I've had an idea kicking around in my head for awhile on how to make variable initiative passes work in SR4. At the same time, I've also been hearing mumblings about how Wired reflexes and other initiative pass boosters are too powerful, or at least too ubiquitous, and how combats tend to be too short since everyone draws a gun and caps someone else inside of three seconds.

Here's what I have so far. Initiative is rolled as normal, and calculated based on Score + successes, as normal. You number of initiative passes are equal to the successes rolled divided by two, rounded down, minimum 0. If you have zero initiative passes, you are essentially out of that round of combat: you do act in the first pass, same as everyone else, but you cannot take an offensive action. You can enter full defense, dive for cover, run away, etc. but not move offensively.

Wired Reflexes and other initiative boosters allow characters to gain one pass per success on the initiative test, up to a maximum of the initiative booster rating. For instance, a character with Wired Reflexes 2 gains 2 initiative passes from his first two successes on the initiative test, but would require a total of 4 successes to gain a 3rd initiative pass.

Well, I think EVERYONE should be able to get at least one pass. One Offensive pass, at least. Now,perhaps injury can make their Initative 0 somehow, ok, then i could accept just not going.

If anything, I wish it went back to how it was, here...in the sense you got to choose from Boosted Reflexes as well.

We've seen folks with multiple IPs in SR4. They don't seem to be that horrifically overpowering.

Yeah, i think mundanes should be able to grab one more pass-kinda like in SR3, if you had 1d6+5, you had that shot at getting 2 passes. it was rare, but there.

I miss the Boosted Reflexes. They had that disadvantage-they were permanent, the person couldn't get em removed to get replaced with Wired or Move By Wire(if i recall), and while they could stack with the Synaptic Accelerator...that SA was expensive as hell. Also, no Control Rig for these folks, so any Rigger type was sorta screwed.

But right now, Initative options are:

Magic. Get a mage to cast the spell on you...if you have a mage. A mage can bind a focus, yes. They could in the old days, though. No change here, really. Adepts too, at the expensive cost...to the point where it's almost cheaper to spring for the Synaptic Boosters.

Wired Reflexes. Fairly cheap, very expensive on Essence.(Well, they always were, though they ARE a craplot cheaper now.)

Synaptic Boosters. Essence friendly, extremely expensive. (Again, like the old days.)

Move By Wire. Essence costly, pretty nuyen costly, but yeah, they do alot. (Again, old days).

Edge. Yep, spend Edge to get a pass. Someone who pumps Edge won't have a problem.

Drugs. Side effects, natch.

Ok, so that IS alot of ways. Back then, it was the same...only replace Edge with Boosted Reflexes.

But no Boosted Reflexes. They were great for that low-end runner on a nuyen/essence budget to grab a second pass; hell, if they wanted to spring more, they could get up to 2 more passes, but that did eat some essence and nuyen up. But those level 1 boosted reflexes were great...one extra die, 15k nuyen, .5 essence.

If they brought them back, i'd be happy. Im sort of wondering if they ditched them BECAUSE of the Edge bit, though. Not sure here. But i know that after awhile, im a bit tired on having to either spend 1.6-2 essence, 2 Magic Points or 9 BPs of my Resources on ONE extra pass.

Come to think of it, it might be good a more lightly-cybered or very low Essence(who can't afford much more) mundane to just pump the Edge and Reaction(the latter is cheap), and get their passes that way.

first:
combat drugs?
second: Atlas shrugged, i would probably not use Wired Reflexes, never did in SR3 because to me, initiative wasn't all that important to begin with, even as the combat-monster . .
third: isn't there such a thing allready? if any one attribute is somehow reduced to 0 you're paralyzed and don't get to do shit o.O

Huh, I'm surprised at the number of people who don't like the idea of combat being longer (IC time-wise, not necessarily OOC time-wise). It seems to me that SR is, as some people put it, "a game of eggshells and hammers", with combat being resolved essentially as quickly as it takes for the speed sam to shoot X = number of combatants times.

That said, how about keeping the proposal, but leaving it at minimum 1 pass?

Maybe in addition, a glitch on the initiative test means that you "stumble out of the gate" and take a -2 to all tests in your first pass of that combat turn? That might do just as well, with some characters deciding to stagger to cover if they fumble or lose confidence with their weapon?

i don't know why people allways complain about the fights being over too quickly . .
if the fighting gets slower, you could play chess instead . . and because the other guys get backup, your 16 pieces stand against several dozends that number and every time your number of pieces is reached again, there's at least one queen in there . . please excuse me for my outburst, but i like my combat being over fast enough that with some speedy RUNNING i can still accomplish my goals even if an alarm has been sounded because i am NOT nailed down untill a small army comes to take me away . .

