One of the DFRPG Arden Vul players asked how I do surprise and initiative. I think I do them pretty much by the rules, but then most GMs probably think that, and yet they still do slightly different things because it's impossible to write RPG rules that are perfect and complete. (This is the RPG version of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. If you can write perfectly clear rules for it, it's not complicated enough to count as an RPG.)
I use "Initiative" to mean the order in which combatants move in a role-playing game, and "Surprise" to indicate a special situation at the beginning of some RPG combats where some combatants don't get their normal actions until they recover. ("Turn order" is a synonym for "initiative.")
GURPS initiative is different from initiative in most other role-playing games. Because there are active defenses, everyone's turns overlap. Also, because all the turns overlap, there's a fixed turn order for the duration of a combat, rather than constant re-shuffling. Surprise means that some combatants suffer Mental Stun and lose their turns until they recover, then proceed normally after that. Dungeon Fantasy RPG slightly tweaks the basic GURPS surprise rules (see Exploits page 26). I follow the DFRPG rules, but there's a certain amount of GM judgment required.
The first thing to consider is surprise. There are three possibilities for a two-sided fight: nobody can be surprised, one side can be surprised, or both sides can be surprised.
Rule zero of surprise is that if there's no chance of surprise, you don't roll for it. If two groups approach each other across clear terrain in broad daylight, you're done.
When there is a chance of surprise, you have to think about whether only one side can be surprised, or both can. If two groups approach each other across clear terrain in pitch darkness, and one of those groups has Darkvision, they have a chance of surprise and their opponents do not. Life isn't fair. On the other hand, if two groups who've both been sneaky both turn a corner at the same time and end up meeting each other at close range, they both have a chance at surprise.
The rules say you can only achieve surprise if you're being sneaky (meaning you move at half speed), or you have some advantage that makes you sneaky by default (like Invisibility). If you're loud, brightly lit, and stinky, then you don't get to roll.
For a one-sided contest, you roll the sneaky side's worst Stealth versus the other side's best applicable detection roll: Per (a good default if you have no specialized senses or detection skills), Vision (assuming you have a chance to see your opponents), Hearing (assuming you have a chance to hear them), Smell (I don't allow this for humans unless the opponents are extra stinky, but something like a guard dog with a really good sense of smell could use this to detect invisible and silent foes), Observation (if you've trained it up higher than your base senses), whatever the GM agrees makes sense. If the sneaky side wins they get surprise, otherwise no surprise.
(Note that, for me, worst Stealth literally means the worst Stealth in the group. I don't use the "part of the problem or part of the solution" rule to let a mostly sneaky group ignore a non-sneaky member, unless they actually take appropriate action like having a quiet person sneak ahead while leaving the loud person behind. This means that every adventurer should have some points in Stealth, and every adventuring party should figure out how to get the least stealthy person in their group better at it.)
For a two-sided contest, it's a contest of each side's worst Per-based Stealth. This is a clever way to combine both Perception and Stealth into a single quick contest. Losing side gets surprised, and on a tie both sides are surprised. (I don't think I've ever seen mutual surprise in several years of running DFRPG, but it'll happen someday.)
Once you're done computing surprise, you mark everyone who was surprised as Mentally Stunned, and then you do the usual turn order. GURPS turn order is Basic Speed first, ties in Basic Speed broken by highest DX, and ties in both Basic Speed and DX broken by a die roll. I also let players freely move down (later) in order, but once they do so, they can't move back up, as that could potentially be exploited to get two turns in a row. (So, if your slower friend is in your way, you can either take a one-time Wait maneuver to Wait until your friend goes, or you can permanently move below your friend in turn order. The advantage of the latter is that only some maneuvers are valid after a Wait, while if you just delay your spot in the turn order you can take any maneuver.)
The basic effect of Mental Stun is that you Do Nothing on your turn except roll to recover from Mental Stun, and all your defenses are at -4 as long as you're stunned. So being surprised can get you killed. The roll to recover is an IQ roll, with +6 for Combat Reflexes, so a rule of thumb is that dumb combatants need Combat Reflexes. (Smart combatants might want it too, but they already spent all those points on IQ...)
With FoundryVTT keeping track, I'm happy to do individual initiative. Groups of identical monsters will all be clumped together in turn order anyway, since they have the same Basic Speed and DX. If a player controls multiple tokens and they're not clumped together and this bothers the player (because they prefer to move all their tokens together) or the GM (because the player loses focus when it's not their turn and this means getting their attention back more often), then a player can move all their tokens down in turn order next to their slowest token. But this is definitely a place where house rules are fine -- if you want to do side-based initiative, you can. You just have to decide whether the side with the fastest member goes first, or the side with the slowest member goes last.
I should also mention where new combatants slot in. Basically, if you magically summon something in the middle of a fight, I don't let it do anything immediately on the turn it appears, but it slots into its normal spot in the turn order the next turn. (Summoning sickness from Magic the Gathering in my GURPS? It's more likely than you think.) On the other hand, if something comes onto the battlemap from offscreen, it's probably in the middle of a Move maneuver in its first turn (though it could be Concentrate instead if teleportation is involved) and then can take any normal maneuver when its turn comes around again.
Finally, I do not modify turn order due to effects during a fight. If someone casts Great Haste on you, you get two turns, but they're right next to each other, not spread evenly across the turn order. (So as long as you know that nobody on the other side took a Wait maneuver, you can cheesily All-Out Attack on your first turn and then take a maneuver that allows a defense on your second turn.) If you get slowed and only get to move every other turn, you stay in the same place in the turn order, just with a Do Nothing every other time. If you drop your backpack or pick up a wounded companion and your encumbrance level changes, that effects your Move and Dodge, but you still stay in the same place in the turn order. The only things that modify turn order are Wait maneuvers (where you temporarily delay your turn until triggered, take your action immediately, and go back to your usual spot in the order), and voluntarily moving down in turn order (which is usually a once-per-combat thing to move after an ally.)
As an aside, I like the DFRPG surprise rules better than the GURPS Basic Set surprise rules, because they make "no surprise" more likely, while in the Basic version, if surprise is possible at all, you only get "no surprise" if the modified d6 rolls are exactly tied. (So, assuming reasonably close surprise modifiers, only about 1/6 of the time.) On the other hand, I like that the Basic rules give a reason to have a leader (many PC parties clearly do not) and for the leader to have Combat Reflexes and Tactics and high IQ. So maybe I'll write my own surprise rules someday that combine the things I like. But I'm avoiding house rules in Arden Vul, so using my interpretation of the DFRPG rules as written.
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