In my group, we've spent time trying to cultivate alternative options to the Init/IP rule, for numerous reasons. The most significant reason is when one member of the team has +3 IP, and solos the room about half the time. Another reason is we all agreed that this doesn't reflect realism very well.

Whatever the reason is, here is the model we've applied, it's very easy and fluid and keeps initiative easy to track, as well as creating a potentially more gritty and intense combat scenario:

Static Initiative: Take the base (Reaction + Intuition), and add a +2 for each pass, including the first one. No Init. roll. Free actions cost -1, Simple -3, Complex -6. We've also taken into consideration that this makes unarmed melee combat rather inferior to ranged attacks as complex actions, and as such a complex action for unarmed combat grants two attacks for the -6 cost. If a player spends more init than they have remaining (i.e. a player with a remaining score of 2 does a complex action), the remainder is deducted from their total when their pool refreshes. Also, everyone gets to act before the refresh.

Essentially, this downplays the significance of boosted cyber/magic IPs, while still providing enough of a boost to justify use. If anyone else has home rules for initiative, I'm open for suggestion on smoothing this out further.

But why ??

Little point in allowing Initiative enhancing speedware, then crippling it because it's too fast.

It's meant to be "unbalancing" against those who don't have it.

I agree, to a point, with Synner667. However, the current system is far too unbalanced in my opinion. I haven't personally, but I've heard many good things about SR3's initiative. You might want to take a look at that.

SR3's Initiative system was only good in comparison to SR2's Initiative system. The SR4 one is actually significantly more reasonable.

SR4 is a game where people go faster either by having significant chunks of their nervous system replaced with a computer, or where mystical energy from the astral plane suffuses their being and empowers them beyond human norm. Of course it doesn't reflect realism! That's the point!

I've mentioned this in other threads, but the group I was running experimented with getting an extra simple action per extra initiative pass boost. Then two simple actions can be traded in for a complex action.

That way everyone gets to go in turn.

My campaign just changed initiative and everyone in the group seems to like it. In essence every turn is now 6 seconds. Your go a number of times equal to your IP +1. This in essence halves the effect of higher passes and nobody in my game feels as slow anymore.

Your passes are as folows:

Speed CHART
Actions on this pass
IP 1 1 and 4
IP 2 1, 3, and 5
IP 3 1, 3, 4, and 6
IP 4 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6
IP 5 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

This sounds like an interesting system that is a bit less complicated than some of the other suggestions, but could you maybe clarify it a bit and provide some examples?

Its almost identical to the main SR4 rules with some mods:

Simply a Turn of 6 seconds has 6 initiative passes in it. Each pass is 1 second of time.

Passes go in order...1 through 6.

Characters can only take actions on the pass designated by the chart.

A typical ganger with only 1 IP goes on phase 1 and 4

A wired 2 street Samurai would be able to take actions on pass 1, 3, 4, and 6.

A Technomancer with all the possible initiative bossters in VR would go on every single phase.

Its important to note however that any character can use movement on every single pass. To simplfy movement ive adjusted it with the following:

Dwarves Walk 1M/pass, Run 2M/pass
Trolls Walk 3M/pass, Run 6M/Pass
Humans/Orks/Elves Walk 2M/pass and Run 4M per pass.

Please note that you can only move when your initiative score is called.

If you need anything else for info or want to hear more...drop me a message.

What?

I can move on every pass, but only on the passes my score gives me?

I think he means that you can move on every Initiative Pass when the Initiative score you rolled is called, but can only take Simple and Complex Actions on the Initiative Passes determined by the chart.

I've never had a problem with SR initiative even 2e initiative. Not everyone has to shine equally in combat. The street sam rarely whines about how crappy he does when its gather information time and time for negotiations. Its like I can't escape 4e D&D every where I turn people are fine with every imbalance in the game except combat imbalance.

Correct, thats exactly what I mean. This way you dont get odd stuttered movement and its measurable across all passes

God I loved 2e where you got your full movement every pass you acted. Cybered up dudes should 6 million dollar man it without having to make ridiculous athletics checks.

Only issue I had in the game is the following...
1. Not every character should have multiple passes.
2. Every character who had a chance for multiple passes almost always went for as many as possible.
3. All players should have a chance to particiapte...its not about someone shining equally...its giving everyone a chance to play in the 'combat' section of the game...because usually once combat starts...it takes a while to resolve compared to other items which are usually resolved quickly.

In my game...even before this initiative change we recently insituted...out of 6 players...3 had 1 pass, 1 had 2, 1 had 3, and the mage had between 3 and 4 on average. This propsed house rule we use seems to have given other players a chance while still allowing those who buy the warez/spells/powers for initiative to still gain a significant edge.

I wasn't happy with the set-in-stone-ness of SR4's new initiative. I really preferred the way 3rd edition worked for that particular part of hte game. But the new system was different enough that you couldn't jsut lift the old initiative and plug it into the new game. Mind you, I overall prefer SR4 to SR3 and think the whole system moves a LOT easier. Kudos to the designers. Anyway, to bring back a little of the old randomness, here is what I did:

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.
* It uses the threshhold concept that is a major core to the game.


Myself and my players enjoyed bringing back a little more randomness to the number of Init passes. I posted this method a while back and several other GM's said they were considering it for their game. Feel free to try it out and experiment. And let me know how it works out for you!

