I been juggling this idea in my head a bit. It's wholly untested, either in practice or in theory (I suck at probability). I figure since it does retread some ground seen in the past, it could work, at least as well as it ever did.

So, I don't much care for Initiative as it stands. I don't really have a problem with it, but it's tedious rolling every round to see little to no variation. Right now, I have my players roll once and keep it, until I tell them to roll again. Edge dice are rolled separately and only affect that round.

I thought, how about doing it a bit more like the SR of the past, that is, linking your number of IPs to your Initiative roll? It could be interesting. At the very least, it'd give me a reason to care enough to roll every turn. It'd also let me get rid of the ridiculousness that is rolling a dice pool then adding the hits from that dice pool to the number of dice in the dice pool. So, you work it this way. You have your Initiative rating, exactly as the book describes. At the beginning of a round, you roll for Initiative. You do not roll your rating, however. Instead, you roll a number of dice equal to the number of IPs you would have. (So basically, you roll one die by default, and any time a device or ability says it gives you an extra IP, it really gives you another die to roll.) You total up the value rolled on all the dice (if you roll a 5 and a 2, that means you rolled 7). If you spend Edge on the roll, you roll only one extra die, but the Rule of Six applies to all dice. You add your total rolled to your Initiative rating. For this round, you act during a number of IPs equal to that Initiative total, divided by 10 (round up).

I figure that the order of actions in each IP should be based on your actual Initiative rating (not the total with the dice). My as yet unwritten modification to the surprise/ambush rules would allow this value to be modified.

Also, under this system, the 4 IP limit would be lifted.

What do you think? Could it work? Would it be worthwhile? Is it somehow easily broken in a way I don't yet see?

It could work, I suppose, but makes high initiative kinda hard. Even with 4 base initiative passes and an init stat of 12 you'd only have a moderate chance of getting more than 3 passes. Rolling and keeping it seems easiest to use and track.

So why not just use older version rules, since that's in essence what you are doing?

That makes sense. I suppose for this to really work it'd require a lot more rewriting than I'd care to do. You'd want it to be possible to have more than 4 dice to roll for Initiative, which would require either rewriting every ability or piece of gear that provides bonus IPs, or (worse), making a list of ways in which some of those things are allowed to combine their effects, even though normally they do not.

Or, go it a different way, and have each bonus IP give you 2 dice. I'm no good at this mathe-magic stuff, but I'm figuring that would result in significantly more IPs for everyone, on average.

And, Grinder, I don't really like the older rules other than that bit. I found it very hard to wrap my head around a lot of the rest. I prefer my own Frankenstein version of the current rules.

I've no plans to use anything other than SR4's system, I just wanted to contribute something rather than just criticize.

Before SR4 came out, I was speculating they'd use an "Action Point" system, but they kept the Free/Simple/Complex action model, which I like.

Yep, it works well enough. Only thing I find weird is, when it comes to comparing physical to astral/matrix Initiative/IPs.

Bye
Thanee