Umm... mundanes can get more than 1 IP.

1. They can burn edge (or group edge if necessary)
2. They can take drugs
3. They can be the recipient of an IP boosting spell

So I don't see the problem?

Honestly, if your proposal of roll as normal, then divide successes by 2, round down, and get that many passes(minimum 1?) I like that. Alot, to be honest. I'd have to see it in action and let it be playtested a bit but it sounds nice.

Problem is with the possibility of 0 passes, it could REALLY hose 'average opposition' more than it can the Runners.

Now, again, it depends what games you play. In ours, the 'usual' opposition, in a 'typical, garden variety run', are indeed mooks form the book. I mean, it's dangerous still; enough people shooting SA at you with 8 dice a pop will hit some, and it will add up, and it will hurt, and they have numbers.

But when they have a Reaction and Intuition of 3, they might well be getting 0 passes, and even on full defense, with their meager stats, will proceed to get hosed by PCs who are rolling 11-13 Initative dice alone(which will average a couple of passes.)

With this method, pretty much everyone gets a shot. PCs don't have to lose almost half their essence or nuyen to get a second pass(or overspend on Edge...what if they don't see their character with luck of the gods?) , Boosted Reflexes don't have to be reintroduced, and at least 1 IP folks have a shot at getting a couple(and maybe even more if they do some Reaction pumping.)

Again, i'd give it a go at some point, test the waters.

I've posted this before, about a month ago. This is how I have tried to make initiative passes a little less blase', regular, and monotonous:

I think Initiative Passes in SR4 are too pre-ordained.

In SR3, no matter how much "initiative" a player had, there was always a chance that they would be slow... or at least slower. Several Wired 3 characters had guaranteed 2nd passes (barring injury) in my SR3 game, but they still might be slower sometimes than many Wired 1 characters due to the roll of the dice. On average they would be going "first" but not always. And they never knew for sure how many passes they were gonna get (often 2, sometimes 3) until those dice were rolled. It was possible to build a non-wired character and actually get a second pass on a good roll. Those players were always excited when this happened.

With 4th Edition, passes are automatic for the most part. No matter how lousy you roll Init, you are gonna have that many passes. It has made the value of Init passes jsut sky rocket, with the unwired (or unmagicked) characters sucking hind tit every single turn. Maybe the designers actually intended to make assorted improved reflex type stuff that much more potent, but to me it has lost some of the ... zing. It's too predictable.

I jsut preferred the ...more randomness of the old initiative. And the fact that while it was more "likely" that you would get more passes, it really wasn't written in stone how many you had. Or how many that little shrimp you were planning on beating up had. You still always knew 9 times out of ten who was the bad ass. But there was always that "occasion."

So, I created this solution to my perceived problem:

Roll your Initiative as normal: Roll X Init dice and add the successes to your Init score. This is your actual Initiative.

Then compare the number of hits you had on the roll to the below chart to determine Passes:

* 2 hits , you get your 2nd pass (if you have the appropriate gear/spells for it)

* 3 hits, you get your 3rd and 4th (if you have the appropriate gear/spells for them)

and then to jsut shake things up and make it fun:

* 4+ hits on your test, you gain a second pass (if you are unwired/unspelled.)


A non-wired guy is probably tossing around 6-7 dice on average for Init, so 4+ hits won't come up that often, but when it does, it will give them that nice lucky shot. And he is still only picking up a second pass occasionally.

A wired guy is probably tossing around 8-11 dice, so he is more than likely to always make his threshold for his multiple passes... but sometimes not. A little give in the system. A little "let's see how the dice play out."

Things to consider:
There are no additional dice rolls and it's really not hard at all to count your hits and figure out your number of passes, so, it doesn't slow the game down any.

It doesn't substitute a system for the game, only adds to it. So, major game balance isn't thrown off.

Anyway, I started using this with my players as a test and all of them decided that they liked the feel of it better, as well. And this was my issue! None of my players had ever actually complained about it. But, they thought the new way was more realistic, even tho' it actually can penalize the characters with any form of boosting... occasionally.


Supposedly, a few people liked it after I posted it and said they were going to try it in their game. I have yet to hear back from anyone tho' I wouldn't mind feedback.

