Managing Initiative - FFG Star Wars

Hi all,

I'm toying with the idea of running a FFG Star Wars game on here at some point (still working on the details at this stage) but I was just wondering how do people best manage initiative for the game? The standard table top way of managing it is pretty collaborative (I've found) and involves quite a bit of discussion around who is going to go in which PC slot on a given round which I could see as being quite cumbersome on a PbP game and would potentially slow things to a crawl just to decide who is going when. Is the best way just to say All PC's go together then all of the enemies go or is there a better way of handling it that I'm missing?

Thanks in advance peeps :)

I've found side-based initiative to be the best for keeping up the flow of the game, regardless of what system I'm running.

Our group basically just did go your roll initiative instead of pc npc based. I feel it works better then the normal way for pbp.

It's not FFG Star Wars-specific, but in the game I'm running, I'm planning on doing group initiative instead of individual. Tally all the PC initiative rolls and compare it against the tallied NPC rolls. Higher total starts the ping-pong match.

As a GM of a GP SWFFG game isimple put in a line such asand when the PCs have all slots before NPC in round order, i do the same thing but who ever posts first takes the next available slot PC slot

the key is to be consistent as possible, help you helps the players, helps the chr

i also let the PCs see a map interface to show DESTINY and extra BOOSTS/SETBACKS so the can gauge interactions with the scene

all our forums are open to public so check it out
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I've done initiative a couple different ways. I've done it RAW and it's worked ok. There's not the collaboration around the table component, but it frees up people to post when they're available and make it roll. That said, it can get confusing, especially for people who are less familiar with the ruleset.

I've tended to go side-based initiative at this point, similar to -- but slightly different from -- what njohn discusses above. I think it manages the flow well enough and enables something that is easier to understand.

In a case where I have two player groups interacting with one another (as I do now) I've gone to strict initiative order. It's not in the spirit of the game, but it's difficult for me to imagine it'd be fair to do side-based initiative against other PCs. It's slowed down the games considerably but it's working.

Thanks for the feedback guys, I'll have a read through some of the games already posted like stawarsrpggm suggested but I'm erring towards side based to start with....still a way out from being ready to run a game yet so I've plenty of time to think it through before hand :)