Still new to Shadowrun (4th) so figured I'd ask the question rather than try to find a answer in the book. Can you split your movement up during a combat round? For instance could I move five meters, fire a shot and than continue moving to a better location. If I can, where does it cover it in the book so I can share the knowledge with the other players.

Not only can you, it's the only way to make sense out of moving through multiple Initiative Passes. Unless you have a Hacker or Technomancer character that's maxed up to 5 IPs, simply divide your run/walk distance by 4 and move that many meters per IP (even if you don't have an action).

Here's a link to a thread where we talked about this about a month ago:

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?showtopic=29033

I house ruled mouvement so that I always have 4 IPs in a CT (note that the max IPs I have in the team is 3, so it fits well). With that in mind, I also changed basic race movement like this:
- Human, elf, ork: walk 3m, run 7m (that's per IP)
- Dwarf: walk 2m, run 5m
- Troll: walk 4m, run 10m

Granted, this boosted some race's movement, but everyone is affected equally (both the players and the opposition). So far (we had 2 sessions only), this helped us keep a structured combat.

Hmmm, a Troll can walk 100m in aprox 19 seconds. Since 10 seconds is a really good 100 meter dash time in RL...

But SR is always wonky when it comes to that sort of thing. So it's probably safe to ignore this; I just wanted to point it out.

Drop run rate for trolls to 9m per IP. I think I originally used a 2.5 factor, but by correcting that to 9m (which ends up at 36m per CT vs 35m under the original rules) will be better.

Thanks for pointing this one out.

Personally I like the idea of splitting up the movement rate for ALL characters over the IPs if they get those IPs or not. That way the 1 IP character actually gets to do something the other 4 IPs.

The only problem I see with this is it allows them to react to things they shouldn't... like someone throws a grenade in the spot they were heading. Well, IPs are a measurement of your ability to react in a 3 second period, so if the grenade was thrown after your last IP you shouldn't really be allowed to change the direction your running, but then that means the whole exercise is pointless since the low IP player is now just roboticly moving his player to where he determined earlier... why even bother?

I haven't found a good solution to this yet.

They can always spend an Edge and gain an IP.

I don't see any problems with setting it up so that in the turn the 1 IP person wants to move from A to B, and he moves there by X m each IP and not being allowed to change it. You said yourself they shouldn't be able to react anyway.

What you get out of this robotic movement is 1 IP characters not being able to dash across a room in a single IP while a 4 IP person has to be in the open for several IPs as he slowly dashes across the room. Basically they'll be in the middle of the room for some IPs like the 4IP person would be, so the quick opponents have a chance to shoot at him while he is running, instead of only when he is at his endpoint (At which point he is going to be under cover or out of sight)

Yeah, I agree breaking it up is still the better way to go. And like etherial said, if they want to change direction to avoid something they can spend an edge to get another IP. I was just hoping I could use it to make combat a bit more interesting for the low IP people too, since they sit on the sidelines for quite a while with a large group.