What happens to a characters Initiative if he changes weapons?
There are no official rules for this – it’s probably another thing that was left out for simplicity or brevity. Common sense suggests that a character who changes weapons shouldn’t get a free re-roll of Initiative. Instead, just change the character’s Initiative count by the difference between the Init bonuses of his old weapon and his new weapon. For example, Gerard the Turb Warrior, the famous Fifth Edition sample character, confronts a pair of highwaymen. He wants to dissuade them from robbing him, but not necessarily cripple them, so he uses his staff instead of his mace. He rolls a 5 for Initiative and his staff’s Init bonus is +1, for a total of 6. He fights for a couple of rounds until two more highwaymen spring from the bushes. Now seriously threatened, he drops the staff and whips out his mace. We’ll pretend he forgot what his actual die roll was but knows that he goes on a 6 because the storyguide wrote that down. The mace’s Init bonus is one lower than the staff’s, so Gerard
