The "other day" Stuart and I played some Blood & Steel. It's a competent platoon-level wargame but doesn't feel much like the era and setting it's purporting to model. It does have some compelling mechanics, not least the initiative rules and I am always interested in interesting initiative rules.
(I tried to get more "i" words in there. I really did.)
In Blood & Steel you roll a number of d10s based on your army's size, one per discrete unit, at the start of a turn. A four or higher means that dice grants two actions, otherwise it's only one.
If you roll more ones than tens, something bad happens, which is generated from a random table. If it's more tens than ones, then you get a bonus, also from a random table. Some of the benefits and mishaps almost seemed like the opposite, which I think is by design.
Then each player selects a dice -- in secret! -- and the players reveal their selected dice together. The player with the highest revealed dice goes first. One assumes that in multiplayer games, other players would go in order of results.
The winning player selects a unit and then takes one or more -- depending on the result -- actions, before handing over to the next player. Then the players select their next dice.
I like a lot about this. It has the basic simplicity of rolling high to go first, but the benefits/mishaps add a bit of extra randomness and surprise to it. The secret selection brings in a little bit of strategy so it's not totally random, and you can make plans even with a terrible set of rolls.
(I can imagine there are situations in which you might want to select a low roll, or even engage in a bit of bluffing. I don't really have the personality for bluffing, and in the game with Stuart, I kept rolling tens anyway, so it didn't come up.)
This seems like it would be easy to bolt on to other wargames, and I feel like it could probably be adapted to a role-playing game too.