Vlad

1. I agree.
2. Our Saturday games fast guys seem to get 3ips. Most others 1IP. Mages might eventually have 2-3IPs. But I believe on being harsh on spell locks(sustaining focuses, I loved when I could channel a fireball through them)
3. Even with 1 IP players can contribute in a fight, probably a lot more than the sam does during gather info periods. While a combat may take longer than a negotiation, it is overall a smaller % time of our games. This is due to the lesser frequency of fights.


Your system is fine, I don't think it is needed, but it still allows some level of extra speed which to me is very shadowrun. Weirdly enough I am playing in a Sunday game where we removed IPs. Its been fine so far, though I will note all the characters had 3IPs anyways since we were down our non combat guys. We recently picked up a player who is playing a mage, his effective increased IPS to what he'd normally have hasn't been an issue since he is a non-combat mage and only has stun bolt for attacking others. I think if he gets stunball the rest of us will look like suck since we all go basically the same speed.

For those that care 3es initiative system was in fact in some ways harsher on Multiple IPs than 4e. You had a combat pool for the combat turn, so you were not at your full pool dice for every pass. In 4e they got rid of a combat pool, and your pool is stat+skill. To mimic the pool being spread out, you could have the # of dice contributed from attributes diminish over IPs.

I've been contemplating a different initiative pass system for a while, but never had a chance to test it out.

Every character gets two simple actions. For each extra initiative pass, you get an additional action. up to a total of five.

On your turn, you may take one action, simple or complex. The rest are saved as reactions. You may then react to any other character's actions by taking an action of your own.

I was then thinking of making certain defenses require actions, such as parrying. In the case of parrying, you could then apply net hits as extra dice to an immediate attack, so long as you still had actions left.

Lastly, because this makes melee combat less abstract, I'd make a melee attack be a simple action.

We stole quite a bit from T2k (yay the 80s ).

Here's how it goes:

Every Round is divided into 4 Phases, On the first pass initiative is rolled normally and everyone gets to act. Second pass is only for ppl with 2 or more IPs, 3rd for 3 or more and 4th for 4 IPs.
You can declare actions every time you have a pass, but it's executed in every phase thereafter until your next pass comes up. For instance a gangmember with 1 IP might say he runs to the door and then he spends phases 1,2,3 and 4 running to said location using a quarter of his movement each phase. When he declares he shoots that orc he will do so each phase unless the target moves out of sight or drops dead. He may also declare he runs over and punches that troll street sam and will then do so upon reaching his location. When the troll has more IP's he may react to what the ganger does and either move out of the way, omgwtfbbq the pesky guy with his streetline special or do whatever else comes to mind.

IMHO that way we're way closer to what should count as faster reflexes as opposed to quickfire guns and run speed augmentations. Also it makes unaugmented people more of a threat.



Oops yes, I forgot to get back to you, sorry for that.
We didn't experience any of the problems people over here suggested, like making the gameplay slower and such. (counting the hits on one roll more then usual doesn't make much of a difference)
One thing that was really nice about your system was that it stopped the 'arms race', ie players didn't see IP bonuses as such a necessity, one took reaction enhancers over wired reflexes, another one chose to use edge when the situation gets a little more demanding.
All in all we saw that as an improvement over RAW.

The reason we didn't stick with it was that we were thinking about making the gameplay a bit grittier and to get some things we deemed odd out of the game.

I've also posted this in other threads, but here is how I've adjusted init. This adjustment is a conversion of a SR3 houserule from when they first started with Init Passes.

I feel that everyone should have a chance to participate, as stated above, but I also feel that characters that spend big essence or cred getting extra init passes should also get something other than just acting again after someone else. That being said I've simply rearranged the IP.

I do IP 4, then 1, then 3, then 2.

Doing it this way those REALLY fast characters will get a full IP before everyone else (if you've got +3 IP I think thats fair). After the ridiculous speed IP everyone goes. This has been working great for my group and has the fast guys happy as well as the unaugmented guys.

Two options I like are:

Give everyone an extra pass. The amount of ownage that your +2 IP Sam or Adept throws out isn't a ridiculous amount larger than normal people.

Give everyone +1 IP. Your IP stat actually determines the number of Simple Actions you can take (you still only get 1 Complex Action, and lose all your Simples for it) in a CT. Everyone gets one Action Phase, and only one. Again, this has the same effect as the above system in terms of the relative importance of extra IP. As a side effect, this also averts the Suppressive Fire issue with multiple Action Phases.

Has it really been 2 months?

I mentioned this to my GM once and he said, "but they go first in the order anyway, what's the point?" However, it's not that they get a full pass before anyone goes, they get two full passes before anyone else: IP 4 and their part of IP 1 (more passes: higher initiative, higher init, more dice and bigger base).

It is likely that they would go first based on init, but not guaranteed. In fact, a point of edge by someone else, and they aren't. Now, it could be that my games aren't completely min/maxed games, but this system works for us. A character with 4 IP is pretty rare, and most of the beefed up characters have at most 3. I think that spending those extra 2 Essence points warrants this bonus (bear in mind I am the GM for the game).

I didn't say it didn't work, I just said that my GM thought it was pointless.