Vlad

Yep, (in 2ed) my favorite character, Nightshade, is an adept. After about a million runs he had some cred laying around. He was running for personal reasons, not really for the money. But, he wanted to be faster. So, he got a Synaptic accelerator because the rules for adept initiative increases are even worse in 2nd. (Actually, He had it specially made effectively getting it cultured even though ti already technically is) That and Enhanced Articulation were as fast as he ever got. All-in-all he (I ) thought it more prudent to spend the 920K to get the extra 2d6 + 1 than to waste power points. I mean, he really did have the money to throw around though, we're talking a character that got 300+ karma over the time we played. (One time he sprang like 200K to throw a party and invite all of Haiti as a distraction to steal some stuff from a hougun )

But, I think that having extra initiative passes over unaugmented metahumans is a very important aspect of Shadowrun. It's showing that my magic or technology (or both!) we can become harder, better, faster, stronger. This is one of the key elements of cyberpunk. In my opinion only second to "Style over substance." So, I don't think that the Wire should be weakened. I think that norms just need to get with the game. If they refuse the benefits of magic and cyberware, so much more is their folly. This is the way of the world chummer. Catch the train, or be left behind.


EDIT: Oh wow, so I just read Vlad's post and the 4th ED Initiative rules. I just figured they were pretty much the same as before. I agree vlad, that sounds kinda boring. I like my regular guys with their d6+5 initiative. I like my tricked out sammies with 4d6+22. Ya know? It's all about the character. But, there's always a way to be faster. Like you've all said, even if it's drugs or going running 47 miles a day (to have a reason to raise your quickness above racial max ). But really, if you can't afford to be faster, then you'll just have to be smarter and more accurate. That's all there is to it, ya know?

My biggest problem with initiative enhancers is that everyone takes them because they are so very useful. They make you better/more effective at ranged combat, melee combat, hacking in AR, driving, spell casting. Hence every character has some combination of wired reflexes, synaptic accelerators or increase reflexes spell, at the expense of other options.

My personal choice is to limit the applications of initiative enhancers, rather than alter their integral workings. For example, it makes no sense to me that a gun in the hands of a wired individual can fire three times faster than it can in the hands of an un-enhanced character. Hence I limit guns to the listed cycle rate (the most bullets that can be fired in one round by a normal user by RAW). This means that a PC with extra IPs can limit their recoil penalties by spreading out their fire between their IPs over the whole combat turn.

For fluff (and balance) reasons, I limit spells to one per combat turn. I justify this by saying that mana must be channelled through the magician's body, to cast the spell, and how fast their brain works has no bearing on how damaging this is to the mage (channelling too much mana causes drain, at least by my interpretation of magic fluff).

I restrict hacking/decking to 1 AR action per turn, although I will re-evaluate this when Unwired comes out. Driving, meanwhile, comes up rarely enough for it not to be an issue.

Weapons do not fire faster with more IPs. It just appears that way.

I'm sorry, but they do.

Someone with one IP can fire a single full auto burst comprising 10 bullets in a combat turn. Someone with 3 IPs can fire three full auto bursts comprising 30 bullets total. Considering that full auto capability is described as a weapon firing as long as the trigger is held down, are you suggesting that augmented individuals hold down the trigger for three (or however many extra IPs they get) times as long?

I understand that the cycle rates modelled in SR4 are far lower than are available in real life, but how much more book keeping do you want to deal with?

They could? The recoil on the weapon might make shooting more than 10 bullets per combat turn pointless for the unaugmented character. The augmented can compensate better and thus keep shoting longer, while accomplishing something besides wasting bullets. It does make sense in most situations I'd say, and as for the situations where it doesn't make sense? *closes my eyes and chants "the rules are abstract"*

So, suppressive fire using 20 bullets use some kind of magical mechanism?

Old ass assault rifle like the AK47 already have a 600 rounds/min (10/s -> 30/turn) rate of fire and more modern weapons easily go up to 900rpm (45/turn).
The thing is, prolonged automatic rifle is impossible to effectively control, so a limit to 10rounds/phase seems legit.
And when EVERYTHING is moving slower, I guess it's easier to compensate, hence the heavy wired manage to shoot more bullets efficiently in a given time.

Fair enough... I missed that bit.
But that still doesn't explain how your WR2 individual can fire 30 aimed bullets, and possibly 60 rounds using suppressive fire, all in the same time frame that the unaugmented character can only let off 20 rounds (which strangely makes an area saturated with fire until their next action phase, suggesting that the weapon is firing continually).



I already posted that the SR4 cycle rates are not comparable with real life cycle rates, so your point about AKs is entirely tangential.

The difficulty of controlling automatic fire is modelled by the recoil modifiers. What else do they represent?

