Doing Away with Initiative

I've been trying to strip down game systems as much as possible recently. The OSR philosophy of 'rulings not rules' has felt wonderfully freeing, and Into the Odd/Electric Bastionland have sold me on roll-under systems, simple stat arrays, and dealing automatic damage (more on that some other time).

It's Initiative rolls that have been bugging me for a little while.

There's something about that formal switch into 'combat' that signals that this, this kind of interaction, is somehow fundamentally different from other kinds of interactions in D&D play, not to mention the rigid turn-taking seems forced and arbitrary.

I thought switching to Testing Dex to see if you go before/after monsters was elegant, but I eventually realised that, after the first round, it doesn't make any functional difference whether PCs go before or after. Let's say Shloo, Kouda and Eli are all fighting a bunch of goblins. They Test Dex and Kouda goes before the goblins.

The round looks like this:

ROUND 1:
Kouda
Goblins
Shloo 
Eli

ROUND 2: 
Kouda
Goblins
Shloo
Eli

See the problem? There's technically a whole chunk of actions spilling over from Round 1 to Round 2 that's really just one big group phase: Shloo, Eli and Kouda all act, and then the goblins act. For multi-round fights, by Round 4 or 5, you're basically just doing group actions.

Reading this post and this post made me think that having initiative isn't really buying any additional tactical choices for a party. At the same time, I'm not sure an initiative order that fluctuates based on attack rolls is much better: it's more randomness, but it also has weird edge cases that make it hard to come up with group plans. More so because I've committed to using automatic damage and roll-under stat, and I don't want to add in complexity I've already taken out.

I think anything that makes combat more like non-combat problem-solving is great, so I'm going to try something a little bit like PbtA, where actions of PCs and NPCs are happening simultaneously.

It would look something like this:

Every round, the GM sets up the situation in front of the PCs (in the same way that the GM gives information to prompt a choice in non-combat situations). The default is that most foes are simply charging and attacking, but the GM is free to hint at especially damaging foes winding up an attack, or introduce dilemmas.

Example: The five goblin warriors charge at Shloo, Eli and Kouda, swinging their swords. Behind them, the beast-master is fiddling with the mechanism of the lock on the slime-hound cage...

PCs declare collectively, before any dice are rolled, what they will individually do. They're free to attack (which automatically hits and deals damage), try out lateral solutions, or explicitly try to interrupt foes.

Example: Kouda will fire his pistol at the goblin warriors. Shloo tries to push past the goblins and cast sleep on the beast-master. Eli will help Shloo.

The GM adjudicates and resolves actions simultaneously. Damage is automatically done, unless PCs have explicitly found a way to negate or reduce damage (I'm using 'impaired damage' rules from ItO that downgrade weak hits to a d4)

Example: The goblins collectively deal their damage to Shloo, Kouda and Eli based on positioning. Kouda deals damage to the goblins. Shloo makes a Strength Test to push through, with Advantage because Eli is helping, then casts sleep. If she fails, the beast-master releases the slime-hound, which will make its attack.

Conceptually, I'm thinking of the PbtA concept of hard vs soft moves. PbtA can sometimes be a little too PC-centric for my taste, but I like the central idea that the GM introduces a complication, and then PCs roll to respond to it. Whereas in PbtA, the 'soft move' assumption is that damage can be avoided (The goblin is hacking at your shield! What do you do?), here the OSR combat-is-deadly assumption is that damage is a given, and you want to end the combat quickly before it becomes a problem.

There's plenty of grey areas of course: PCs shouting 'I shoot him before he can fire!' for instance. But I wonder whether I'm just over-complicating this: one of the appeals of the OSR philosophy is being able to make rulings on weird edge cases, and there's a whole arsenal of tools that OSR GMs have for non-combat encounters (Fortune rolls, Advantage/Disadvantage, Test a stat, so on and so on). As a GM, I could probably figure something out.

Note:
In the edge case above, I'd say that attacks that aim to kill or incapacitate are already the assumption of automatic damage, so the player would deal and take damage as per normal. But maybe they could trade reduced damage to reduce an enemy's damage die with harassing fire...

But what about getting the drop on your enemy???

This is the one advantage to an initiative system that I can think of. I'd just adjudicate surprise as a separate thing in and of itself: if your PCs achieve surprise, they do damage before anyone can act. Vice versa for your NPCs. Neat and simple.