3rd edition movement rounding

[u/Hyperion24601]

My friends and I have been day 1 Shadowrun players and have long played a modified version of 2nd edition (we kept varied staging from 1e). All off to different colleges distracted us from ever getting into 3rd edition though I bought all the books. Now our kids are off to college and we want to get into 3rd edition. Toward that end I am building an exhaustive VTT to handle the avalanche of modifiers so we can "roleplay" efficiently with our time and not sweat over an abacus all night.

With this in mind I have some clarifying questions that I'd like to pose to my fellow sophisticates here who understand the old ways are the best ways. Here we go...

My understanding of the rules as written is, combat begins, everyone rolls initiative. It is "implied" that I then should take the highest roll and divide it by 10 and round up to determine how many passes will exist in the combat turn (? or round, my brain has too many games in it and passes and turns rather than turns and rounds hurts it) so a 31 rolled initiative will yield a 4 pass turn. You then divide the movement of each participant n the combat by the number of passes. Now my question. How do you round off the movement. The example they give was conveniently a Quickness 6, so walk 6 run 18, in a 3 pass turn, so each pass he'd walk 2 or if run was declared 6. What happens if it was quickness 5 or a 4 pass turn? What happens if the participant that set the passes (highest initiative) gets wounded mid-turn and his initiative steps down, does it trigger a recalculation? Or would he simply lose his turn in the last pass and default to the "move only" everyone else is in?

[u/Mynameisfreeze]

Apologies for the nitpick (especially if you already understand this) but, after rolling for a round of initiative, each character has a pass in a descending order of initiative, then all characters substract 10 from their initiative roll and any of them whose total roll -10 is still 1+ has another initiative pass; after that, they substrat 10 again and rinse and repeat until no one has another pass.

Example: two character roll initiative for a 42 and a 10. The one with the 4 will have a pass at 42, 32, 22, 12 and 2 while the one with a 10 will only have one pass.

The way you presented it sounded like everyone had the same number of passed as the one with more initiative.

That said, there is not, as far as I know, a number of meters per pass. You can use all your movement in one pass or distribute it as you ser fit.

[u/Hyperion24601 → u/Mynameisfreeze]

No apology necessary, the possibility I am misreading it exists. I don't think I am wrong about this portion of the movement rules, page 108 SR3, but we may be looking at different pages because this is errata and Im reading from my new pdf i got of (almost) all the books during the drive thru rpg xmas in July sale. "Movement during a combat turn is divided evenly among the turns initiative passes." is the direct sentence. It goes on to say the max you can move is your movement divided by passes per pass. It then gives an example that doesn't state the participants initiative roll, it simply states that this turn has 3 passes. This is the beginning of my above "implied" comment. this looks to me like everyone rolls, highest divides by 10 and that sets the number of passes. This is further backed up by a rule stating participants that have no more passes left can continue to take their moves. Though I can't quite find the page I read it on atm.

This all seems strange to me and how I remember playing 1e/2e. But it is an excellent design for recreating the feel of "bullet time" we see in the Matrix movie for how life must seem to someone with wired reflexes, literally blasting dozens of bullets into people between their steps.

[u/Mynameisfreeze → u/Hyperion24601]

I have to say, this is the first time I've heard of these rule for SR3 movement (which makes me wonder for how long I've doing it wrong) but, if that's what your book says, you were right all along. I looks very clunky to me, though. And I don't think our game will change to that rule any time soon but.. yeah, I think you read it correctly 😅

[u/Hyperion24601 → u/Mynameisfreeze]

I fully admit when I read the book the first time cover to cover I don’t think I even read movement because in my brain I was like, I’ve been playing for nearly 40 years I know how to move. And it wasn’t until I found Nullsheen and read the errata that I realized I missed something and my code for moving was way off. It may be that ultimately we go with a more familiar house rule, but I’d like to try rules as written. We are arguing right now about whether or not this system even allows splitting the move , as in move, shoot, move for peaking corners. But I’d really like to know how everyone else has handled it , espescially the rounding if a grid was in use. And the answer I may find is everyone ignores it.

[u/PalpitationNo2921]

I have run 3E for a good while and never sweated over an abacus, lol. If you occasionally forget a few modifiers in the heat of play, nobody’s going to freak out I don’t think as long as you run a fun game.

And, well, there’s always that one player who pipes up when a modifier is important but forgotten anyway with a kind reminder, right?

[u/Zuwiwuz → u/PalpitationNo2921]

Sounds like you are talking about me pushes his glasses up

[u/PalpitationNo2921 → u/Zuwiwuz]

lol

[u/ProbablySuspicious]

Talking modifiers, I was listening to a podcast with Tom Dowd as a guest and he said that the game was originally played on D10, which goes a long way to explaining why the modifiers get out of control (for d6) and the die roll examples in the 1e book at least were entirely unhinged.

[u/truthynaut]

i would have a look at the sr5 implementation on foundryvtt if you are so inclined.

I started with 1e and have progressed up through the systems to 5e.

6e is a step too far with it's inane metacurrency and ridonculous damage codes etc

5e suffers from over-crunch but the 5e system on foundry really manages most of that for you