E2A

Fair enough... The rules are abstract. You don't need to justify WR3 allowing a higher rate of fire than WR1. But if one chooses to do so (as we on DS are wont to do) it's not hard to do. I choose to impose cycle rate limits, which makes mooks with assault rifles more of a threat in my game, and makes IP boosters less of a must-have, although still useful in some circumstances (and hence pertinent to this thread).

Especially since I don't recall germans stoping after having fired 10 rounds with their MG42. It might make "sense" with assault rifles which are rarely used with more than 10 bullets (but then, what prevents a character for *trying* and taking heavy recoil?), it's just completely nonsensical for fixed MMGs.

Where I live, we have a way to deal with that kind of problem; I could translate it by "shut up, it's magical!" . That's the only solution left.

I'm sorry... I don't really know what you're getting at. My point is that the cycle rates (aka as number of bullets fired in a round) should be the same for augmented as unaugmented characters. Whether that number is represented by 10 bullets per round or 50, it's dependent on the gun, not the shooter.

If you don't like it, why not houserule that a player can only fire one long/full burst by initiative phase and voilà?
Gameplay-wise I don't like it much...

Yes, because everyone knows the germans were turn-based attackers...

The cycle rates are the same. The weapons don't fire faster, it would be silly otherwise. Someone with more IPs is just able to utilize more of the weapons potential.
A full burst does not mean you pull the trigger and don't stop until your next turn. A full burst is just the limit of control you can have in one complex action, or something like that. So, the more IPs, the more complex actions, the more control over your weapon, the more full burts.

The enhanced reflexes allow you to aim and actually have a chance to hit more often. Yes everyone can fire the same number of rounds per combat turn. If you have a mundane that wants to shoot as many times as the WR3 person, he can. The first shots from the semi-automatic he rolls for, the other 6 rounds are just lost and hit nothing. Unless he wants to spend a point of edge then the first 4 shots are rolled for and 4 rounds hit nothing. I recommend conserving the ammo and only pulling the trigger when you have the semblance of a chance to hit.

With the Suppressive fire, I believe it was in a different forum where we figured out how this worked. Suppressive fire isn't so much holding down the trigger and spraying rounds all over, as it is firing many quick short bursts whenever a person enters or leaves your area. Thats why someone who stays in suppressive fire only gets shot once (on the start of the suppression). Someone with multiple IPs though could suppressive fire each pass and have a chance to hit the person who's just standing there. Holding the trigger is more of a wide full-burst but its a lot more concentrated.

Yes. You can justify ammo consumption and firing rates and extra IPs and everything else with whatever fluff you like. Per RAW you can fire 3 full auto bursts with a tricked out Ingram Whiteknight with no recoil in one combat turn from chargen. And this only uses 30 bullets.

I'm not debating that.

I was, in reference to the OP, describing how I attempted to make initiative boosters less ubiquitous in my game.

Insisting that WR are teh l33t kinda misses the point.

Has anyone mentioned the following:

Mundanes CAN have more than one pass, even without combat drugs - spend an edge point to get an 2nd pass (upper limit of 4 IPs) p. 134 SR4.

Hmm one thing I never wondered, does it stacks?
Can a mundane take combat drugs AND spend an edge to have 3 passes?

I'm saying that "it's because people stop firing due to recoil" is an half-decent excuse for an assault rifle, but it's not for a machine gun put on the ground. In real life, people can fire for several seconds with a MG without stopping. Therefore, there is no way to male sense of the higher firing rates from people that have several initiative pass. It's just an abstraction, which works in some situations and is completely absurd in a very few specific situations, such as a person firing a very long full-auto.

Our group has adopted Franks Initiative. Pretty much you roll Reaction + Intuition as normal, but instead of adding it and using that for Initiative, the number of hits scored on the test is your Initiative. Not too bad a system; it keeps the sammy from always going first, and even leaves the possibility that you may not go at all (Initiative 0 = no go).

Of course, you can still use Edge to go first in a round, get another IP, or add edge to the Initiative pool to roll. Also, if anyone gets 10 hits, they get another pass free (the last bit is my own). Never had someone get that many hits, though.

