The DM was tracking initiative order, enemy HP, conditions, and effect durations entirely in its head. That works for short fights but drifts badly on longer encounters and breaks on context truncation. Now the DM has a proper initiative tracker — a state machine that handles turn order, HP, conditions with 5e-correct duration expiry (anchored to the source's turn), and auto-syncs player HP to the character sheet. The full combat state gets injected into the system prompt every turn, so the DM always sees ground truth instead of trying to remember it. The MCP server dynamically swaps tool sets: narrative mode gets the usual 10 tools plus enter_initiative, initiative mode gets 7 combat tools (damage, heal, condition, next_turn, etc.) plus roll, recall, and update_character. This keeps the DM's decision space tight — it only sees what's relevant to the current mode. Works for non-combat initiative too (environmental hazards, chases, timed puzzles) since the tracker is just "who goes when" with HP and conditions bolted on. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>