Ok. Example on page 149.

Twitch the Elf has 3 IP and can run 25m/turn. So "he'll move 8m per IP and, if he stopped in the middle to help a friend up, he'd be moving only 16m this turn."

That just makes no sense at all to me. If we assume that helping up his friend is a Complex Action, there doesn't seem to be any rule that says he has to stop moving for a Phase in order to perform it. In fact, as I understand it, if his friend was 25m away he could have moved all 25m in his first IP and then helped the friend up as the Complex Action, leaving him with two IP worth of actions left but no movement.

Also, can you perform your actions before your move, after your move, during your move, or any of these?

Another example problem I thought of that also confuses me. SlowGuy has 1 IP and FastGuy has 2 IP. BadGuy has 1 IP. Initiative order goes SlowGuy, FastGuy, BadGuy.

Case 1: SlowGuy is behind cover and wants to head to other cover 10m away. He walks 10m in IP 1. Done. FastGuy does the same. But because he has 2 IP, he ends up moving only 5m in IP 1, which means he's out of cover when BadGuy gets his phase on IP 1, and BadGuy shoots at him. So FastGuy gets shot at and SlowGuy doesn't. What??

Case 2: My response to Case 1 was to say that FastGuy can use all 10m of his movement in his first IP if he wants (which is where my interpretation of the Twitch example came from). But here's a trickier case. SlowGuy wants to move between the cover points and shoot at BadGuy in the process. He has a single shot pistol. He declares the action of firing in the middle of his move and gets his shot off. FastGuy wants to move between the cover points and use his superior speed to fire _twice_ at BadGuy. This should take him the same amount of time as it took SlowGuy to fire once, but it seems there is no way for him to do it without BadGuy getting a shot off at him in the process, even though SlowGuy took the same amount of time and couldn't be targeted.

The only fix to this is what you as GM decide.

I, personally, don't usually bother with movement, as it is almost never important. But in the cases it is, I use the highest number of IP's, and use that to determine what each person moves during each IP. If characters want to delay actions for another IP, they can.

You are misunderstanding something here:
Max movement is divided by max inipasses.
So even if you have more ini passes, you do not run faster.
you just have more opportunities to do something WHILE you run.
In the example with the slow guy, the fast guy and the bad guy, the slow and the fast would, of course, both be in cover.
But the slow guy used his one IP to get there and does not get to do anything else this turn. Fast guy gets to do more stuff.

So when you get an active phase you can either move OR take action, not both?

Movement has certain actions assigned to it i think. I am not sure though.

Your movement is totaled across all IPs (in one Turn). You can take special actions (Sprint, Run) during IPs, but normal movement is not an action.

So you can move your whole allowance in your first IP if you want to?

No. Movement rate is per Turn, not IP. If necessary for precision, you can divide it *evenly* between all IPs. This isn't necessary all *your* IPs, either. If you have one IP, and Bob has 4, then there are still 4 IPs in that Combat Turn. You move 1/4 your rate in each one (whether or not *you* act on all 4 IPs in the Turn).

Sprinting (only possibly while Running, which is a whole-Turn mode) muddies things somewhat. Alas.

Ok. This makes some sense, but seems to result in an even stranger paradox. It means that SlowGuy can get shot at as he crosses a 10m open area if FastGuy is present, because he'll be in the open in BadGuy's turn in IP 1 due to FastGuy's presence forcing 2 IPs. But if SlowGuy smashed FastGuy over the head and knocked him out to make him non-participant in the combat, there would be only one IP, and SlowGuy could move his full 10m in one action, giving BadGuy no chance to fire at him.

It is indeed strange. It's 'fair' (or, realistically unfair) when you think about it, though. With 2 IPs, Bob is just *faster*. He can easily shoot Slow-Joe in mid-run. If Bob's not there to shoot, then it hardly matters when the Combat Turn (which is always the same ~3 seconds, regardless of how you slice it) 'ends'. Right?

If it would help, you could always divide all Turns into 4 (or 5); technically, those IPs are always there, but we ignore them when no one acts on them. Either way, you're moving the same distance in the same number of seconds.

Right. But my problem is that FastGuy ("Bob") is SlowGuy's _ALLY_. BadGuy still only has 1 IP; he's no faster than SlowGuy. It's just that FastGuy's presence forces there to be 2 IPs which means that when BadGuy gets his phase, at the end of IP 1, SlowGuy is only halfway through his movement, instead of having completed it (as he would have done if his ally FastGuy were absent, as there would only need to be a 1 IP)

Yup there is that particular problem, which you could solve with house rules or something.