Here's some probability tables to show what that does:

No wires:

0-1 hits: no passes
2-3 hits: 1 pass
4-5 hits: 2 passes
6-7 hits: 3 passes
8+ hits: 4 passes




Wired 1:

0: no passes
1-2 hits: 1 pass
3-4 hits: 2 passes
5-6 hits: 3 passes
7+ hits: 4 passes




Wired 2:

0: no passes
1 hit: 1 pass
2-3 hits: 2 passes
4-5 hits: 3 passes
6+ hits: 4 passes




Wired 3:

0: no passes
1 hit: 1 pass
2 hits: 2 passes
3-4 hits: 2 passes
5+ hits: 4 passes



------------------

First impressions:

Low initiative guys are screwed, since they will quite often not get any actions at all. Even a pretty fast guy with init 9 still chokes around 14% of the time. On the other hand, he gets another pass around 31% of the time...

As I read it, yes - you can even spend an edge for an extra pass with wired reflexes...you just can't have more than 4 passes total.

Well, I'm curious as to what the point of having multiple IPs is if you can still only cast one spell and still only shoot two dudes.

If you actually run that way... I know I for one would stop using guns and magic altogether and just make a sammy with a katana. Sure, there's no range, but at least I can attack 5 times as fast as anyone using a gun. Basically then melee combat, unless of course you're nerfing that as well, is infinitely superior to magic or guns. But really, why would you nerf the whole combat system? Guards are allowed to have reaction enhancers too... like i said before, if you can't keep up with the SOTA, you should stay out of the game.

Also I would like to point out that my wire doesn't like you. It twitches every round that it's not allowed to shoot, and every time it comes closer and closer to finding a target... My wire has a mind of it's own.

So how do you deal with multi-casting, which is a common thing for my characters?



What about Hackers who are acting in more than one node/window/host/whatever? Do they also have to just hang around for 3 or 6 or 9 seconds until they can act in a specific node?

I may have misunderstood your point, but as I understand it you're asking about casting multiple spells with one magical action in one IP and stacking the drain. If you're channeling all that mana at once then fair enough. It's a risky stratagem as you might just kill yourself, which offsets the power to throw stunbolts at 3 people. What you can't do is throw 3 stunbolts at three people in each of your three IPs risking only regular drain damage.



I should have been more clear. If you have multiple IPs and are multitasking, you can only use one action per active persona. This is a little bit of an iffy example, as the RAW matrix rules could do with clarification, and I fully expect to change my opinion when Unwired comes out.



Mulitple IPs are devastating in close combat, and great for defense. That is my intention. Close combat as written in SR4 is somewhat gimped IME. You can only attack once per IP, rather than double-tapping with an Ares Predator typically for more damage.

I don't much want to give every guard the PCs run in to wires, because then they will, without doubt, take to killing and organ legging everybody they come across, and amassing far more nyen than I want them to.

I understand you play SR3, in which the rules for wires and initiative were quite different. But luckily for you, in SR4 genetech can fix your problem with cyberpsychosis.

The obvious solution here is to have your character develop the juggling skill at high levels. Then you just juggle enough guns to get the full ROF your extra init passes can provide.

It would certainly make for an interesting twink.

My character is Bozo the clown, gun juggler extraordinaire... Fear my cascade of lead!

I'm very much of the "Isn't that the *point* of cyberware/augmentations? To make you *better*?" school of thought It's why unaugmented grunts take combat drugs and spend Edge to get ahead. In some ways the increased initiative levels are the defining factor of the elite in a tactical situation. It's already the difference between a pro and an amateur: the pros have *time* to do stuff, where the amateurs are always *rushing*.

I think the problem stems mostly from people playing optimised characters; does anyone going the WiRef route buy Level 1? Not many, I'd think. Rating 2 is the "sweet spot" for nuyen and essence cost, and probably intended to be that way by the game designers. This gives consistent performance equal to an unaugmented grunt security guard munching '70s grunt candy and hitting the natural adrenaline rush that I like to think Edge can simulate. So a 'Runner's *peak* performance (with Edge) is only one pass better, but they can keep it up for their whole career rather than burning out their Edge in a few seconds and their organs in a few years.

It was a different game, but a fond memory of a CP game with modified initiative and recoil rules was the time the two combat-focused characters in the group having variously disabled the half dozen gang members before the Face (no reflex boosters) even got his gun drawn and pointed at a bad guy. That's a *trope* of the Cyberpunk genre, and we (the creators of the rules mod) were pleased that we had managed to capture the atmosphere of bullet time so well

I think the secret was in actually breaking down the norm's draw and shoot into draw-steady-shoot so the player didn't feel like they were inactive, but could just see the trainwreck of the gangers' fate develop faster than he (or the gangers could cope with. That was a phased system (think Car Wars or Star Fleet Battles) with 10 phases per round and a max of 10 actions which I've always thought were better than strict turn-based or the IP mechanism that SR4 is using; smartlinks reduced the standard penalties for snap-shooting and the combat characters could cope with the remaining penalties and the recoil penalties for firing every opportunity they got.

