Initiative passes and speed seem to have a problem in SR3. Please excuse my unnecessarily drawn out example.

Imagine some slow character with a gun. She's four meters away from a dwarf with a Quickness of 4, a sword, and a strong desire to strike before getting shot. Initiative is rolled, and our trigger-happy lady rolls poorly. She's definitely going to go second.

One possible role gives Mr. Target a single IP. He can move up to his Quickness in meters and start chopping at his enemy. If he rolls much better, Target can have three IPs. He can move only two meters in his first IP, one in his second, and one in his third. That means he moves, can't get close enough to the attacker, and gets shot. Even running doesn't help: he can run Quickness x 2, or eight meters, but still only three in the first IP.

The same problem can come up in a number of ways. Fewer IPs can let characters move farther at the beginning of the turn, which can get them to an enemy, behind cover, or otherwise be an advantage.

How should this be handled? Ignore RAW and let characters divide movement among IPs as they choose? Allow any character to use all movement in the first IP or to divide it equally? Accept a rather counterintuitive disadvantage for faster reflexes?

Don't forget the +1 reach for the sword...

By canon, characters move throughout the turn. If there are n passes in a turn, Mr. Target can move 1/n of his movement in the first pass (during which he gets his action), and the remainder of his movement occurs after this.

The problem primarily occurs because, while splitting movement between passes has obvious consequences, splitting it across a single pass is less clear. The solution might be to introduce the possibility of not being able to make it in time even with a single pass, but this is a thornier problem than I'd thought when I started posting so I'm going to have to sleep on it.

~J

Note that fewer IPs only let a character move further when everyone has fewer IPs, since movement is divided among the total IPs, not an individual character's IPs. In other words, if a character with a movement rate of 6 has 1 IP, and another character has 3 IPs, then the first character can still only move 2 meters per combat pass, not all 6. So a character would only be at a disadvantage if he would have won initiative with 1 pass, and no one else would have gotten more than one pass. And if he needs to close a certain distance to attack. I don't think the situation would really come up too often.

Your proposed house rule is all right, though. The only thing I don't like about it is that you will have people with only one initiative pass suddenly being able to close greater distances in that first pass. To give a counter-example, take a sammie with 3 initiative passes against that dwarf with 1 initiative pass. Under the old rules, the sammie would shoot the dwarf, the dwarf would close some of the distance, the sammie would shoot the dwarf again, the dwarf would close some more distance, and the dwarf would finally get a swing before the sammie would shoot him again. Under the house rule, the dwarf would be able to close and counterattack in the first action. That seems a drastic change to fix a problem that won't pop up very much.

Like Kage mentions the 1/n is how it should work, We adapted it with minis as it made it easier to keep track of. Typically we fixed it at 4 passes even if someone rolled 5 passes. Rather than having to calculate on the fly. Though its completely doable for having a calculation of movement based on number of passes as long as its written down in advance.

We would then say everyone can move X spaces according to their quickness/movement rate (walking running stopped), during each pass reacting to each other as normal. If they don't wish to make any actions on their turn other than movement or lack of, they can hold till the next pass.

We also said that you can set/change your movement equal to the number of initiative passes you have. So if you started the turn by running and had 1 pass you could change to walk or stop but the rest of your movements would follow this.

At the end we just fixed it at 4 and if someone managed a 5th, their movement was up and they just finished the round.


EX: 3 characters with the following initiatives:
A) 31
B) 11
C) 1

A) decides to run and gun doing his actions. (drops init to 21)
B) decides to take cover (1 movement action left, init 1)
C) stops at the door and holds action (init still 1, no movement actions - stuck at door for remainder of combat but can respond on next pass)

This method was useful for creating more tactical situations and preventing low init beating out the movement speeds of the high init rollers but overall added more book keeping. As long as there is a a visual way to keep track of this, its not too bad otherwise we usually ignore these rules unless its a chase.

Actually, just not having a thinking problem and giving characters movement in IPs when they don't get actions helps a lot. It creates a small problem of either having to pick one movement type in the first IP and stick with it or strange situations where low-IP characters should be running all the time when they can't act, but that's what the GM and reason are for.

I agree with the holes in my unnecessary house rule, Glyph. It fixes one problem but creates another. RAW, not rules as I misread them, prevent low-IP characters from charging faster.