Initiative house rule idea

I had this idea listening to the live play. I like the way initiative passes works except that it seems to boil down to: all of the heroes but one go, then the villains go, then the last hero. 

What if one side couldn’t take more sequential turns than the other side?

For example, the Freedom Five are fighting Citizen Dawn and 4 citizens. 

The heroes go first.  If they do the standard tactic then it’s 4 of them, then all of the bad guys plus the environment, then the last hero.

But suppose Legacy goes, then Wraith then passes to Dawn. So at most, 2 villains can act before she has to pass back to the heroes. That feels like it might allow for a little more back and forth in combat.  

Thoughts?

Cool idea. I'm not sure how well it'll work, but it's still neat.

Personally, if I gm a game and I find my players doing the "all but one" technique, I'll just counter by doing the same thing in reverse order.

So, say there's four heroes, a set of minions, a villain, and an environment turn, and the three of the four heroes went and then passed it to the minions. I'd have the minions pass to the remaining hero, forcing the villain and environment to go last, then on the start of the next round pass it back to each other giving me that (mostly) double villain turn they were trying to avoid.

Oh, that's a great idea. I never thought about doing that.

I think it all depends on how much of a jerk you, the GM, wish to be. Because the potential for jerk initiative in this system is high.

I mean, tell your players about double villain turns ahead of time, and go ahead and take those double turns when the players hand them to you. But it's easy to do things like always pass to the Galvanizer at the top of the new round, just to make sure the bonus wear off. If you constantly do that, it's not gonna be much fun for that player, at the very least. Remember, you're not trying to win, you're trying to tell a story, and if a good story is told, everyone wins. :D

Reposting from another thread, re: the Initiative system:

To me, that's an easy fix:

1) The environment/scene tracker always goes last in initiative order.  

2) The environment does not get to 'choose' who goes next; the last player (or GM) to take a turn chooses who starts the next round (following the Environment/Scene Tracker).

3) The GM may not pass initiative to themselves, even if they have multiple actors within the scene, unless all players have already gone.

4) Any player who chooses to pass initiative to the GM may, on their next turn, reroll a single die of their choice.

Yes, this doesn't "eliminate" the possibility of the players all going before the villain, but it does disincentivize doing so, as a player can reap a tangible, in-game benefit by passing play to the GM.  Further, it makes GM tracking easier, by keeping the scene tracker's place in initiative static. 

I think the problem is the potential to abuse the initiative system on both sides. The near-double turn strategy is more of a backup to my main plan, which is simply to inform the players that they should be thinking about who the writer wants to pass the turn to instead of the character.

I've been thinking about the same issue. 

I've several conflicting ideas, and haven't tested a one....

Idea 1:  each side figures at start of encounter the consecutive action limit: 1+(Them/Us), round up. (THis sets a minimum of 2). Once a side is out, the other can run itself out.

Idea 2: Larger side limited to 3 in a row, smaller to 2 in a row.

idea 3: have an initial intiative roll, and generate a track like FFG's Star Wars does - who uses which slot for their side is open, but the slots themselves stay fixed. (The issue being that, unlike FFG SW, SCRPG adds new foes rather steadily...)