I just picked up the SR4 book, love the setting, and want to figure out the rules. The movement rules (pg. 138), however, have me completely bewildered.

I want to use miniatures and a battlemat. Do SR people who employ such things generally use the hex side of the mat or the squares side? What scale do you use for either? Coming from a d20 background, my first plan was to use a square battlemat with 1 inch = 1.5 (5ft) squares. I cannot see any way to reconcile the movement rules with that though. It's weird enough dividing the movement by a variable number of IPs, and varying the speed for walking one second, running literally the next second, and then walking some more a second after that, but even if I get a handle on all of that - the 'chunks' of movement in a given IP rarely come out to a multiple of 1.5m (to fit my squares). And I can't just round off because the chunks are so small that the rounding can easily account for half of the movement!

Anyway, I'm not so much interested in exactly what the rules say, but how actual players play the game. What really works as far as miniatures & battlemats go for ShadowRun? Any help other than ('you are playing the game wrong') is much appreciated - included house rules to make things easier and more intuitive.

movement has allways been, at best, clunky . . there's so much issues with movement it's not even funny anymore . . well, maybe if frank enters the discussion, i have much fun if he discusses such things with other people *g*
as for the battle-map-stuff? i'm afraid you're on your own there . . as far as i know there is no such thing utilizing a fitting scale . .

I use maps and pencils instead of minitures.
We do the IP divide for the movement per turn and then we move them on the map that distance.
Your issue seems to be that the movement doesn't divide all that neatly into squares right? You wither need a bigger map (so 1 square is one meter) or you need to be less exact and not worry about the logictics of how the turn by turn, meter by meter movements play out on your map.
Your players might lose or gain some movement here and there, but I recomend just rounding up or down to the nearest "sqaure" and not worry about the meters lost per square. The pleasure of miniture gaming will outway the logistical sacrifice

Also, ther is a great supplement from an earlier edition of the game, a boxed set with some maps and minitures and it was designed for shadowrun, meter by meter minurue combat. It was called DMZ or somesuch. Might want to check gaming shops in your area to find it.

Veggiesama has house rules for Movement using a battle grid that you can find linked here. I've never used them before but they are supposed to be similar to d20.

Use a gridless mat and calculate movement using trigonometry and determine relative positions using subjective polar coordinates. You'll need a protractor and a straight edged ruler to do it this way, but believe me you'll get far superior fidelity. The scale can be whatever your instruments have the fidelity for.

In other words, SR movement doesn't lend itself well to 2d grid-based mapping. It is should be substantially more freeform than that, particularly in regards to some of the more abstract aspects of movement, such as Infiltration. (In fact, the abstract nature of infiltration means that it doesn't lend itself to mapping and plotting at all).

But some players around here do use battlemats, I believe, they may be more helpful. The best advice I can offer, again, is that using printing out gridless maps and calculating movement distances with a ruler works.

Edit:DMZ (Downtown Militarized Zone) has been out of print for a very long time. It is unlikely that you'd be able to find it and it's rules aren't even slightly compatible with SR4 simply due to the fact that it is an older product using the variable TN system.

Thank you for the advice (and links). I think I'll try it using a gridded mat but just to estimate distances (I guess I'll also have to keep a ruler or some such handy. It will feel really weird if figures don't have to stay in squares etc, but I bet it will also be liverating once we get used to it.

well . . yes, of course it is very liberating . . the characters don't have to run along the same ground even . adepts with wallrunning and the gecko stuff allow for people to run on walls/ceilings, and at that point you will run into problems because there are no 3D Maps *g*

Another possibility for movement over the course of a Combat Turn is to describe a character's position as a continuum rather than a point. For example, Willy the Troll is going to run 35 meters from the car to the corner of a building this turn. At the start of his turn, he declares his movement and the GM draws the route on the board (he's using a white board because people who have white boards are cool). Any bad guy with LOS to that route can take a shot at Willy (with a modifier of ... um ... -2? I haven't unpacked my SR4 stuff from Origins yet) during the turn. It doesn't matter how many IPs Willy has, because at any point in the CT, Willy will be somewhere on that route, and there's no worries about fractions of a meter moved during an IP. If Willy takes one or more Sprint actions, the line is extended.

It's a bit quantumy and abstract, but then I've always thought of SR4 as more of a role-playing game than a war game.

We use hex mapping, with each hex being a distance in meters as determined at the time - enclosed combat is 1m per hex - open fields or large buildings set the scale to 5m per hex, or sometimes as much as 20m. With the exception of 1m and 2m, however, it is always divisible by 5.

As for movement, I have two suggestions.
First, what my group is currently using, do not divide movement by passes. You have, lets say, 10m of movement for that turn, you can move 10m on the first pass, 4th pass, or any combination of passes as long as it does not exceed 10m.

Second, divide the movement by 4. Each player may move up to their alloted movement in any given pass, even if they are otherwise unable to act (such as from not having multiple passes).

welcome to DS! as the resident ambassador and all around sexy guy, let me welcome you with this baggie of fresh baked muffins, and a copy of monty paython and the search for the holy grail.