Possible CT Functionality wish

[gmkieran]

I thought I'd do a little market research before I bug the devs with this idea, in case no-one but me finds it useful. So, several of my combat encounters lately have included friendly NPCs who are not, technically, combatants, but who represent very real targets for the un-friendly NPCs my party has encountered.

Does it make any sense at all to anyone else to have an option in the CT that would designate an entry as "non-combatant", meaning it gets skipped for initiative rolls and attack order, but is available to be targeted and can have a connected icon on the encounter map? I think this would speed up combat at least a little, as those entries wouldn't interrupt the progression of initiative or require a description of their relatively unimportant action on the part of the GM (we like narrative in our combat, so everyone including the GM gives a description of what their characters actions looked like).

A non-combatant should be able to become a combatant (if, say, a dropped weapon became available for one to pick up) later on in combat, so it would have to be a setting that could be easily toggled in the CT. It seems that this would be relatively trivial functionality to add, but I'm not a dev.

Anyone care to weigh in?
gmkieran

[Trenloe]

You can kind-of do this now (not quite fully as you describe it, but nearly there).

Make all of you non combatants have 0 initiative (or -10 if you have the possibility of someone having a -1 or -2 initiative) so that they are all at the bottom of the CT. When you (as the GM) get to the first entry of the non combatants press the "Next round" button and the initiative order will jump to the top and miss all of the non combatants. When you want one to join the fight, open their NPC stat-block and roll their initiative.

The only major issue with the above would be if you have auto initiative for the NPCs and have a lot of non combatants - you'll have to manually zero out all of their auto initiative rolls at the beginning of the combat.

[Doswelk]

The Savage Worlds ruleset has an option to place a combat tracker entry 'On Hold', this means they do not get dealt a card for initiative, I suspect similar code could be added into 4e/3.5e

[Moon Wizard]

I just do what Trenloe mentions in my game too.

The On Hold option is not as necessary for 3.5E/4E games as it is in SW games, where the initiative changes every round.

Cheers,
JPG

[gmkieran]

Interesting. That's actually what brought the issue to light, Moon - I was running a weird combat with lots of NPC's coming and going so that initiative *was* changing every round (because I couldn't find a way to auto assign initiatives to just the new-comers). The on-hold option sounds like exactly what I was hoping for, but I can see where, in a normal combat, it wouldn't make as much sense in D&D's system. The bottom-of-the-order solution probably wouldn't be terribly onerous - I do auto-initiative, but I've usually only got 3 or 4 non-com's, so zeroing them out wouldn't be bad. Thanks for the thoughts!!

Cheers!
GMK