Flash-Paks are legal "grenades" that give a minus 4 to all the attack rolls of anyone who is looking at them. They are also fairly cheap and can be recharged.

Giving a minus 4 to attack rolls to anyone looking in your direction seems pretty strong to me. In many circumstances, this will be better than thermal smoke and you don't stand a chance of hurting your own party (unless they are facing the front of you for some reason). The real interesting thing to do is to use a lot of them however. Grenades can be detonated via wireless command and it seems like you can make a whole string of them go off at once. So a creative runner could pick up a riot shield or something, attach ten or so Flash-Paks to its surface, and then set them off with a free action that would give an attack penalty of 40 dice to anyone who is facing the front of the shield, which seems ridiculous. Am I missing something which prevents this?

What makes you think the effect would be cumulative?

Here, do a quick test. Go into a semi-dark room with a lamp. Take the lamp's shade off so the bulb is exposed. Sit there for 10 minutes & let your eyes adjust. Turn the lamp on briefly, and turn it off. Notice your vision difference. Now do it again 15 seconds later. See if your vision's worse than the first time.

Flash-pak's shouldn't stack, if there's not a rule explicitly saying they don't.

No. They shouldn't stack except in extreme circumstances. And even then, the additional negative modifier should be minor.

However. Flashpacks on a riot shield is a pretty cool idea.

If ANYTHING, I'd say they should wear off slowly (1 die penalty removed every couple combat turns), and tossing another one would renew the effects & re-blind the person, going back to the base penalty. I'm not looking at the rules as I type this though, so if that's the case, then cool!

Of course, Flare Compensators remove the benefit completely. And in SR4, there's really no excuse for not having flare compensators in either your cybereyes, your glasses, you mage-sight goggles, or your contacts.

Edit: No, they don't remove it. Odd. They just reduce it to -2.

Question: Would multiple flare compensation stack? If you have both glasses with flare comp and cybereyes would it stack?

Nope.

Now combining Thermal Smoke and Flashpacks is a surefire winner.

I've got a plan along those lines, but it involves a MobMaster. Once we're done with it, do you guys want what's left?

Thanks for the response. I was actually thinking of them as being more like a wounding penalty than a visibility modifier.

light in the physical world and "light" in the astral are unrelated (except to the extent that darkness tends to evoke a certain reaction in human beings, and therefore dark areas will probably have a slightly higher tendency to have negative emotions associated with them, that is)

therefore, the flash component of the flashbang would not effect the mage who is astrally projecting or perceiving IMO.

that being said, it is not just a flash grenade, it is a flashbang, and the bang component would have full effect imo.

as far as smoke is concerned, objects that are opaque on the physical plane are generally opaque on the astral.

as far as using smoke grenades to defend against flashbangs... i'm not quite sure how that would work. first off, there's still the bang component. secondly, setting a smoke bomb off on yourself to protect yourself from being blinded seems counterproductive. i suppose you could use the smoke grenade on your target and move so that he can't hit you accurately, but flashbangs don't exactly require precision targetting.

[edit] GAH! this is why you quote everything lol... go and change your post so now i look like i'm making up a question about flashbangs, why don't you [/edit]

My bad! I just realized that Flash-Bang and Flash-Pak are two different weapons. I have been using the two terms interchangably.

This thread is about Flash-Paks, and that is what I am talking about.

It could be argued that a flash pack attached to a shield that is active could if anything give a bonus if the smoke in between was thick enough.

"Aim for the light!"