That's not really a glitch, as I said. If SlowGuy is running to cover during the Combat Turn, the BadGuy *should* get a chance to shoot him. His movement is *not* complete until the Turn is complete. It would never finish when his own action phase did (unless he chose to *stop* moving early). It's not 'SlowGuy does everything, then BadGuy goes', for movement.

If it has you chapped over it, just make sure your players are okay with it and make initiative passes resolve in order, that is to say the guy with 1 IP waits until the guy with 4 IP has finished three of them before you even compare initiative results. That is the realistic way of doing it, however your players might bitch and moan when they are the ones getting screwed. The reason it is set up as it is, is so that everyone gets to go before getting hosed. Your game, your table, do as you please. Personally I would simply split movement for everyone into 4 phases per round. You continue moving on passes you don't go on. Solves your spatial problem and keeps the initiative set up the way it is in RAW, though I think my idea might be cool for a particularly brutal kind of game.

we solved it otherwise. Not perfect either so but works at our table, because it doesn't come up often. Every character can move 25m per round in total and can divide this number however he wants. Some chars might appear to run faster than others, but on a 3sec average they're all equally fast.

This, basically. The absolutely easiest way to avoid headaches when thinking about movement rates and multiple passes is actually pretty simple: Just realize/assume that all four initiative passes exist, whether or not anyone can act in them.
This solves the issue of an 1 pass people actually being faster than people with multiple passes. Instead of taking their entire Combat Turn's worth of movement at once, they take 1/4 of it when the start moving, and keep going a bit more as the passes progress.(1/4 more on pass 2, 1/4 more on pass 3, the last fraction on pass 4, then its a new turn)

Walking does not take an action at all.
Running takes a Free action, and has some dice pool bonuses/penalties for attacks and defense.
Sprinting is a simple action that adds 2 meters per hit to your Running rate(so it doesn't help if you are Walking). Its the most annoying to deal with, if you're dividing movement by passes. I would just assume that each hit adds a half meter(2/4) immediately, instead of adjusting later movement because of it.


Another decent houserule I've seen involves changing the length of a combat turn to be Four seconds instead of three - that means one second per pass, and also slightly adjusting the movement tables to be divisors of four. (Human/elf/ork goes to 8/24, dwarves to 8/20, trolls to either 12 or 16(walking)/32). It cuts down slightly on the 'powerwalking shadowrunner is faster than olympic runner' syndrome, but also makes the combat math a lot easier to think about on the fly when everyone has their per-IP-movement rates readily available.

We did something similar. We set the movement rates at multiples of 4 and decided that everyone always had 4 IP's for movement purposes. It does make a bit more book-keeping however.

Is there a reason why you can't say that someone with more than one IP can move as far as they like in IP, as long as they don't exceed the overall limit in the Combat Turn?

So FastGuy can move 10m on his first IP if he wants to, but will then be unable to move on his second - and if he decides to run at that time will only be able to move 1.5m (23m run speed, / 2 because he is only in run mode for one of 2 phases, - the 10m he has already moved = 1.5m)

Does that break anything else?

I'm not sure I like the "there are always 4 IP" rules since that means that BadGuy can shoot either of them when they are 2.5m along their movement, and paradoxically could NOT shoot them if they were out of cover at the end of their move.

Also, can you do actions before a move, after a move, either, or both?

He should be able to get the chance to shoot them, in my opinion. They still have things they can do, and the next turn will be in cover.

It doesn`t matter. The system doesn`t care about what you do for movement, as long as the penalties you rack up apply.

There is a problem with this. Running still takes actions.
Its unfair to force the faster guy(the one with more IPs) to spend more actions(free actions ARE valuable) to move the same distance if he wants to start and stop.
Fortunately, its an easy fix: Running and Walking now BOTH don't take actions. You decide which mode of movement you're taking when you move, and apply the appropriate penalties for the rest of your action phase.

Your bolded example: What? That doesn't make sense.
If someone is out of cover, and its someone elses turn, then yes, they can be shot.
I think you are misreading into things. There are always 4 IPs, but only for calculating movement. It doesn't automatically give everyone the ability to act in them.

Right, but if there are always 4 IPs and BadGuy can only act in one of them, then the only chance he has to shoot anyone else that turn will be in IP 1 (ie, when they're 2.5m along the movement). They'll finish moving and arrive at their destination in IP 4 and BadGuy won't be able to shoot them at that time because he can't act then.

