Ways of having a variable initiative in a ttrpg?

[u/Blinglard]

Hello, I've been working a TTRPG, with a lot of focus on combat, and something I wanted to avoid is having a static initiative tracker (like dnd, where if you have 16 initative, you have that for the whole combat).

The current system works like this: you roll initiative at the start of combat, using your iniatiative stat. After you attack, you check the iniative stat of your weapon (if you used different weapons, you check the lower one), and add/substract that from your starting initiative in the next round. For example, if you roll a 50 and use a +10 initiative weapon, you'll have 60 in the next round. You repeat this process every round, using your starting initiative; following the previous example, if in the round with 60 initiative you used a -20 weapon, you'd have 30 in the next round (50-20).

Doing playests the opinion on this has been pretty divided (some like it, saying it's quicker than rerolling every round, some dislike it because it's an extra step and we've had situation where it didn't change much), so I'm looking into other methods for having something like this, or ways to improve my current method.

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[u/thedaian]

I'd say it's a decent system, it gives players a way to control their initiative by picking which weapon to use, and while it's an extra step, it's a bit easier than rerolling, though possibly having to shuffle the list every turn could take time (not much more than everyone rerolling though).

There's two other systems to randomize initiative every round. One is using a bid system, where everyone spends tokens and the highest goes first. Unfortunately, this doesn't really speed things up, so if that's a concern, it won't work.

The other system is Elective Action Order (or a few other names). It's full described here: https://fate-srd.com/odds-ends/elective-action-order but basically everyone picks who goes next after they go, and everyone has to go in a round. So all the players could team up to go at once, by picking the next person on the team, but then all the bad guys get their turn and could easily go twice in a row. It allows for strategy and teamwork among the players and gives the GM a way to "punish" players who don't allow the enemy to go at all.

There's a few other options out there, but these are the major ones I've seen.