Beacon does not have what might be considered standard initiative as in you roll a d20 add your DEX bonus and then murder away. I have never really liked that system, the best that can be said about it is its simple. Before Beacon when playing d20 type games I always used a house rule where each side rolled a d6 to see who had the advantage every round of combat. I don't know where that came from, if it was in the original D&D rules, or if it was just carried over into our games from way back when we played free-form* games as kids. Anyway I don't do it that way and I talked about why Beacon implemented a variation of the this idea along with combat phases here and here.
I was pretty happy with the phased approach and I really liked the tactical changes this brought to the game. I find it more engaging how players have to think about what they are doing before they roll for initiative, and I like how the battle can change round to round and the players have to react to this. It might have taken a little longer to roll each round and to call out the phases but it was made up for with more player interaction as they chose their actions based on what the others were announcing and then interest as they played out the round.
Well I recently heard about a really good idea for initiative from some young up-and-comer named Mike Mearls called Greyhawk initiative. This is something that was making the rounds back in 2017 but I just heard about it a couple days ago so its shiny and new to me. Greyhawk initiative is simply the idea that everyone picks an action and then rolls a different die based on their intended action; e.g. ranged attackers roll a d4, melee attackers a d8, spell casting folks roll a d10, and all other actions roll a d6. You resolve actions based on lowest to highest. This is pretty nifty.
This idea is very similar to the action based combat phases in Beacon where action determines battle order, but the big improvement I see is that it is easier to explain and even better it adds variability. You might get off a spell right away, the archer might get off a shot before the guy downs his healing potion, but he might not. I am very interested in this and I think its a simpler and more elegant expression of the idea I was trying to get with the phased combat system.
I think I'll take this pretty close to what is laid out in the original article, d4 for ranged attack, d6 for movement, d6 for light weapons, d8 for heavy weapons and d10 for casting and add them when doing two. I also like how this system allows for advantage/disadvantage in the rolls, that's such a sleek mechanic which I also want to use more in the game. I'll have to work thorough the details a bit more, but I have that optimistic feeling that this will be pretty cool and I can't wait to try it out.
*My cousins and I used to play a game we called 'Top Secret' which was just a couple lined sheets of paper with a d6 based table for gunshot hit locations and a d6 based table for compass directions. You would roll for initiative, roll to shoot and roll to dodge and everything else was just lets pretend we are secret agents.
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