Oh, ok. As long as that was the plan. Fiar enough I guess


Yeah... That could be a problem at first, but eventually you could say they're saturating the market with them and only get 1-2% for them. Or, just give guards extra based on Edge or something. Or have them sneak up on the players? I dunno, really it's your game and if everyone's still having fun then it works out fine ^-^


:O There's a flaw for that!? I've wanted to play a character like that for awhile now. But I haven't gotten around to it. I think it would make a great character that thinks his wire is talking to him. (Also, I think it makes sense to be a little messed up in the head after having massively invasive voluntary surgery

EDIT:
I think the only real problem I have with this thread is getting 0 actions. I suppose my group plays more balanced than the players you're talking about, but I just think I'd be pretty upset with no actions. Let's see... in the new campeign we're starting...
Mage: 1 IP every time
Face: 1-2 IP (50% for each) due to high intelligence
Speed Sammy: 3-4 IP - (50% each) Again, her job is to be fast.
Melee Adept: 2 IP every time
Tank: 2-3ish, I don't remember his actual numbers

So really, we're pretty evenly distributed. Sure some are much faster than guards, but some are on the same level, but good at other things.
Do your teams not look like this? Or does everyone have 2-3 IPs?

Various cyberpsychoses are offered as -ve qualities in Augmentation, so if your GM was cool with it you could have a character that engages in conversation with his implants. Amusingly there's software in Arsenal that lets you give your guns or (any other hardware) personalities.

But I digress. The problem I had in my games was that if anyone didn't have IPs out the wazoo they spent a good deal of time twiddling their thumbs while the street sams took shot after shot after shot. Basically, unless a character had WR or SB they weren't considered a combat worthy character, and I got tired of every character I saw having the same collection of 'ware. So with my changes, bonus IPs are still awesome (you can blow people away, with reduced recoil penalties, and still have actions to gymnastics dodge), but they're slightly less awesome since they don't increase a guns (already good) effectiveness by 2 or 3 times.

Just noticed this...

Sure, the point of 'ware is to make a character stronger, better, faster, but I felt that the bonuses offered by multiple IPs was just too good when twinned with the damage dealing capacity of guns. A dual wielding wired 2 gun bunny is eminently capable of one bullet killing lightly armoured mooks, effectively dropping 12 enemies in one combat turn. Even if forced to spend more than one bullet on each guard, we're really looking at a minimum of 6 guards taken out each turn. However you slice it, that's a hell of a lot of damage capacity, ranged and with no potential backlash, compared to which melee, and even magic, suck.

You know that mages can get more than 1 IP too?
And melee sucks, no matter if you have 1 or 4 IPs.
Seriously, what is your point?

Have you actually read this thread? Even just the OP?

If you still need to ask that question, then I'll try and answer it.

How do you arrive at that? Let's assume for the same of the argument that lightly armoured mook means reaction 3, body 3, and armour clothing and no dodge skill. Our gun bunny is using an Ares Predator. Our mook will soak/didge an average of 3 hits away, let's just say 3, and has 10 boxes. That means that our bunny needs 8 hits on average to take a mook down (5-9-3=10) which require and average of 24 dice. If he has to 24 dice with each gun he needs to have 48 dice in all, assuming he's ambidetrious. In reality a fairly min-maxed elven samurai might have agility 10 (exceptional atribute and muscle toner) + skill 9 (exceptional skill and specialization) reflex recorder +1 =20 dice, 22 with smartilink (which he can't use when splitting his pool), meaning just not enough to kill a mook in a round without splitting his dice pool, even under the somewhat genourous assumptions used here.

You really can't count on taking out 6 guards a round, even if you have characters like this fighting mooks like that, which they shouldn't be.

ETA: Granted you could use ex-ex ammo and then perhaps get 6 a round, but then the mooks could have dodge.

I think the problem here is that the mooks aren't being very bright. There's something wrong with the tactical picture. Let's say Sammy the twin-Ingram 14DP (no Smartgun bonuses) gunbunny has 4 IP which is 16 short burst actions, using 24 rounds of EX-Ex from each weapon. Doesn't even need to reload. Let's assume he's got enough snackies to not have any penalty on his offhand, even.