Won't a guy who wants to run for an entire Combat Turn have to spend all his free actions maintaining that mode, no matter what? The only difference I guess is that with the method I suggested, if he moved 23m in his first IP this would commit him to spending his later free actions on maintaining Run mode.

So he gets a shot off. What's the big deal? If the PCs are "walking" to the cover, that seems a little, overconfident to me, at least roleplaying wise. In reality, if I was shooting you, and you walked out from cover, to go to more cover, it makes sense that you risk beng shot. If you bolt, you might make it, then act when you can. Spend edge for another pass if you want.

Under "as many IPs", FastGuy gets shot at 8m instead of 5m if he runs, but he still gets shot. SlowGuy wastes movement he doesn't need.

Under "always 4", FastGuy and SlowGuy both get shot at 2.5m if they don't run or 5.75m if they do.

Spending Edge doesn't help. The only way it can help is if they go _after_ BadGuy in IP 1, move out after he's spent his action, then use Edge to go first in IP 2 and get to the cover before his next one. But that seems a bit specific.

So, why do something that's going to create a penalty if it doesn't help you?

The thing is, turn-based systems are abstract. Any changes you can add will still be abstract in other ways, and just make it more complicated or cause issues in other situations. Combat in SR is a very varied system, with melee, ranged, magic, spirits, decking, rigging, etc. There are going to be areas that feel a little flat.

When you keep looking at combat turns as 3 seconds, and not X number of passes, it isn't so jarring. People are running, ducking, shooting, dodging constantly most of the time. Having more passes just means you react quicker and so have more meaningful opportunities in the three seconds that other folks might not have.

You've come up with a situation that exposes this particular flaw of an abstract system, but there are many such flaws all over the rules. If it's an issue for you, make a house rule and press on

Who are you trying to help? Personally, I think you should do what feels right to you. I like the fact that PCs should think before they act. In reality, if I was either of those PC's, I would never try to go for cover over that exposed an area if I already had cover. Also, the PC's shouldn't know who get's to act, in what order, and a GM could delay action on the NPC until someone reveals himself. I would.

"Stick and Move! Stick and Move! ... ... ... DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOODGE!!!"

The best solution here is to simply not think about it too hard.

In most cases, players know where they need to move and that shouldn't change much during the middle of a combat turn. Movement isn't (often) "I go 3 meters then turn and go 2 meters and then... ." Rather, it's "I run to cover," or "I charge into melee combat," or "I go out of cover, over this obstacle, and as far down the hallway as I can."

If you try to cut movement down into IP segments, you're just going to drive yourself and your players crazy. Moving one or two meters during each initiative pass is simply too granular and will take too long.

What I've found is that the combat system is abstract enough to handle abstract movement. Let someone say "I'm running to cover" and if they can make it, they get the benefits of the cover that IP. But then allow them to change their minds about their final destination on the next IP, and bend that line of movement a little, so long as it's not egregious. And again on the next IP, until they run out of IPs. As long as they ultimately don't go farther than they have movement (and as long as they don't do anything ridiculous, like head for cover and then decide they really wanted to go the other direction altogether), it turns out okay. In the middle of a given turn, any inconsistencies about exactly when and where things happen can be chalked up to the fast-paced confusion of combat.

This also gives a little bit of a movement advantage to the people with the most IPs, since they get more ability to fine-tune where they are at the end of the combat turn.

When you ditch the mentality that Shadowrun combat has to be extremely precise (and break movement down into ultra-fine segments), you end up with cooler things happening and happier players.

1) This is wrong. Delaying actions are useful, and you should read up on their rules.
This is not a hard concept to grasp: I hold my fire until I see someone to shoot. Someone with only 1 ip is perfectly able to choose to act in a later IP.

Yeah, you don't need to houserule a system that isn't broken, just because you don't understand that there's a system in place that already allows what you're trying to do.

Teleporting 1IP people is a problem with the -basic- movement rules, not one the suggestions we are discussing.

Usually, SR4 is not played as a tactical miniatures game, so this stuff rarely matters. *If* you find yourself in a situation where a player says, 'nuh uh, I ran 20m in IP #1, he *can't* shoot me!'… then just remind them that's stupid and shoot them. A rare problem with a simple solution.

the way I run IP.

I take the Max IP, and divide movement rate by that. (so If someone has 3IP, I divide all movement by 3).

