Greyhawk Initiative cheat sheets

I'm very intrigued by Mike Mearls's Greyhawk Initiative variant. If you're unfamiliar with it, Greyhawk Initiative is a variant where instead of rolling once per encounter and having fixed slots in initiative, players roll every round. And instead of rolling a d20, the dice you roll depend on what you'd like to do.

The system is meant to increase the tension and unpredictability of combat, and I'm 100 percent in favor of that. As a DM, keeping combat from dragging — and keeping players involved with the game and not their phones — can be tricky.

Greyhawk Initiative has been widely panned by players on first sight, however. Adding more complexity to initiative and requiring a roll every round does seem like a strange way to make combat more exciting.

I've been DMing for new players for the past little while and so I'm reluctant to try it out myself. For one, I'd like them to start out with as close to a vanilla 5th Edition experience as I can give them so they have a good baseline. But for another, knowing which die is which is hard when you're starting out.

So I made some cheat sheets! I think a quick visual reference takes a lot of the perceived complexity out of Greyhawk Initiative, and I hope I get a chance to give it the benefit of the doubt. So here it is:


And here's a single version:

Hope this helps!

Comments

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