, listener, understand that it has taken us multiple attempts to record and present this because it is a very different concept that even now I'm having trouble like explaining this. I had to write it down multiple times and then rewrite it and then reorganize it in order to even present this. So there's a good chance this is just bullshit. But I think it makes sense with the concept of losing the initiative in the Palladium system. Otherwise I don't understand what that means and why it's relevant. If you're not using bubbles, if you're doing whole table rolls initiative and you're all just rolling down the line, if you're doing that approach, losing the initiative makes no sense. You just push someone to the end, but the flow remains. They're just pushed elsewhere. What if they've already acted this round?

Guess what, there's no penalty.

What if they acted earlier in the round and you pushed them to the end of the round, but the round's not over, did they get to act again at the end of the round? There's the question that losing the initiative doesn't explain.

Absolutely. This is a really interesting way of rephrasing how combat happens. And I think we'd really like to hear people's thoughts on this and try it. Tell us how it works at your table and your game and talk to us. We happen to have a discord channel which you may or may not know about. And you could come in and say, no, we think you're crazy, or you go, wow, we tried this. And everyone Loves it.

Yeah. Drop in, let us know. And I think I'm going to officially refer to this as, yes, the initiative bubble concept. The bubble system. Bubble system rules, option for initiative, and that whole second bit about losing the initiative, the back and forth and back and forth. Let's just call that bubble option A. Yeah. So if you use the bubble system, you can define that. We're also using option A of that. Let us know what you think of this. Let us know if you have done this. I think it could work. I want to give it a shot.

I'd really like to see people's feedback on it. I may try it myself.

And if you do, let us know in the Discord how it goes or on a future episode. Buckwhe.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

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