When I was GMing a Shadowrun campaign a few years ago I quickly reached the conclusion that rolling initiative at every turn was a hassle. But I coudn’t just roll once at the beginning of combat because rolling high on these is a way to get multiples actions. So I made a tool that does it for all of us.

Why is it so large? Why the weird layout and the duplicated data? The idea is to have the browser windows spanning between 2 screens, one that is shiwing the right part of the page towards my players and one that if facing me showing the left part of the page. This way players can see what I allow them to see without seeing every NPC and their HP (in the “notes” field).

Shadowrun initiative tool

Since the question has been asked: you can’t use it with every player on the same page, there is not synchronization process, it’s just for local use.

Quick help:

  • Add: add a line for a NPC or PC to the tracker
  • Roll init: do that once at the beginning of the battle or when you want to reset initiative
  • Pass: subtract 10 to the initiative of every character (I don’t use it because I use the “Pass” button instead but it can be useful I guess)
  • Step: go to the next character that has an initiative of 10 or more and subtract 10 to the previous character (I basically click that at the end of every character turn)
  • Sort: sort character by initiative, useful if you change it by hand (can be a problem if yo used the Step button before)
  • Update: for debugging, try to recompute a bunch of things, useful when a bug happen
  • Inc Focus: for debugging, move the black rectangle (from Step) one line down