Split Initiative

I’ve been doing a thing for a while in OSR Thinking Adventures style games I’ve been calling split initiative which I almost certainly read somewhere else and stole but here we are. Those of you using the Wolves rules have seen this before.

Basically at the beginning of each round of combat (or general dangerous time) each character rolls to get over/under some value. Those passing the check go before the monsters (or danger or whatever) and those failing go after. Simple as.

This adds a bunch of chaos - in the Wednesday game today this lead to all the high-level PCs going last, allowing a bunch of Level 1 characters to be killed by carrion crawlers. The easiest form of the check is just a d20 under Dexterity, although Wolves does d10 under AC - reinforcing the Armour-as-Class thing those rules are doing. If you wanted to decouple this from stats it could be as simple as “roll 4+ to go first” on a d6, giving an even 50/50.

UPDATE 26-11-2025

Using AC in games with multiple classes causes the weird problems of fighters often going last. Rolling under Dex causes fixed results from the start. So:

Roll to hit vs Chain. Succeed? Go before the monsters.
If they’re slow, roll to hit vs Leather.
If they’re fast, roll to hit vs Plate.

Everyone gets a little better over time, but fighters (and such) faster than others. Obviously, up to you if this includes magic weapons and weapon skill and shit like that. I’d base it purely off level personally.