It seems like lately, many people on this board have been debating back and forth on whether Wired Reflexes and other similar physical initiative enhancers carry over into Augmented Reality or not. There are some good arguments on both sides, mostly following the lines that, on one hand, it is perfectly reasonable that speeding up physical actions should speed up physically interacting with the matrix, and on the other hand, allowing a jacked-up street sam to go faster than a "speed of thought" VR hacker is unbalancing, and doesn't mesh well with the fluff text description of the two relevant technologies.
In order to help resolve this, I'd like to present my house rule mechanic called Queueing.
Hackers with augmented physical initiative still retain their full initiative passes, even when using AR.
The commlink's ability to interpret the commands sent to it is limited by the method used to input those commands.
Direct input or non-DNI AR: 1 pass max
DNI AR: 2 passes max
Cold-Sim VR: 3 passes max
Hot-Sim VR: 4 passes max (unbounded*)
A hacker cannot take more actions** in the matrix than the interpretation limit of their connection type. If a hacker has more actions available than their connection type limit, then any remaining actions will be queued.
When a hacker queues an action, they input the command on their turn, but the commlink isn't able to interpret it and actually perform the action until the system is ready again. (next combat turn)
Example:
Twitch, the AR hacker with the Wired Reflexes cyber is doing some heavy duty hacking. With all of his cyber and his physical initiative, he gets a total of 3 IP's this turn. He uses his first two passes to perform matrix actions, as per normal. He issues a command, and the system immediately responds. Now, on his third pass he has a problem. He has used all of his passes for his connection type. He can either choose to instead take some physical actions, or he can begin queueing up actions for the next turn.
Twitch chooses to queue his next action. He declares his action, and and modifiers due to him are noted. (damage, distraction, effects of drugs/toxins, etc.) No tests are made just yet, as the system hasn't processed his command just yet. The next turn rolls around and on Twitch's initiative score from the last turn, his command will finally go off. Situational modifiers due to the system and everything else is added to the modifiers noted from last turn when Twitch performed the command, and the tests are rolled as if Twitch just performed it. (changes in Twitch's condition don't apply and this doesn't take an action, but it does count against his 2 action passes per turn)
Now, say that Twitch has an action queued from a previous turn, but he goes before that action can resolve. (He rolled one more hit on his initiative test this time around) He can either choose to not take any matrix actions until that action has resolved, or he can add another action to his queue. That action wouldn't resolve until his next pass. On his second pass, his second queued action resolves, and he can add another action to his queue. (which will be resolved on the first pass of his next turn) On his third pass for this turn he can add a second action to his queue, but if he does, he won't be able to take any matrix actions on his next turn without having them queued, adding up to 3 more actions to his queue. (the third of which won't be resolved until 2 turns away.)
A hacker can cancel any number of queued actions as a free action. This is not queued, and happens immediately. (Ctrl+Alt+Del)
A hacker can queue one action without penalty, each additional action counts as a loaded program counting against Response. (go ahead, click back and forth between several different things real quick, notice the strain?)
A hacker can queue actions that depend on other actions to some extent, but if the first action fails, the second will generally fail. (ie. you can send a search command, followed by a download command, but if the search doesn't find anything, then that's exactly what the second command will download.)
A super-fast hacker can bypass this limitation slightly by commanding two separate commlinks through DNI-AR. (or sitting down in front of 4 keyboards.)
A hot-sim hacker never has to worry about queueing. His commlink doesn't need to translate anything, and can go as fast as he can.
So, what do you guy's think? I'd like to get some input before I roll this out in my games on Sunday.
* This value should be set higher if the GM removes the 4 IP cap. (although things tend to get a bit insane at that point)
** By "action" in this context, I mean the combination of 1 Free + 2 Simple or 1 Complex that make up a standard pass. If any part of the pass includes a matrix action, this counts as an "action" when calculating the limit of the commlink