I haven't been around for most of the debates on Initiative Passes, so please forgive me for wading in at this late hour. I also feel I should warn you that I haven't actually played a game yet... only read a lot of the books and fiddled with character concepts (sidenote: if you know of any shadowrunners in Sydney, Australia please let me know).

Here goes:

So from what I can gather it sounds like the main problem with initiative passes is that they are unrealistic in terms of what a character can achieve in one turn and that they are essentially mandatory gear as far as being successful in combat is concerned.

My response to the claims of unrealness is a two-parter: You're playing a game filled with magic and cyberware. Which is to say that, 1. What is not possible now might be possible in a technologically advanced and magically active future, and 2. it's a game.

My solution to the problem of IP's being all but mandatory, leaving characters with only 1IP at a significant disadvantage, is to reduce the availability of IP bonuses. If you make it so that a starting character can choose to have one extra IP if he wants, but make sure that two extra IP's is either impossible, or prohibitively expensive, then characters with only 1IP will be at less of a disadvantage and NPC's won't need to be as jacked up to be challenging. Obviously in this scenario the third extra IP is way out of a starting characters league.

For cyberware and bioware the ways to do this appear to be based on price, essence and availability. For example if you jacked up the availability of Wired Reflexes (e.g. 8R, 16R, 24R) then it's out of reach for most, but a character could conceivably get Wired Reflexes 2 by taking the Restricted Gear Quality.

For adepts you could increase the points cost for Increased Reflexes (although you may think it is already high enough). Depending on game balance I would hesitantly suggest 2 points per level? That way two levels is possible, but expensive, and a third level is really expensive.

For mages you could increase the casting drain for Increased Reflexes, or up the threshold? Perhaps it would require two or three successes per level? Force 3 for +1IP, Force 6 for +2IP and Force 9 for +3IP. A mage with Magic 5 or 6 could attempt to overcast to get +3IP, but their chances of succeeding are not great.

In terms of drugs that provide IP's (Cram, Jazz etc) if you feel they are too readily available and unbalancing you can easily make them more expensive, more addictive, increase their side-effects or reduce their duration.

Let me know if I have missed anything? And I apologise again if any of these possibilities have been suggested already.

No. The issue is not how easily you can attain multiple passes, it's what multiple passes do, & thus your 'solution' does nothing to affect the problem.

Honestly, I like how it is now, just with a small re-ordering on how passes go. Currently, you go in order of 1-2-3-4; my suggestion (& that of many others that I have taken it from) is to change this order to 4-1-3-2. This of course does nothing to address the supposed problem, but does make it a bit more 'realistic'.


On a side note, I can agree that the Improved Reflexes spell could use modification (not so much a power issue as a streamline/usefulness at other Force castings), but the Increased Reflexes adept power is already prohibitively expensive, to the point of absurdity. If anything, it should be reduced in price (along with Wired Reflexes). This is reflected in my Adept Powers thread.

Try this on for size: instead of rolling your Initiative every round, roll your IPs.

Weirded out yet? Bear with me.

Roll a number of dice equal to the number of passes you're getting this Combat Turn. All the characters with 6's go first, then the ones with 5's, the 4's, etc. Ties are broken with Initiative, then Intuition, then Reaction, then Edge, then randomly. If two (or more) of your dice come up with the same number, you go twice (or more times) on that phasey-thing, with second (or more) actions taken after everybody's first (etc).

This doesn't separate actions into discrete time-units, just makes the order of action a bit less predictable. It gives fast characters a better chance of going first without removing the possibility from slower characters. Was that what we were going for?

This is not that different to how it worked in previous editions.

Personally I like the way the ordering is now handled much better than previous editions. That said, I don't like the rolling of buckets worth of dice but I know of far too many players who get off on that sort of thing. Since it is a game, I have no problems indulging them.

So long as it doesn't bog the game down that is.

- J.

Okay. So I clearly totally missed the point, but since this thread is already here could someone please elaborate on what the problem with multiple IP's is?

