prodigydancer , granted, a round robin system can work, and is much easier to balance. I once played a game of Warhammer 40K where my opponent was left with 5 characters after my first shooting phase (because we were too lazy to build terrain, and I had a ton of ranged firepower).
But competing initiative among the same team is retarded. IF the game makes you want to be winitiative debuffed, then it is a stupid oversight.
The proper way to do it is to let each player choose which character to activate, and call this stat tactics (because it becomes a Team stat) instead of initiative(which is personal).
Also it needs to manipulate turn order, otherwise having tons of characters is a huge advantage because you have several actions in a row.
Games like Space Marines (epic 40K) allows a side to retain initiative (ie play twice in a row if they succeed their command test), or delay it (ie skip one action to let characters play later).
Granted, turn order manipulation is not as bad as in a competitive 1v1 game here, because the player is always outnumbered (so it can be seen as an extra challenge), but there is no excuse not to be able to choose who should go next.
Having characters compete and only against other characters in the same team is bad (because the competition goes against everything else in the game, and the stat that governs will becomes not only weak, but you may even prefer lowering it on some characters).
Also, choosing who goes next gives a more interesting decisions, and never makes your situation worse because you killed an opponent.
Even the very notion of guessing how many wounds a sword fighter could take before dying is absurd because in many cases just one is enough. Levels are also completely unrealistic. Should we consider all games that have HP and character levels terrible immersion decline?
All things being equal, I prefer systems that track actual wounds than HP indeed.
(This one is from Robinson Requiem)
Yogendra Singh Yadav
In 1999, Yogendra Singh Yadav was a member of the Indian troops fighting against Pakistan and his target was three enemy bunkers situated at the top of a mountain. Said mountain presented a hundred-foot wall of solid ice, which meant climbing with pickaxes and risking death every step of the way. Yadav volunteered to go first, fixing ropes in place so that his fellow soldiers could follow. Halfway up, the Pakistani troops starting shooting. Yadav was hit three times and most of his squad was killed. When he reached the top, he ran through machine-gun fire to throw a grenade in through the window of the first bunker, killing everyone inside. Then he tackled the second bunker, again taking multiple hits, before he got inside and killed the four men there with his bare hands. He had a broken leg, shattered arm, and as much as 15 bullets in him when his fellow troops took the third bunker. He was awarded with the Param Vir Chakra, a medal so highly valued that only 21 people have ever received it – two thirds posthumously. Yadav, however, survived.
Part of this story may have been enhanced for propaganda purpose, but still: sometimes, one wound is not enough!
