GURPS uses a fairly traditional initiative system to determine who goes first in combat. Like all such systems, it works well for “real-time” gaming, but it tends to get in the way of good “flow” for a Play-by-Post or other asynchronous game.

In the past I tried to solve that by having players declare 3-5 turns’ worth of actions in advance and resolving those on my side, but that ended up being a lot of work and after a while I burned out on it.

It was at about this time that I first read Lancer, and noticed it used an interesting initiative system. One of the PCs always acts first in a turn, followed by an enemy. We alternate that way until all people on one side have acted, and then the remaining combatants on the other side act one after the other. The players themselves decide who acts during each “player activation”, and the GM decides who acts during each enemy activation. The order in which characters act can therefore vary from turn to turn, but the order of activations always remains the same.

I’d later find out this model was known as “Popcorn Initiative”. It worked well for me in the couple of sessions of real-time Lancer I ran, and I’d get a lot more experience with it when I joined a forum game of Zeitgeist using D&D 4th Edition rules.

Popcorn Initiative works extremely well in that game. Post flow during combat is pretty much uninterrupted as long as there’s anyone available to post. We get through a whole combat round in a single day if everyone is on point, a formidable pace for an asynchronous game.

It worked so well, it made me think I’d only run an async GURPS game if I could use popcorn initiative in it. And it turns out adding popcorn initiative to GURPS is not hard at all!

The Rule

Instead of using Basic Speed values to determine turn order, use the system described at the start of this post, and repeated here for ease of reference:

  • A PC always goes first, followed by an enemy.

  • The two sides then alternate taking their turns until all members of one side have finished.

  • The remaining combatants then take their turns one after the other.

  • Repeat the above procedure for each 1-second round in the combat.

  • Players decide which PC acts on each player turn. The GM decides who acts on each enemy turn. The order doesn’t have to remain constant from second to second.

Traits and maneuvers that give extra actions or extra attacks all affect the character’s own turn, as normal. A character’s defenses “reset” at the start of their turn as usual. Surprise still works the same, and limits your actions in the same way. All this rule change is how to determine the order in which turns happen in a 1-second round.

If the battle involves one or more characters with Enhanced Time Sense, then all of them get to go before the less enhanced combatants, using the rules above among themselves. It effectively splits the second into two “sub-rounds”.

Having a high Speed here is still useful because it gives you more Dodge and more Move. Changes to Basic Speed cost the same as under the standard rules.

Popcorn Examples

Example 1: A party of four fantasy adventurers fights a group of 6 orcs. The heavily armored warrior PC goes first and positions himself to protect his squishier buddies. An orc goes next, then a PC, and so on until all PCs have acted. The final two orcs act one after the other.

Example 2: Two of the orcs in the battle above attack the warrior, who blocks once and parries once. This leaves him with penalties for further defenses. If he is not the first to act next round, the penalties will stay with him until he does take his turn.

Example 3: The same four adventurers meet a Giant Enemy Crab who has Extra Attack 1. Again one of the PCs goes first. The crab goes next, and he can make 2 attacks during his turn as in the normal rules. Then the remaining PCs act.

Example 4: A group of 6 WW2 British Commandos ambushes a patrol squad of 8 Nazi soldiers. The Nazis are surprised and are considered Mentally Stunned as per the standard rules. Though the GM gets to choose the order in which the enemy soldiers act, all they can do on their turns is attempt to recover from the stun.

Example 5: A 6-person squad of the Solar Patrol runs into a pack of three homicidal robots while exploring a ghost spaceship! All of the robots have Enhanced Time Sense, and so does one of the PCs who is a robot themselves. So the PC robot acts first, then the three enemy robots, and then the rest of the PCs.

Conclusion

This is definitely a system I want to try out when I next GM an async GURPS game. I tried to change the standard rules as little as possible. Lancer does a few more things, like giving certain powerful enemies multiple activations per round, but I want to experiment with this base version before I try doing that in GURPS.