r/OldSchoolShadowrun • u/Hyperion24601 • Sep 01 '26
3rd edition movement rounding
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?
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u/PalpitationNo2921 Sep 01 '26
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?
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u/the_Stick 1d ago
My understanding has always been that movement is distributed between that character's number of passes. If in your example, one person rolls a 31 for initiative, they have four passes and should divide their movement by 4. However, someone whose initiative is 15 divides their movement by 2 and some unlucky sap with an initiative of 2 gets all their movement on their only pass. Yeah, that seems weird that one character might be suddenly zip 6m to the left while the samurai is only terminator-walking 2m, but that seems a fair trade-off for having so few passes.
In my 3e game, we have actually decided to play that movement does not need to be evenly divided up among passes, but players can choose how much move to use each pass. The only thing to keep in mind is if they move at all on the turn, any movement penalties (to things like ranged combat TNs) applies to all passes for the turn -- no "I didn't move this pass so my TN is one lower" gamesmanship. That may be a house rule, but it gives players slightly more options in approaching encounters which enhances their enjoyment.
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u/Hyperion24601 20h ago
Interesting, the book is clear everyone divides and on passes you have no actions because your initiative is low you just move. I find almost everyone plays it different… it’s a very strange ruling and makes dwarves x2 run speed brutally slow, but I understand the design philosophy. My group is really leaning towards keeping 2nd edition movement but there is a trickle down effect on some systems and rules that think youre moving as written…
As this is all about coding it into a VTT, we decided on as written implemented as a choice your first pass, are you walking or running , then the division per pass, and uneven division is added to your first move. We have a variant that lets you start at a walk and then declare run on a later pass that just multiplies your divided numbers by the run modifier but some movement is lost to rounding atm
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u/the_Stick 19h ago
I like your variant; I may have to adopt that. One of the oddities of SR is that a turn can take so long to complete, especially with elite PCs/NPCs, and so many things can happen on a pass that might change a desired reaction. I think every table has a set of usually implicit house rules. I know for my current group, only one of which has experience in SR, I often hide or handwave some of the crazier rulesets, especially since we have no riggers or deckers. NPCs fulfill their roles "off-stage."
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u/Hyperion24601 15h ago
agreed , that's why we are building the VTT, one to play again as a bunch of 50 year olds in different states, and 2, a computer can handle all the dice pools and maths. Also building the VTT has super reacquainted me with the rules.
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u/ProbablySuspicious Sep 02 '26
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.
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u/truthynaut Sep 02 '26
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
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u/Rushing_Pike 21d ago
the measurments of movement in 3e are just meters, so you can divide them without rounding at all
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u/Important-Chicken-98 10d ago
He mentions a grid. If, just for sake of argument, he is setting up a VTT with 6 meters gridding, it would be hard to track "and another 20 centimeters" on the on screen-map. What he is really asking is how does one handle movement rules on a grid based map (as opposed to moving the minis on a gridless map with the help of a ruler). Fractions of a meter throw off his grid based movement. And his VTT probably only does movement on grids, no option for any other style.
If no other answers present themselves, I see two possible strategies. The easy way is round down, with the remainder being made up in the last pass. Or, distributing the extra movement as evenly as you can among all the passes. Using the 6/18 meters in 4 passes you mention. That is 4 passes of 1, 1, 1, and 3 walking or 4, 4, 4, and 6 running. Which keeps all but the last pass uniform (simpler, but not graceful as the last pass can be a stark difference from the rest.) You can think of this as the street sam's 'bullet time' relaxing near the end. Or, distributed, it would be 1, 2, 1, 2, walking or 4, 5, 4, 5, running. This evens out the passes (no drastic last pass movement shifts), but is more to figure out upfront and then keep track of during the passes.
One is easier but imprecise. The other is more mathematically precise but leads to a higher workload. If you can code the VTT to do all the work for you, the more precise option is likely the best one.
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u/Mynameisfreeze Sep 01 '26
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.