I was wanting to get everyones opinion on the subject of initiative. I noticed that with a group of cybered up sams, thay could concievably kill an entire team of (insert badguys here) before the (said badguys) even got a shot off. This seemed a little lopsided. My thoughts were to roll initiative like normal but have players announce all actions at start of turn. Then play out all combat phases according to their declared actions. Wanted to kill that guard in one phase? Oops missed that second bullet. Move on to next target as per declaration. I have heard that a turn lasts 3-5 seconds. This seems to fit better with time. Now please tear into my thinking like a band of hyenas. My group sure as hell will.

What's so wrong with the rules on Initiative as they stand? Don't change the rules because your players are beating your opposition, change the opposition.

Unless of course your group wants to change the rules, in which case you should change the rules.

I don't have a problem with the rules as they are right now. My players all (except the mage) have around 5+2d6 for init. The mage will soon be bondign a sustaining foci to give himself extra initaitive dice. With only 4 characters, usually only one or two enemies die before they get to act. Starting the round in cover, running the previous round, and various other targetting TN raisers really slows down the kill rate.

Its when you have people standing right in front of the gun adept that the higher inits really start to shine. But with even semi-intelligent opponents that should happen fairly rarely. I know that if someone were on the other side of the room from me and they had a gun, I wouldn't run out in front of them.

I may not have been clear. I suppose I am looking at it from the timeframe point of view. I know that their are reaction enhancements, but it just seems to me that players are accomplishing way to much in the alloted time of a combat turn. I have no problem with them shooting the five people standing in front of them but its the whole, kill one person ,make sure he's dead, check to see where person two is, calculate invariable tangent of a quantum emulciphier, shoot second person, shoot second person a second time, check third etc. To me it just seems overly "cluttered".

Well, as the old saying goes, "play whatever way is fun".

However, I personally wouldn't change the rules just because some characters have a high Init. If they've earned it through karma or paid for it with their hard earned nuyen, it wouldn't be fair to deny them a chance to shine.

And also, I guess it epends on the campaign style you're running. A cinematic game would play itself to this style well, while a gritty one wouldn't.

Require more actions spent on observing to determine who is a good target. But if its the number of actions that bothers you, you could instead lower initiative modifiers across the board. Get rid of wired reflexes and change the adept power to match boosted reflexes. Drop rating 3 VCRs and spells that give +3d6 initiative. Do other stuff to lower the average intiative score per person.

Alternatively, just say that rounds are 6 seconds long, or 10, or 15. Whatever seems to be a more logical time frame for someone being able to kill three people in a gunfight.

You need more than six seconds to kill three people?

I would, but I'm a bit squeemish and would probably spend a large portion of the time in psychological trauma after the first guy's brains went splat.

Use a flamethrower. No brains, omae. LOL

But then you have that whole "smell of burning flesh" thing. It would probably make me toss my lunch. Then there's the screaming waking up the neighbors. It just wouldn't work.

Flamethrowers take longer than six seconds. I prefer white-phospherous minigrenades for that anyway.

Now, you want to kill in three seconds? One second to aim and push button, one second to throw, and one second to dive for cover as the two-second time on the C4 reaches zero.

My experience from tense situations - time seems to hang and take forever to pass. It may have only been 30 seconds, but seemed like 5 minutes when it was happening. When you are dealing destruction, you do it. Afterwards, when you have survived and the adrenaline is wearing off, you may have a reaction. Most times I have been shot at or had a gun pulled on me, I haven't slept that night. The last time it happened it took about 3 extra hours to get to sleep, but at the time I was so exhausted I should have been to sleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.

You may want to think about moving to a better neighborhood, saying pleas and thank you tot he mafia dons, and/or paying off the loan sharks.

Held up at work a few times, silly situations my friends got me into, and acts of random violence. When I lived in the bad neighborhood, I was the scary guy.

heh, i know what you mean. characters in SR are impossibly efficient in their movements during combat.

some things that might help slow combat down would be:
1) try using the Sudden Shock rules on Raygun's site. basically, every time you take M damage or higher, you have to roll or lose your next action (at least, i think that's how they work).

2) if there's a surprise situation, don't tell the players how many opponents their facing. if they want to do a headcount, they have to take a simple action to Observe in Detail.

3) use the knockdown rules, but don't tell the players how much damage they've done to their opponents. that way, they might see a bad guy go down--but he might not be out. if they want to make sure a bad guy's dead, they'll have to use Observe in Detail; and even then, you might require a Biotech roll.

Ah, but the smell of burning flesh is the reward for lugging around the flamethrower.

Liberal use of target modifiers is also helpful. Your players will complain at first, until they get used to the idea of needing 6's or 8's for all but the most trivial actions.

Higher target numbers = less sucesses = less damage to bad guys = more player actions.

If you really think about it you can add +4 or +6 to just about any situation.

Low Visibility, Movement, Stress (mental), Weather, Damage (once your NPCs start living longer), NPC magicians/Spirits with Confusion Spells.... it all adds up to less efficient killing sprees for your PCs.

