The turn order in Boot Hill is very simple:
- Rolls percentile dice for everyone who is acting this round. This roll determines order of movement.
- After movement is complete, us a pre-calculated Speed stat to determine the order in which attacks are performed.
This is an interesting combination.
The purely random order of movement is not influenced by anything like innate reflexes, obesity, encumbrance, or even wounds.
The Speed factor combines innate reaction time, wound status, nerves (inexperienced shootists will flinch and delay action), and weapon speed to generate a place in line.
The result is a fast and engaging system that works equally well for group and solo RPG play. (For ease of reference I’m going to use the generic term PC to represent each active participant in a combat, be they PC or NPC.)
Merging all of the decision points – the five Ms of movement, missile, melee, magic, morale – for a given PC into a single moment is a huge mistake and one that the overwhelming majority of RPG designers make. The more decision points a player has to navigate at once, the longer it takes to complete the OODA loop. And during that time, that player is the only truly engagement member of the table. Everyone else is not directly engaged during this time. They are waiting for the game-state to change so they can reorient themselves. With each additional player, the wait time increases, leading to the common D&D 5e lament that combats take forever and up to 20 minutes can pass before a player gets to engage with the game again.
Initiative by side avoids this trap by condensing all of the decisions on each side into a free-for-all conversation and negotiation. Everyone is analyzing the game state and proposing or declaring actions, and then everyone helps resolve the mess of orders together. This is one of the reasons that older D&D rules (properly implemented by the book, mind you) are so much faster and more engaging than the modern versions with their individual initiative approach. While Boot Hill uses individual initiative, it solves the problem by carving the turn up into movement and combat phases, with each one having a different initiative countdown. The time between decision points is much reduced, because the decisions to be made are smaller in nature – not in import perhaps, but certainly in variables.
Here, the choices are strictly confined, which drastically reduced slowdown due to analysis paralysis. In the first half of the turn, you are either you’re moving somewhere or you’re not. Which is not to say the choices are easy. You have to account for who has moved, and who has not. You have to anticipate potential counter moves, and you have to strategize about how to put your PC in the best possible position.
In the second half of the turn, everyone has already moved. All you have to decide when your turn comes up, is who you’re shooting at. Again, they’re interesting decisions to be made here. Do you shoot at a combatant that has not yet fired, in the hopes that you can eliminate him from the gun fight before he does? Or do you concentrate fire on the deadliest threat, knowing that it exposes you to follow up shots by slower shooters?
What you don’t have to do is decide is everything all at once, follow Bay and interminable weight while everyone else at the table dutifully takes their turn. The wait time might be the same in both cases, but breaking the turn up keeps you engaged throughout the entire process.
The randomness of movement order, and the pre-calculated inevitability of combat order also serves to keep things fresh. You can plan for who is the fastest draw in the West, but the fastest draw in the West might move so late in the first half of the turn that he’s got nothing to shoot AT, for example. Rerolling movement initiative gives every turn a unique flavor, and limits the amount of pre-plotting that you can do in a combat which also helps keep things engaging.
All of these things are true for solo play as well. By breaking the decision moments into tiny slices, Gygax and Blume significantly reduced the cognitive load on solo players. You can take it one step at a time, with minimal changes to the game state, with just enough difference from choice to choice to keep things interesting. The need to start each turn with resetting movement order creates the randomness and chaos that keeps solo play interesting. This helps avoid the general tendency of solo players to speed up the gameplay loop once they become too comfortable with it. The (mostly) unchanging turn order of combat provides enough predictability and stability to allow for some limited pre-planning and strategic decision-making.
It’s a very tight system, and one that deserves more scholarship then the common refrain of “combat deadly, no rules for non-combat, wat do?” usually offers.