So, unless I am doing something wildly incorrect, a Simple Action sprint check, taken twice, can let an athletic - not even necessarily augmented - character approach 35 mph+ without too much trouble.

So what have you all done about this absurdity? Ignored it? Allowed only one meat-body movement per turn?

25 Meters per turn

Olympic Athlete:

6 agility 6 athletics +2 specialization in running

14 dice average 1/3 sucesses: 4.5 = 9 meters per turn

Two simple actions = 18 meters per turn total bonus

43 meters per turn = 14.33 meters per second

14.33 meters per second = 32 mph

Fasted human in the 5th world: ~26mph

Yep, this is a hinky running system. it allows an non-modified person with max natural attribute/skill to average a speed higher than the fastest human alive today.

If you reduced this to 1 meter per turn per success bonus, then you get about 25 mph for an olympic athelete, with up to upper 30s mph with drastic successes (ie Karma).

And? It is ignored. Does it really matter?

Just consider a combat turn during 4 seconds (one for each possible IP) instead of 3. This alone removes the weirdness of sprinting.

Eh, also i am not convinced that is how they ment it. But yeah... that's like it is written.

In my game you can sprint, make ONE test and add the speed, and you have to "keep it up" by always spending a simple action in each IP, no added bonus. Also i am thinking about forcing a sprint for the whole CT. You know... no one can just stop running just like that (except for running into a wall i guess).

Really the problem is that the Movement Rates are already too damn high. Walking is about 7.5mph, and Running is about 18.5 mph. For most people that would make Walking in Shadowrun a pretty quick jog, and Running a flat-out sprint.

It would be more realistic if you more or less halved the movement rates: 5 and 15. Anything over that would require a Running test (keep that 2m per hit). That's about 4 and 11 mph. Remember that at Walking speed you're taking no penalties to your actions.

That way an average well-practiced runner (let's say STR 3 and Running 3, or ~2 successes) would be able to pull about 14mph with one Sprint action, and 17mph with two.

At STR 6 and Running 6 (world class), you're looking at ~4 successes, or 17mph with one Sprint action, and 23mph with two.

So a world class sprinter who is the peak of human running perfection could conceivably hit or beat the 26mph mark.

For the regular walking/running, I think fast hustle to short sprint. The movement rates given are the top end, as nothing stops you from going slower.

The thing that bugs me is the movement rate being spread over an entire Combat Turn. Aside from Nameless in 2nd Ed (opening story, considering going through a crowd at 80 kph or thereabouts) I just like the idea of a boosted sam' tearing it up. For the rest, I'm willing to consider it an abstraction.

I'm more concerned with playability than realism, in cases like this. Personally I'd much rather see players able to move their characters too far than not far enough (take a look at the wacky movement rates in Dark Heresy, for example, if you want to advance while firing, shoot then fall back, etc, etc, you slow to a crawl!). It's more fun for a game to err on the side of moving too fast, I believe, especially when dealing with the "better than human" undercurrent of many Shadowrun characters. It feels pretty awesome when a superhumanly athletic Street Samurai or Adept is able to scramble around and evade the bad guys, IMHO.

It would be simple enough to make that tiny tweak to a combat turn's length (as mentioned above, bumping it to a 4 or 5 second combat round), if it's really an issue that breaks the game for you.

Hmmm, I never read it that the bonuses from subsequent checks would stack, but rather overlap. I figured the only point of spending another action that turn to check again would be to make up for a poor original roll.

Ignored it. Sometimes in games, realism takes a backseat to ease-of-use and overall fun. As I've said before: This isn't real life. It's Shadowrun, it's supposed to be BTL.


If a player of mine ever did more than one sprint-check in a combat turn, I'd do some basic realism adjustments to the rules. I.e. you need to make endurance checks of some sort to keep running that fast.

Same here. It looks like the intent of the rule is to replace a Run free action with a Sprint simple action, roll the dice, and move faster than your standard running rate.

If you tweak the combat turn length, you start to run into the problem of two actions taking too long to be realistic.

Ten meters is a long way to walk for one combat turn, with no penalty. If you're in an indoor environment, 10 meters could easily be room to room to room. At my apartment it's about 10 meters from the front door to the bedroom, almost a straight shot, and it takes me 6 seconds to walk it without slamming into a piece of furniture. If I had to actually take corners, it'd take me a little longer.