Oooo I like that... I may have to implment that one. Will (4) sound good?

Just my 0.02€, counting inflation:

I tried to use the knockdown rules in my game, but in most cases they resulted in just some more dice rolling and no one being knocked down. Knockdown seems a bit "drastic" to me; either nothing happens, or you're knocked back a step or two (which , unless you're up against a wall or standing close to the edge of a tall building, usually doesn't affect combat that much), or you fall over and lose at least your entire next phase just to get up. The Sudden Shock rule sounds like a really nice compromise; will try to use that.

But yeah, if you want your players to "waste" actions during combat, withholding information is the way to go. This is most obviously true in surprise situations where the players have little information about their opposition to begin with; I'd say it should take a player at least one phase to figure out which guy to shoot first, two if he's smart enough to not just stand there and spend all his actions looking.

One thing that I've used a couple of times in my game to slow down combat a bit was coordination. My players usually target the same guy to take down their opposition more quickly. The tricky part is explaining to the players why they need to spend a simple action to observe combat before they can shoot the correct target. The possitive thing about this is that by having them "waste" actions like this during combat, they started coordinating their strategy before engaging the enemy so they wouldn't lose any more actions.

End result: Combat that was quick and efficient because my players made an effort. It still seemed like the 3-4 seconds were packed with lots of actions, but it made sense because the players had planned their attack beforehand.

But of course, stretching combat so that one turn takes 15 seconds is probably the simplest way to make combat less "crowded".

Doesn't the wound level modifier to initiative create a small pause? And it can sometimes eliminate an entire last pass.

You are basing this on current people, who probably have an initiative of 10 or less? (Average person's reaction is 3 plus 1-6.) So three seconds a phase. A Light wound would cause about a third of a second pause, a moderate wound a two thirds second pause, and a serious wound a full second pause.

If the person somehow achieved an initiative of 11-13, they could lose their entire second combat phase. Example, they win initiative, act, subtract 10, incur a wound, and the modifier takes them to zero or less.

It is sometimes hard to remember how fast initiative boosts speed things up.

Cool, so you just lightly wound each security guard in the first pass and then deal with them at your liesure while they reel in their wounds, totally unable to defend themself or raise an alarm.

Another thing you can try, to reduce the amount of 'god like knowledge' players often have of the situation, is to run most of the combat using little slips of paper.

Everyone anouces their actions on little slips of paper and you tell everyone what they see on little slips of paper. That way, one guys preception action dosen't tell all the players what's going on... And you end up with real life screwups like everybody shooting the guy on the right, and no one shooting the guy on the left...

Another thnig that might be worth doing is making all actions within 10 points worth occur near simultaneously, so that if the sam going at 33 blows a guy to bits, the sam going at 32 might waste his action shooting at a fine red mist, rather than switching targets...

Yes, hitting someone just 'standing around' with the same force will produce much more shock and wound effects than a person undergoing the full 'combat stress reaction'. This is one of the reasons that snipers and ambushes are generally more effective...

What about folks with a pain editor?

If you arbitarily declare that the PC is Surprised, then it could reflect the sniper situation. But if you allow rolls by the book, then there is a chance however small a PC might not be Surprised. For example, a Reaction 4 sniper takes a shot at Mr Ultrafast Sam with React 14. Sniper rolls against TN 2. He gets 4 successes. Sam rolls against TN 4. He gets 6 successes. Oops. Sam is not surprised.

no, tisoz. you're going to use sudden shock rules, and you're going to like them because, by god, they're in the book.

oh, wait, we're discussing house rules that are completely optional, that no one is forcing anyone else to use. my bad! the way you were acting, there, i sorta assumed we were discussing canon stuff.

I think there are rules that explain it already, others don't want to see how an existing rule could explain it.

the existing rules don't explain it very well. others want a better rule.

So the better explanation is a pause that cause loss of a pass or turn or round? When I pointed out how that could go astray, people started in about sniping sittuations. When I reminded of how surprise rules helped explain that situation, I got more crap about how that fails to represent diddly.

I think I will just wait for you guys to come up with a perfect house rule then, or even a new combat system, and then respond. Because you do not seem to want weaknesses, larger than original problem, pointed out, or how an existing rule or incorporating an existing rule will get the desired effect.

TTFN

Even though I'd personally like to force a sudden shock test even with Light wounds, based on what I've read of soldiers reacting to sometimes relatively minor injuries, it would under no suggested rules be a reliable way of disabling foes, as I already pointed out. Especially with minor injuries, like a thumb-sized hole through your abdomen, it would be just about as likely that the security guard in question barely budges and then functions with only the slight setback of +1 or +2 modifers.

And like mfb said above, they would be perfectly able to cry out or hit a panic button/Big Red Button in any case, shocked or not.

I think the Knockdown rules adequately reflect the 'Sudden Shock' situation. We all know that most guns don't actually cause the knockdown effect, but this kind of mechanic can easily be adapted to the shock of suddenly being wounded.

YMMV of course. I'm fine with the rules as they are, and don't find the need to add even more rolls to combat in my games.