Because if it's just a matter of turn order, I really don't get it.

Basically, they are 'required' for any character that ever expects to get in combat, as they are a direct multiplier to how often you can act. I'm sure I missed details, but that pretty much sums it up.

Limiting access to them will do almost nothing. Availability limits only affect character generation. Excessively high costs overly restrict & hurt characters in general for taking something they need. Various other things I cannot think of at the moment because I am half-asleep...

My problem with IPs is that they are practically a necessity to be effective in combat, and there are certain builds that are almost unarguably better than others. This really came to be an issue when a dual pistol wielding street sam was capable of dropping a frankly absurd number of mooks compared to a melee adept. I have instituted a houserule that makes guns more equal in the hands of the unaugmented, which can be found elsewhere on DS. I find it works well, and my players find not being obliged to buy IPs allows them to spend resources elsewhere.

Okay, well at least I was trying to address the issue that I thought I was trying to address, even if you don't think much of my 'solution'.

I thought availability also affected how easily a character could get a hold of stuff? And I think that if it was much harder to get access to extra IP's and meant players had to make large sacrifices to get them then they wouldn't be as necessary. If you make IP's rare for your NPC's as well then they won't be as necessary in your PC's.

The only reason that I can see why IP's are a necessity for effective combat is because the other guys might have them, am I right? If multiple IP's weren't a part of the game at all would shadowrunners everywhere fail at combat?

By making them harder to get it means that only the occasional character will have an extra IP, which will be advantageous without making him super-powered and characters who choose accuracy over multiple IP's will not be at such a huge disadvantage. 3 IP's should be very rare and 4 is the realm of Prime Runners and Dragons etc.

Not really. Previous editions had a normal distribution around (3.5 x dice) + Reaction (unless your Initiative was only +1D6), so it was much easier to predict who was going first. In the above-described system, each person still gets n action phases, but they're more uniformly distributed over the turn.

If that's the issue, you could always set one Complex Action equal to two Simple Actions and say that each character gets a number of Simple Actions per turn equal to one plus their IPs. Roll initiative and have each character go to the back of the queue whenever they do anything that requires a Simple Action or a Complex Action, and end the Combat Turn when everybody's spent their actions or passed.

Availability is not much of an issue, since it merely makes the extended roll to get the gear longer. At character creation you may not have them, but after a couple of months game time there's no reason not to get them, since they confer such a large bonus on every character type. There isn't a trade off in terms of accuracy; you get your full dice pool in each IP.

I did remove IPs from my game entirely for a while, but superfast reactions are a popular trope of cyberpunk, and it led to a necessary and extensive change in the way drones and spirits worked. My houserule has made IP boosts less desirable, while still a net benefit, and leads to the kind of game I like.

I haven't ran SR4 extensively yet (maybe 6-8 sessions so far?), but if I were to house rule initiative based on present experience, I'd count Initiative + IP but roll the IP and tally up the result.
Highest number goes first through to last, with everyone getting at least one pass first, before the second, third and fourth are kicked in.
This actually would save on dice rolling, making it more aligned with past editions and speed it up.

Having said that, I know this may not sound fair to some but honestly, Initiative in SR4 is more about maintaining game balance and less about being realistic. This is to prevent situations like we used to have where a wired street sam could moonwalk into a room, fires off 3 called head shots and walks out to polish his guns before the mage can summon a single spirit or cast a single spell.

- J.

I did suggest some other ways of tightening access to IP bonuses in my opening post. But what I meant by the trade off is that if Wired Reflexes was more expensive and/or essence intensive then it would limit what other cyberware the character could afford and/or fit within their essence limit. They would have to make sacrifices in other places to get those extra IP.

Here's my solution to making IPs less important:
Make combat less important!


Trust me, it works...

Arkon has a point...

I toast your sentiment. To be fair, initiative and IPs can be critical in hacking and some astral operations, but I do believe you speak truth.