Initiative House Rules[]
1. Dexterity or Perception can be used for initiative. Other games such as Earthdawn or partially GURPS have Dexterity as the initiative stat and also a speed stat. This leads to thinking high initiative should lead to going sooner. Star Wars D6 also used Dexterity in its quickdraw rules (so it has precedent). Thus, people can use dex if they want for init.
2. You get an extra action before multi-action penalties apply for every 10 you roll on initiative (so, 1 for 2-9 roll, 2 for 10-19, 3 for 20-29 etc). This rule is somewhat based on Shadowrun. It gives a bonus for rolling high on initiative above and also allows quicker combat as some people get to go and take more actions. It also makes things more random, as combined with the Wild Die sometimes people get lots of extra actions.
3. If you roll a 1 on the Wild Die and take 6 away you have fumbled init and do not go at all if you rolled 2 or less dice. You also have a 1 die penalty to your defenses, since in effect you have -1 extra actions. This rule helps add randomness and make initiative more exciting. It also helps PCs, as enemies more often have 2D or less initiative than the PCs do, but primarily it is to add randomness.
4. If you roll 0 dice for initiative (due to wounds for instance) you still roll 1D for initiative. This is your Wild Die. If it is 1 you do not go as in rule 3 above with the -1D penalty to defenses. If it is 6, reroll as usual and the re-roll is your initiative (do not count the first 6). If it is 2-4, your initiative is 0 and you go on zero. This rule helps figure out what to do when people have 0 dice to roll for initiative.