Not that I'd complain too much about the realism. It's more that the high Walking speed means that people hardly ever seem to run unless they're in big open spaces. Indoors, 10 meters will get you to just about anywhere you want to be.

I just checked back in the SR3 book since I was curious. Walking speed was Quickness in meters per combat turn, and running speed was 3 times that for humans. It's odd that the SR4 designers would amp up movement so much.

Keep in mind that 25m / 3 seconds is the Shadowrun running rate of an Infirm, Incompetent (Running), Strength 1 character with no augmentation, magic, or other enhancements.

Pretty much this. My beef is that characters rarely need to run (and thus take movement penalties) on a regular basis because in realistic environments 10m is a pretty long way.

That's the real point for me: movement rates never matter at all, especially outside of vehicles. It's a good thing, because you don't have to worry about these bent rules.

They matter for melee.

Being able to close distance across a block in 3 seconds is the only thing keeping melee in the game.

I disagree. Melee *isn't* still in the game (har har), and you're supposed to sneak up on them anyway.

Having the Troll sprint across a third of a football field and slice you in half with a combat axe in the time it takes you to shoot two bullets is a little ridiculous, though. Especially if he gets Initiative on you and you just sit there and go durrr the whole time.

My ideal basic movement rates would be something more like: 5/15 for Humans (etc), 4/12 for Dwarfs, and 8/24 for Trolls.

My point was just that's it's not a miniatures game and (in my personal experience) distances are only used to ballpark firearm ranges and *once* for a vehicle situation. If we played it as a minis/map game, I'd be more worried about the 'runner troll' and the other obviously broken movement rules.

I can see that it's unrealistic. But it's the same rule for PCs and NPCs, so it's not unfair, really.

And how often should sprinting come up? Entering melee combat with someone shooting at you from a housing block distance is absurd.

Melee isn't for long-range engagements. It's for running around inside buildings, which tend to have limited-size rooms that you can easily cover in 1-2 rounds. It's for when you bump into enemies.

You can only Sprint once per Round.
because as soon as you change from running to sprinting you can't change it a second Time (only Improve it with a second Check,If the Result is better you take that better result)

He who dances only once per Post
Medicineman

Movement rates are still too fast.

Well 25 meters / rd and 3 expected successes (Pool 8-10 Dice ) thats about 32 Meters/Second
Very Good but not yet World Record
even 4 Successes(Pool 12 ) is still in teh "Ok Range"

And yes ; walking range is too fast

with a very good Dance
Medicienamn

No one from CGL is going to come to your house and assault you if you lower 'em for your game. Honest.

Yeah, heard that one before.

I'm pretty sure they have Lesbian Elf Stripper Ninjas on staff just for such a purpose!

Your example comes out to just over 23mph, which is only about 3mph shy of the world record.



They break into my house at night and move the furniture around :/

So our characters run around like the Space Marines used to do before they ate all the pies, eh?

Yeah, but that's just to keep ya sharp. It's got nothing to do with house rules.

So you know someone who runs the 100 meter Dash in about 3.13 Seconds? 32 Meters/Second Breaks the world record by almost 3 times...

Incorrect. While there is some ambiguity on exactly how sprinting works, there is no restriction on how many times you may make a sprinting check outside of how many actions you have, and each hit increases your movement rate.


Did you even look at my post? I did all the calculations for you. A high-school track student (dice pool 6) can, Rules as Written, break the world record. Consistently.

An incompetent, infirm, minimum strength human can break world record running speeds.

I am not so sure about the Incompetent, Infirm Individual (they are not even allowed a roll after all), but your point is well taken. I am not sure why the 32 Meters/Second Speed is not registering on people though. That is a 3.13 Second 100 meter Dash, which is an insane speed, and is about 3x the speed of the Current World Record Holder.

It's registering, we've just already acknowledged that movement speeds are too high to be realistic, but we don't care. If you want to lower 'em, lower 'em. Me, I'll stick with playability and err on the side of my players being more awesome, not less.

See, I agree with you Critias... I, personally, have absolutely no issues with movement Speeds, regardless of how high they are. I know that 32 meters/Second is ludicrously fast... So what...

