Tabletop RPGs like to pretend they’re about dragons, dungeons, and daring heroics, but anyone who’s spent time behind a GM screen knows they’re actually about a group of grown adults consulting polyhedral goblins to find out “what really happened”. We call it “rolling dice,” but there’s a deeper process involved here that was first spelled out in 2008 by J. Mal over at the Grognardia, who (so far as I can tell) coined the phrase “the oracular power of dice.”
Every time a die hits the table, the universe collapses from infinite probabilities to a concrete event. A missed attack? I guess that goblin was quicker than advertised. A critical hit? You probably found the one loose scale on the dragon’s belly. A failed lockpick? That must mean the lock was forged by ancient dwarves who hated player agency. The dice speak, and the table gets to explain why the world was really like that all along.
This is the quiet art of the micro‑retcon: the tiny retroactive edits that keep the fiction coherent while the dice write reality. It happens over and over at the table, and it’s one of the least understood aspects of the hobby. Let’s look at one of the most concrete examples of how rules impact the retcon: Initiative.
If dice are the oracle, initiative is the ritual that determines how long the prophecy takes to unfold. And depending on which ritual you choose, you get very different flavors of chaos.
The is the modern, orderly approach is the individual initiative system. Everyone lines up like good little boys waiting their turn at the microphone. The rogue acts, then the fighter, then the cleric, and so on. Each turn is a neat little package: roll, narrate, move on.
The fiction gets updated in tiny increments. The world solidifies every few seconds. There’s no room for sweeping reinterpretations – just a steady cycle of individuals saying, “Welp, I guess that happened.”
It’s tidy and controlled and doesn’t take much brainpower. It’s the RPG equivalent of editing a movie frame by frame. It manages the chaos in small, manageable doses, with the meme question repeated over and over, “How do you want to do this?” where each instance of “this” is as small as possible. And you have to do it this way. With the line-up as it is, each player has to understand what the new game-state is after the previous player acts. With each step in the order, the game-state changes, and more analysis is required, and a new little slice of narrative can be built.
Then there’s initiative by side. This is the classic, longer term method of ordering the chaos of battle. Here, the fiction stays wobbly for much longer. Everyone on one side declares and resolves before the other side responds. You roll a bunch of dice, pile up a stack of outcomes, and only then do you try to stitch them into something resembling a coherent sequence.
Now the oracle can really stretch its legs. A whole round of actions gets retroactively justified at once. Maybe the enemies were caught flat‑footed. Maybe the wizard’s fireball distracted them. Maybe the rogue only landed that hit because the fighter’s earlier swing forced the ogre to pivot just so.
It’s less like editing a movie and more like editing an entire scene in one go. Messier, yes. But also more dramatic.
The real difference between these systems isn’t pacing or tactics—it’s how much of the world remains “unresolved” at any given moment. Character-by-character initiative keeps the fiction on a short leash. The dice rewrite a moment of reality at a time. Side-based initiative lets the fiction float in limbo longer. The dice rewrite whole chunks of the timeline minutes at a time.
Initiative determines the temporal reach of the oracle – how far back the dice can reach to say, “Actually, what really happened was…”
And that has a sneaky effect on narrative authority that I’ve never seen addressed. The more unresolved fiction you allow to pile up, the more power the dice have to reshape it, and the more you force everyone at the table to negotiate who holds the narrative reins. Contrary to what you might expect, handing players the spotlight in individual initiative only grants them moments of narration. Opening the interpretation to initiative by side opens the door to everyone getting a say over everything that happened during that last one minute round of combat.
Initiative by side gives players a wider canvas to shape the story because it creates a larger stretch of unresolved fiction – more space where interpretation, justification, and creative causality can occur. When an entire round hangs in limbo until all of the actions resolve, the table doesn’t just react to isolated die rolls; they collectively construct an explanation that resolves the numbers into a story. That reconstruction is where meaningful authorship lives.
Side‑based initiative turns combat from a sequence of micro‑edits into a collaborative act of myth‑making. It invites players to negotiate outcomes and to provide the connective tissue that makes a battle feel like a living story rather than a mechanical turn order. If you want a table where players don’t just take actions but help define why those actions mattered, where the fiction is shaped by group insight, then initiative by side is more than a mechanical preference – it’s a philosophical one.
And in a collaborative hobby like RPGs, it’s a narrative upgrade.