Initiative without the argument

We thought initiative was a sorting problem. Roll, sort descending, break ties, step through. We built that, it worked, and tables still ground to a halt at the top of every round.

Watching real sessions showed the actual problem: the order is not the hard part. Knowing whose turn it is right now, on six different screens, is the hard part. A player looking at their own sheet has no idea the GM has moved on. So they miss their turn, and the table spends thirty seconds re-establishing where it was.

The fix was not a better sort. It was making the current turn impossible to miss from anywhere in the app.