A question that came up in our game last night that for life of me, including searching through Man and Machines and the SR3 main book and also hefty google searches was the difference in speeds of drugs and toxins listed as Immediate and Instant.

The only thing I could find was in Man and Machines it states that a compound with a speed of instant applied via weapons is that it affects the target at the end of the combat turn. Groovy. So what about the speed of immediate?

Apologies if this has been answered here before, but like I said our group just couldn't find a definitive answer.

To be honest, I cannot find a RAW definitive answer on this either. Personally, I would take this as a typo/equivelent meaning and treat it as Instant.

Every drug takes time to take effect and end of the combart turn is damn fast. Cynide being my favourite fast acting poison, which I seem to remember is Instant.

The difference - in terms of RAW - is the time it takes until the affected character has to perform the damage resistance test ... although the seemingly synonymous terminology is somewhat confusing the difference is sometimes not negliable:

Immediate => In the very combat phase that he/she is hit with the toxin/drug/disease
Instantaneous => At the end of the combat turn during which the character was exposed to the doxin/drug/disease.

The real "bummer" there is that IIRC there's only one particular toxin family that by defaults acts at a speed of "Instantaneous" instead of "Immediate": the FUGU family. That particular toxin family was introduced in SR3 as part of the core rules where the rules actually lacked and form of differentiation between "Instantaneous" vs. "Immediate". Only after M&M this differentation came into existance, where the text explicitly references "Instantaneous" being the speed that delays the onset of effects until end of the Combat Turn.



I guess it won't get more definite than this. The ugly truth is: the related rules in SR3 core and M&M aren't detailed enough and it least the core rules initially left the impression that both terms were interchangable and only M&M introduced that non-linear delay for "Instantaneous".

I can see your reasoning on this one, and the way it's written does lend itself more to this than the typo explanation but I just don't think I'm comfortable with a lot of the Immediate speed drugs happening as soon as they hit simply for game balance purposes so I think I'm going to go with the Instant/Immediate being the same i.e. happening at the end of the combat turn; as there's no definitative answer.

Personally I don't like the situation either. I just commented on "RAW" ... which happens to make no distinction under core rules but certainly under advanced M&M rules.

However, my actual problem there is that so few toxins/drugs/diseases have that "Instantaneous" speed that will cause the M&M rule set to introduce some level of delay. So my solution would revolve around altering the speed of some of the chemicals to the delayed one instead of treating the two speeds as identical.