My point was to show our resident Medicine Man that his calculations were way off for determination of World Record Speeds.

Peace...

Technically Medicineman did make a mistake, but his conclusion isn't really wrong. If you look, he changed 25m/rnd into 32m/s, but a round is really 3 seconds. So with 3 successes you're looking at speeds of 31m/rnd which is about 10.5m/s. That puts a 100m dash at a more reasonable 9.5s. Still record-breaking, but not mind-bogglingly so.

I'm just going to point out again that in the previous edition, walking rate = Quickness and running rate = Quickness x3 (x2 for Dwarfs).

This meant an average human had a movement rate of 3/9. It also meant that, exactly the opposite of SR4, Trolls were not some sort of vehicle-outrunning sprint gods, due to their Quickness penalty. It also means that movement rates roughly tripled between editions.

I know, new edition, new rules, but not only is this change silly, it's huge. And not one of those regular huge changes like everything now being wireless. It's one of those changes that alters basic expectations about the world. And physics. And human capabilities.

Even in an incredibly unrealistic game like D&D, the walking rate is 3.4mph, and the flat-out-sprinting-with-a-feat rate is 17mph.

It's just weird. They made a mistake.

31.32 meters per round is equivalent to the world record 100m dash time.

@Tymeaus
Yup Sorry 31 Meters per Round
25 meter / Rd+ 6Meters/ Rd = 31 Meter/ Rd
@Muspellheimer
Hmmm ....at first your run and with a running Check you change from running to sprinting...but as soon as you sprint you can't transform a sprint into a sprint because you are allready sprinting.Thats why you can make the Check only once per Round
(and everything else (more than one check) leads only to ridiculous results)

with a running Dance
Medicineman

Yeah, I was just pointing out that Medicineman should have said 32m per round, not 32m per second. The first is far more believable than the second.

Given the way running records have progressed it's not unreasonable to expect that the 100m world record will be faster 60 years in the future as well. (In the 1960's the fastest people were around the 10s mark, now the fastest are around 9.7s.)

Sure, but each 0.1s is going to be a big accomplishment. We've pushed it forward 0.3s in the last 50 years.

But that's not the point. The average person still isn't going to come any closer to the old 1960's record, no matter what decade you're looking at. All we've done is push the outside edge of the envelope. Most people are still going to be in the middle.

Doesn't help that the average person has a bit more around the middle than they did in 1960, too.

You have been around long enough you should know this - it is extremely rare I am wrong about mechanics, so it is advised you find a quote supporting you before attempting to "correct" me. In other words, read the damn rules..




Note: I do not currently have access to SR4A, but have looked it up in the past & do not remember any changes.

You're right that it doesn't offer any sort of limiting factor to spending simple actions to sprint.

This of course leads to the further absurdity that someone with, say, Wired Reflexes 3 can make 8 sprint tests. If you can pull off, for example, 4 hits per test (dice pool ~16) you can add 64m to your running rate. That would be 89m/turn, or just over 66mph. Not quite enough to travel back in time, for that you'd need about 14 more hits, but it's still pretty ridiculous.

No more ridiculous than Wired Reflexes (or Move By Wire) Rating 3 already is...

Well, if they weren't from CGL, then who the frag WERE they?

Vlad

I've been around ,You've been around. I can make mistakes, but so can You too
But I never intended to write that You're wrong about the Mechanics more that your point of viewing the Rules is from a ....wrong angle
When I read the German SR4A on Page 177
there is a paragraph called Sprinting
And it says that a Charackter can try to increase his running speed with a simple action ,etc etc
I didn't find any sentence about additional Tests meaning additional Meters per Turn (this means for Me:1 Check, 1 raise of the running speed per Round and thats all)
I hope You agree with me that 6 Checks per Round with 4 Successes each and a speed of 73 Meters per Round for a Human ist ridicoulos
(just like Epicedion wrote )

HokaHey
Medicineman

HokaHey Indeed...

FASA

The plot thickens...

Sprinting requires a simple action. If you have a simple action available, you can sprint. Unless you can provide a rules quote specifically providing additional restrictions (such as SS weapons), that is bullshit.

Oh, & I know exactly what this means from a realism viewpoint; look at my first fucking post in this thread.