Combat Tracker order funkiness with equal Initiatives

[Sorcerer]

it might not help much, but it confirms that I am not the only one fumbling around in the dark.

as I recall 1st Edition had a D6 for initiative, so that was even worse.
of course in those days I did "group initiative" - a us and them scenario as to whether all the PC's acted before all the NPC's or not. With PC's acting in "Party order".

of course it would be possible to add an option to select which die people wanted to use for initiative, not too difficult just time consuming.

or for the more adventurous I believe there are 3 (I think) math.random(10) entries somewhere in the combattracker.lua which you could change to math.random(20) to make the Roll all/roll all NPC values simulate d20 rolling (the actual init field drag/double click d10 roll uses another mechanism but is also relatively simple to alter if you want to.

The CKG gives init bonuses for dex only starting at 20 (+1) with a further +1 for every 2 points thereafter. I was going to add that to the character sheet init field as an auto calculation (it would then carry over to the CT)

There is no way to automate simultaneous stuff. I probably would decide who gets to go first based on the situation and what's best for the story at that point. but mostly I would probably let PC's have first choice as to act first or wait and then do all the NPC's based on factions - so roll all orcs and then all townspeople or whatever. It's a bit harder on the computer than Face to face. (keeping players informed and engaged) but it's doable.

[Sorcerer]

OK

so I can report that there is a problem with the sort code. in that it doesn't sort based on name as it should (It seems the release version i.e. v2.0 has a couple of lines of code missing).

on the up side its easily fixed, so I can do that in the next patch.

The other thing I noted (and had forgotten) is that after sorting the rolled initiative value, if the values are the same it checks the init value (i.e the plus the creature has to rolled initiative - this value is carried over from the character sheet ). This means that creatures with pluses to initiative (possibly from high Dex) gain the advantage.

As I said I will correct the name sort with the next patch (not sure when that will come out...) and add M_W's suggestion of a Database Node sort as a final check (this will not be necessary if you are using Append NPC, but if you are not it will fix the windows in a definite order to stop them jumping around)

[dr_venture]

As always, you da man, Sorce. I'm really happy to know that there is in fact a secondary method of determining the order for equal INITs, beyond just alphabetical by name or something kinda non-sequiturish like that.

Do any of the monster's have negative or positive INITs that would play into that secondary sorting? I notice that Zombies, for instance, has "Slow" listed under the 'Special' field (and sadly for the characters, I didn't notice that they always act last every round - oops! I was just giving them a negative on their INITs).

Also, on further thought, as long as it wasn't a pain to do, if you have easy access to the combatant's reach score in the CT, I'd vote for having a 3rd level sort based on that. Even if creatures aren't fighting each other, I think sorting on reach is at least more potentially relevant than node name, which is basically arbitrary, I believe. But only if it's not a big deal to do.

As for adding an option for INIT die type, I'd personally prioritize that lower on the list. Additional options are always welcome & I'd definitely use this one, but I can very much live with the current implementation. Again, having an inkling of the potential updates on your plate, I'd cast my vote for your time being spent on more core issues. Just my 2 cents. After I win the lottery and hire you as a full time ruleset developer (which I suppose could be viewed as heaven or hell), then we'll hash out more of the details