Rolling for initiative

I don't like the convention of having the players roll for initiative at the start of combat. It's an invention brought in by the 3rd edition of D&D and maintained all the way up to the present day. The problems are manifold and have been belabored to death elsewhere, so I'll just point out my solution. AD&D and BECMI don't work like this. In both systems, players must make an intention of action BEFORE the initiative die are rolled. This sounds like a wargaming practice, but it also works great in narrative combat.

Focusing on D&D narratively, as if we were playing purely in 'theater of the mind', the players would be doing whatever they want, until one of them comes into a situation and will say "I attack".  At that point, their attack should automatically succeed, unless it is opposed by an enemy or monster, who decides to fight back. The monster should also announce its action, such as "I breathe fire." Only then are initiative die rolled, simply to determine which action goes first. After that single round of combat, narrative play would resume, unless the two combatants opt to continue a series of attacks (or opposed actions)

This is a subtle genius woven into the original D&D framework that is not effectively communicated in either the rulebooks, or from most groups online. I've been part of AD&D and Original D&D groups where the DM used 3e style individual initiative, simply because it seemed to be more fair in giving all players a turn. For that matter, I found the O/AD&D  turn sequence to be much more fair, as every player has his or her own say every turn if they have to describe their actions to a caller, who would then relay those actions to the DM. I personally don't use the caller, or rather as a DM I also act as the caller, and ask my players to describe all their actions per turn to me first before I resolve their actions all at the same time. I describe my method more in depth here

I read a blogpost on AngryGM where he disparages the initiative roll as the "whoosh" of loading the combat screen from a videogame rpg, and I agree. But using O/AD&D style encounter rules, and rolling the initiative die only IF two sides decide to take opposing actions, and only AFTER they've made their declaration, allows you to weave combat into narrative gameplay without breaking the flow of the narration, and still allows players who do not wish to be in combat to go about and do their own thing. The only thing to remember, to keep everything balanced, is that 10 rounds of combat equal 1 turn, so you can pace the players' actions accordingly.