Full Video Transcript

Hey friends, welcome to the table. Today I want you to roll for initiative!

You might have heard this term thrown about in the gaming circles and wondered, why does the DM ask you to roll for initiative? In a game like Dungeons and Dragons you’re using a d20 for your initiative. You’re going to roll it, and then you’re going to add on what’s called an initiative bonus. There are different ways to get this number up, but primarily it’s based on your Dexterity stat.

Why do we do initiative roles? This is so that we can determine what’s the order we’re going to play in. You can consider that you enter a combat, you roll for initiative to see what order everyone will go in, and then everybody will take their turn.

So you might be wondering, this sounds kind of important, like whoever’s going to go first is going to get some kind of bonus, right? And that’s true. In a lot of systems, if you act before anyone has been able to act, you get some kind of extra advantage. So you may have characters who optimize to be able to act first. That being said, once everybody’s gone, it really doesn’t matter what order you’re in, because everybody’s going to be going and getting a turn anyway.

So if you have a character that relies on surprise, relies on getting that first hit in, or has a really great advantage of being able to take out a few people really quick to help everybody else, that is the type of character that you want to be optimizing for an initiative role. In general, in the combat, you want to go before the monsters go. So if you’re encountering a giant spider, it’s really great if the whole party gets to go after the spider before it even gets a chance to move. This gives you the option to maybe even not have any combat encounter at all, by simply having the element of surprise and pouncing on it.

Outside of those combats, you’re not going to use initiative very much. So when you build your character for that first time, try to think about how much does this actually matter to this character before you go invest in a lot of things that boost it up.

Remember, you’re always welcome at the table!