He's rolling 7D per hand. He's not got surprise, but the squad of mooks are in the open. He nails four of them. Maybe. The reason he gets to nail the other 6 is because he survives the remainders' return fire and the mooks stay in the open. If instead of just standing their ground and flattening light ammo* against his armour**, they dive for cover, pop thermal smoke grenades (always good for gimping any potential Mage Threat too) and lay down suppressive autofire, young Samuel isn't going to hit jack with 7D per attack. So maybe he wings another 3 because he can't miss, but he's exposing himself to the suppression fire. Maybe it's just that suppressive fire isn't sufficiently effective in the SR environment (good armour?).

*Next round*, the mooks have hit their autoinjectors and all blow Edge to reach almost-parity with the 'bunny. Or they keep with the suppression and use fire-and-maneuver to slowly flank him from cover. While saving their "adrenaline rush" for when the reinforcements arrive. Or just keep their heads down.

If all your fights are in featureless corridors where the sec-forces can't get out of the line of fire, then yes, your hero Samuel is going to cream them. And so it should be.

That the non-combatants have to sit around for 3 IP is, IMO, mostly a correct depiction of one of the genre's strongest tropes. Yes, you have to have >1 IP to be considered a combatant (unless, maybe you're a heavy weapons specialist, but even then...), but that's not, IMO, a Bad Thing tm. There are always some standard bits of a character build needed to fulfill a given role, and I don't get why that's a problem. There are a *bunch* of different ways to get those IPs, so it's not as if the characters are identical.

* They perhaps ought to be using a long and a short burst of Assault-rifle EX-Ex to even things up a bit.
** Possibly the reason that Samuel can just take it is the stacked armour and gelpacks etc...

Yea I did. I was rude in my reply and you got to be rude too, so let me rephrase:
All you do is complaining about how good guns are, neglecting the possibilities of magic and the fact of inferior melee (which can't really be argued, except for a few extreme cases and they have been shown in other threads)
Variable IPs are an interesting concept which worked fine in older editions. Yet it will not change the balance between melee, guns and magic. All it might do is buffing those who are not considering combat to happen their line of work - hopefully because they do social or matrix based runs instead of B&E and not because of neglect.

Has anyone here actually tried 'Edgeman' when it comes to IPs? A character without any IP boosting ware(maybe other ware, hell, even alot of other ware, but no IP increasing ware), and just pump Edge to high levels(6 or 7, depending?)

If so, how does it work? I imagine part of it is how often Edge refreshes(last we played i think we did once per scene or so, which means edge could refresh several times per night, if there were alot of scenes.) But if the Edge refreshes at a fair pace(it doesn't have to be uber fast), I imagine it might be an interesting way of going about it.

I'll try to address the points raised as best I can in limited time.
Shiloh We're still working with more than 6 guards to counter a single gun specced runner. That's not a small patrol, and it would have to be bigger to take into account the rest of the runners. That's reasonable for a HTR, but somewhat overkill for a standard patrol in a moderately defended corp office complex such as one would send an out of the box running team into. One can construct a reasonable threat for our hypothetical runner team, either by tooling up the guards with 'ware and combat drugs, or having large numbers of them, or outfitting the facility with drones and oodles of passive defences. That doesn't change the fact that guns and IP boosters are a no brainer for any PC interested in combat.

Kerberos The character being discussed is a chargen legal, relatively balanced gun bunny, only using the BBB. I think what you're failing to appreciate is the sheer number of (minimum) 5P damage resist rolls this sam can inflict in one combat turn.

Zak I'm not just whining about the effectiveness of firearms. I'm trying to rebalance their effectiveness with respect to melee. I'm not even suggesting variable IPs. I'm just restricting what you can spend additional IPs on. IMO, by RAW magic is fairly well balanced with respect to guns - quite possibly more potent due to the limited resistance dice available to most character types - but again, by restricting the use of IPs for spell casting, it makes IP enhancements less important for magicians.

I'm not failing to realize that at all. He will clearly massacre random mooks. His build seems designed to massacre mooks. However he can't kill 12 in a round, and even 6 is a stretch, I ran the math and it doesn't work out. His effectiveness also drops rapidly against higher quality opposition or if modifiers are being applied.

I'm certainly not denying that Wired Reflexes are extremely useful, or even a must-have for a lot of character types, and you can certainly nerf them in you game if you want. However nerfing them should be done on the basis of a realistic assessment, not on a greatly inflated estimate of the mook-killing capacity of a character optimized for mook killing.

Really I don't see how random mooks will ever be a challenge to an even slightly optimized sam. It's easy as pie to build one that can roll 17 dice on his guns, 15 on dodge and soaks with 14 dice. Just using BBB and without min-maxing much. No 3,3,3 mook will ever stand up to that, even if you nerf wires. As I said you certainly can nerf them if you feel it enhances the game experience, but you also need to up the quality of the opposition.