If you have 1 IP:
IP1: Start/stop move, Action, Hold Action.
IP2: You keep moving in the direction you picked, heading towards your end point (if it's less than a full run) or you can use a held action.
On IP3 You keep moving towards end point or you can use a held action.

if you have 2 IP
IP1: Start/stop move, Action, Hold Action
IP2: Start/stop move, Action, Hold action
IP3: Use Held action

if you have 3IP
IP1: do what you want
IP2: Do what you want
IP3: do what you want

If you had someone with 4IP then you divide everyones movement by 4.

Basically if you have 1IP you only move so far in 1 IP, but you can't change your movement/react to later IP's unless you actually have actions.

Heh...
Problem Solved...

It's a Free action to start moving, and set an end point. If you wish to change your endpoint, you need another free action. That seems logical.

And Clearly if you have a held action, you can carry that into later IPs. Why wouldn't you be able to, that's stupid.

All movement and actions by players in whatever IP are Declarations of Intent. PC with more IP get to declare more stuff.

Resolution is done by the GM as to what happens during the course of a Combat Turn.

Just because a player says "My 1 IP guy instantly goes 20m and is behind cover" doesn't mean they instantly get teleported 20 m while no one else gets to act simply because that is their single declared action. For the duration of the turn they are traveling that 20 meters. So the multiple pass character is acting during the 1 IP characters movement. At some point during the 1IP declared movement, fast guy gets to act.

Divide into Declaration and Resolution. Players declare actions, GM resolves them.

I did read up on that, but even that by RAW seems to limit him to being targeted at the halfway mark, because the delaying rules say you can only delay until "the next" initiative pass - not till any later initiative pass.

Also, when you delay do you have to delay your entire Phase? Or, can you start moving on IP 1 and then delay the "action" part of your Phase until IP 2, or do you have to move and act in a single IP? This is another problem I've had as I'm not clear on whether you move and then act, act and then move, choose one or the other or can split the movement up.

Well I guess that sort of answers the question I've had floating in my head for a while, because the stats and system seem to make it resemble a tactical minis game (with the massive tables of precise gun ranges, etc). After all, saying that a person can walk 10m in a turn seems to imply to saying that if they need to move 10.1m they must run and take penalties, and thus the difference between those two needs to be tracked.

But the follow-up question to that is that if it's not actually meant to be done with these detailed systems then how is it done? Too many of the answers seem to come down to the GM making all the decisions. But I do know my players will want some kind of consistent understanding in advance of what's going to be going on. Otherwise they'll say I might just as well decide who is going to win the fight and save some dice wear. I like the "always 4 passes" idea but it does seem quite complex, it reminds me of the original Champions or SFB active segment systems which I guess is what this has been based on.

Is it normal to do actions in a "PBEM turn" sense, where everyone declares their intents in initiative order then the GM resolves all the actions at once? I can see why that would help but at the same time it seems to contradict RAW which says explicitly that those with higher initiative scores _act_ before those with lower initiative scores (not just declare, act).

There can be situations where everyone declaring their actions at once could be detremental. FastGuy might kill BadGuy before SlowGuy acts, meaning that SlowGuy now has wasted actions (or would need to re-declare what he's doing if you allowed it). It would also mean that players lower in the Initiative wouldn't be able to react to something that happened higher in the Initiative order. For example, BadGuy uses an overhead crane to move something over top of SlowGuy and intends to drop it on him during the next Pass. If SlowGuy has already declared his actions at the start of the Pass, he's now in trouble since he would (in theory) need to stick with his previously declared action rather than diving out of the way to save his skin. I've always found it easier to just get action declaration when it's the individual player's turn. Then nobody needs to remember what they originally declared if the series of actions before them takes a little longer than expected and can react if things go differently than they had originally planned.

If you're going to HR that all turns have 4 passes, you may want to set it at five instgead. Then you don't have to change movement rates or rfework your entire system when a rigger, hacker, or technomancer gets 5 passes.

Well, in your case, he could abort to Full Defense, and dive out of the way.

hyphz, movement covers the whole Turn. You can move however you like during your actions, as long as the total doesn't go above the limit. (So, move-act-move, act-move, whatever.) Non-running is a non-action, so you don't have to worry about it. Running lasts the whole Turn, and it does affect rolls, so you do have to 'keep track'. It's pretty simple: 'are you running?'

If precision matters, then you have to divide the total—but in all other cases, you just roll with it. You can play it like miniatures, but I'd venture to say you shouldn't, and reiterate that I really think this is a rare case.

You do it to the level of precision you need. While the rule offer the ability to be very precise in small steps, the vast majority of the time you do not need to do it that way. Choose what level of precision you need to have the most fun. Some people choose to have meters of movement and mid IP actions matter, that's fun for them. When you need that, then you need to work at a high level of precision. Break it down into teh small steps.

