Casting and Withdrawing in PBP

General ACKS Forums House Rules
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1

I don’t know if this will help anybody, but I’m trying to run an ACKs game in a forum, a medium which is notoriously slooooooow.

Anyway, you’re supposed to declare casting or retreating or withdrawing before initiative, but in a forum (at least the one I frequent) that’s essentially a waste of a day.

So what I’ve decided is that if you want to cast or withdraw on your turn, you roll initiative again, but keep the lower result. Maybe you get lucky and there’s no effect. Maybe you roll much lower than your first roll, and the enemy piles on you. Or maybe your roll was already low.

I suppose I could just ignore the rule, but this seems like a decent compromise. The “advantage” you get from stealth-casting on a low initiative is offset by the fact that you’ll rarely cast on a high initiative, and if you try, everybody knows about it.

Anyway, just an idea.

2

I think that's a great solution.

If you want to stick with a single initiative roll, you might impose a -1 penalty to initiative for each level of the spell. The spell is "in the process of being cast" during that time period. Example:

JUDGE: Initiative 4! Mage is up.
MAGE: I cast Fireball at the approaching goblins. It'll deal 6d6 damage.

JUDGE: OK! The fireball will go off on Initiative 1. Initiative 3 is up. Initiative 3 is my Evil Cleric. He's going to hurl a sling at the mage to try to interrupt the Fireball....