I still don't see the problem with that. As has been shown, to my satisfaction at least, the shootist *can't* drop 4 guards in 1 IP, and even if he could, the problem is not IP based, it's just that oor Samuel goes *first*, and gets 4 shots before the guards can even react. Now, in a "...standard patrol in a moderately defended corp office complex such as one would send an out of the box running team into..." I'd reckon 2-man patrols would have "verisimilitude", and at *that* point, IPs are irrelevant because both guards are down, 1-shotted by a 14DP called shot narrow burst to the head each before they can even act.

Multiple IPs only even enter the equation in a target-rich environment, which is why I based my roughly worked example in such a situation.

My point is that guns and IP boosters *should* be a no-brainer for combat characters. Same as guns are in modern games, and muscle-powered weapons are for a low fantasy game. Going up against a swordsman who's as good with a sword as you are with your fists isn't generally advised. "Wired Sams taking unwired people apart" is a basic staple of the genre. If you think it's gone too far, by all means do something about it in your game, but before changing the rules drastically, it's worth seeing if it's really the IP imbalance that's the problem.



Is shooting 16 people in 6 point armour with 5P, actually that effective? With 3 (average) body to resist, that's 4 Stun damage apiece. And all bar the first 4 will be returning fire (maybe only once) unimpaired. If that doesn't turn Our Sam into hamburger, there's something *else* wrong with the rules.

OR

Is shooting 2 people twice each with 5P (likely the best he can get, firing with both hands) the best way to start the gunfight? Surely better to one shot each of them with a full dice pool.

*Either way* his following IPs will largely be wasted, either because he's been cut in half by the return fire, or because he's either won in the first IP or the targets have gone into cover and he's going to have to expose himself before getting another shot.



What I think everyone else doesn't get is why you want to do this. Bringing a knife to a gunfight is a mistake unless you have "something special" to even the odds (like Adept Powers, being invulnerable or the like). Magic is the next step in that escalation: bringing a gun to a magefight... Fortunately Mages are pretty rare, so most of the time guns are the trump suit.

You know, about numbers and return fire....

Ive seen characters take crazy hits. A sam with Dermal Sheathing, maybe Bone lacing a good Body(say, and Ork with 7 body, not hard to get at all), good armor, a helmet, and maybe even FFBA, has a crapload of dice to roll on Defense.(7 Body, 14 Ballistic Armor is 21 dice AFTER the Dodge, in which he probably has a what, Reaction of 6 or 7 modified if he's a sam, and that's a couple of hits. (22 or 23 if he has bone lacing. And this is not even a totally twinked character.) Tack this onto the fact if the mooks are throwing somewhere between 7 and 10 dice(given smartlinks, skill, range modifiers, etc.).

He's also got a physical track of 12, and probably an Edge of at least 2, maybe 3. He'll likely be knocked out before he's turned to hamburger. Unless they want to keep plugging his unconsious body while the REST of the party is shooting flash-bang grenades and full autofire at them, the Sam will probably live through alot of return fire.

Me and my buddy talked about it last night; these days it's almost like you have to TRY to kill someone. Most of the time they end up more or less knocked out.

Aye, and what I'm saying is that maybe *here* is the problem, rather than IPs.

In a way, making stun damage the 'preferred way to take down opponents' might not be a bad thing, though.

It can save a long-running and fun campaign(captured PCs can escape, of course), it can make for interesting villain returns, and in a way it sort of pushes the PCs toward more non-lethal combat. The way i usually run it, i tend to make the force greeted with more equal force. A group of PCs tossing flash-bangs and using gel rounds are less likely to have the HTR team called than the team armed with panther cannons and HMGs with AV rounds and frag grenades turning the oppositon into chunky salsa.

But i guess it's how deadly you want your game. We play a 'moderate' game, leaning a bit toward some action oriented things were the PCs can die; but more often get knocked out. Death usually comes if one of us makes a really big mistake.

Ah, sorry for derailing the topic. It doesn't totally have to do with IPs, what i brought up, but i guess it could tie in somehow. Well, combat is affected by numerous factors of course-IPs are one of them.

Some valid points have been brought up. The way the game is structured makes guns and multiple IPs the obvious choice.

However, like the OP, and 27% of poll responders, I feel IP boosters are too ubiquitous due to their power. Hence the goal of my house rules is to make them less attractive, by making them less useful for gun bunnies and combat mages. In this situation WR can be the 'something special' needed to 'bring a knife to a gunfight'.