When you don't need the steps, skip em. Choose the mode you want to play in, and adjust as needed.

When you read the rules, you'll notice that IP is actually described as Declare/Resolve, Movement is an entirely different section independent of the Turn Order, and Actions list, and that it says

"If a character mixed his modes of movement during a Combat
Turn and it becomes important to know exactly how far the character
moved in a particular pass, simply divide his Movement Rate by the
number of passes in that turn."

So in a single Phase, you can declare running, move to somebody 10m away, use a Complex Action to attack then in melee, then move 10m back again?

It's not precision I'm worried about, it's consistency and stability. I know my group will not like any suggestion that I am changing the rules on the fly for every situation. Also, if I do anything other than what's in the book it's my own responsibility. I really am having trouble with the idea that this game has been around for 20 years and yet does not have stable and agreed-on rules for something as fundamental as player movement! Surely there's an official standard somewhere?

AFAIK, yes… if there's just one IP in the whole Turn. You can mix any bits of movement into your actions. You can't take a Sprint action and a Complex action in the same IP, though (cuz that's too many actions).

I'm not sure what you're talking about at the end there. It's black and white in the book: you can move your Movement during a Turn, and *if* you need precise per-IP chunks, divide by total IPs (of everyone involved, so probably 4 or 5). The circumstances of 5 physical IPs are very rare, so 4 is usually fine. That's stable, official, and agreed on. If you wanted, you could always use the move/4 numbers, and make PCs declare each IP—this would be functionally identical to the normal 'simple' rules. Either way, people are moving the same distance, in the same time, with the same exposure to attacks, etc.

In the case of your 'Spring Attack' example, obviously precision is required. You would use per-IP distances, if anyone in the combat had more than just 1 IP/Turn.

This +1.

SR4.5 is an abstract game with a lot of detailed options, but it's definitely not meant to be a tactical miniatures game. Trying to resolve exactly where anyone is and what modifiers apply to them is a headache. The best thing to do is simply handwave a lot of it away: just tell them: "You're at short range for that gun" or "You have cover". If you're using a protractor and slide rule to plot out exact placement, you're just going to frustrate yourself.

I had a similar problem in SR3, but I haven't figured out how to best apply my house rule to SR4.5. Basically, actions were declared and resolved in reverse order. That's right, the slowest guy went first. The trick here was that people with higher scores could "seize the initiative" and interrupt someone else's action. The beauty of this system was that mages and other slow characters got involved in the combat right from the start, so they didn't wander off for soda while waiting for their pass to come up.

I haven't thought about how to apply this to SR4.5 because of a difference in the way turns work. But the basic idea is sound, I'm just not sure about precisely how to implement it.

Really hate those reverse/declare systems. So complex, and everyone feels like they're getting screwed. I understand the concept's appeal, but… oh well.

Well, I can understand that, and I'd like to be able to do it that way. But at the same time, if you're not supposed to think that through, how are you supposed to think about what to do?

I have a player group coming from D&D 4E. They do tend to be very tactical players. If they see that the rules given to them allow them to have a character dart out from behind cover, run 10 metres up to flank the bad guy, shoot him twice, then run back to where they originally were in a single Action phase, they'll want to do it. Now if I'm going to say they can't do that, that's fine, but they'll want a set of rules to work within that clearly state they can't do that and enable them to calculate what they can and can't do. If they have to run every action by me in advance then they'll feel they can't plan ahead or pull off surprise tactics and they'll be upset by that.

That plus the fact that I still don't understand the Twitch the Elf example from the book (I did ask about this at the start of the thread but it may have been missed) are really making me unsure about how the heck to run this, even though I'd really like to. Is there a full complete combat example somewhene?

Bad players, alas. But yes, the simple answer is that no one can spring attack, so they shouldn't feel bad. They can instead fire from cover… because they're using guns, not melee. Melee is stupid, and stupid runners die fast.

Melee has it's place. But, in a world of firearms, the person that brings a knife to a gunfight is either very, very good or an idiot.

Learn to tell the difference if you wish to survive.

Cover is your friend. Until the weapons come out point out the fact that you don't have any cover any longer, only concealment. (M2-HB, anyone?).

That makes sense, but melee suddenly doesn't look so stupid if you can kick the gun user in the head from 10 metres away without getting shot before, during, or after - which is why I mentioned that in my earlier post

If you are under 10m distance from somebody, chances are you will be there before a gun can be drawn/aimed your way . .