Traditionally, in cartoons, high explosives such as dynamite and Illudium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulators do not cause any damage to living targets other than a blacked face, even if they have enough explosive power to destroy entire planets, as is the case of the Illudium PU-36 ESM.

This is also true, to a lesser extent, in SR4.

Let us introduce Mr. Daffy, a plain old wageslave with 2s across the board. Mr. Daffy, however, is concerned with his safety so he owns and wears and armored jacket.

Mr. Daffy, on a dare from Mr. Bugs, duck tapes several sticks of dynamite, totaling 1 kilogram in mass, to his armored jacket. Mr. Daffy then lights those sticks and walks into work. They, of course, explode quite embarrassingly. The resulting 3DV damage is converted to stun by Mr. Daffy's jacket, leaving him with a terrible headache and a soot-blackened face. There is, likewise, blackening and slight damage to his office and its contents.

At this point, I will ask that interested parties try this at home. Duct tape a kilogram of dynamite to a kevlar vest with a Rating III ceramic insert and put it on. Set off the explosives and see if you survive. I'm pretty sure that it will be fatal, but I could be wrong. Do it in a crowded place with plenty of people and sensitive equipment around and make a record of the damage if you do survive

Disclaimer: By reading this disclaimer dumbasses who are stupid enough to blow themselves to hell indemnify me from all civil liability.


Obviously, the damage potential of commercial high explosives is extremely lacking, potential in the lethality of point-blank contact.


The next example, however, is a bit more extreme.

Meet Gary Swallows, troll; gay porn star. As a gay porn star, Gary lives up to his name. He swallows quite well. He is extremely adept at swallowing long hard sticks. So it is no problem for him to swallow several intact sticks of dynamite, even if they do have lit fuses.

Gary Swallows, having deep throated and then some several sticks of dynamite with lit fuses, is forced to resist 3P damage with body alone. He's a fucking hard-bodied troll (emphasis on fucking) so this is trivial for him. He suffers nothing but slight heartburn from the exploding dynamite and lets out a belch powerful enough to cause 3P damage to anyone within its path for the first meter, reduced by 1P every meter thereafter.

An I the only one who finds this just slightly ridiculous. There is some fun in playing a troll who uses a dynamite butt-plug as a last-ditch holdout weapon, certainly, but it is ever so slightly unrealistic.

Hmm, the MK3A2 concussion grenade has a charge of 8 ounces of TNT. Some quick conversion says thats around .23 kilograms. We'll call it .25 kilograms to simplify any multiplication. In SR4 the high explosive grenade does 10P -2/meter.

Next questions is, are the explosives rated as 'commercial' in the book deliberately degraded in effectiveness? That is, are pure explosives something like rating 10, and the commercial ones are supposed to have clay or some other inert material added when they are manufactured?

Since such a practice in not in use today, we'll guess that it is also not in use in the future.

The sqrt of .25 is .5 which implies that TNT has a rating of 20.

This would certainly make any amount of explosive dangerous to swallow. If Gary swallows .125 KG of TNT he's looking at something like 7P damage (does the chunky salsa rule apply here?) so even if he had body 15 he'd take around 2 damage. A normal guy would take around 6P, not enough to kill you but probably worth a trip to the hospital.

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From a bunch of work done by Austere Emancipator, the relative ratings of explosives are also pretty screwy. The best explosives only have around a 1.2 to 1.25x advantage over TNT.
So making commercial explosives rating 20, military explosives rating 25, and most homemade explosives max out at rating 15 might be a quick house rule fix.
Of course, this makes 100kg of TNT so 200P -2/meter...

Thanks.


But, still, troll guts don't have a barrier rating. without a barrier rating, there is no chunky salsa effect.

Fo realism, divide all explosive weights by 10. You are done.

The blasts in a confined space rule doesn't apply. It only applies when the walls have a barrier rating. Gary has a body rating. Things with body ratings do not reflect blasts.

And your calculating armor penalties incorrectly.

And he didn't make a demolition test. The BBB does not require that a demolition test be made for just randomly setting off explosives. The description on 315 states that demolitions is used to target weak points and focus the blast.

Yeah we definitely need rules for swallowing explosives or inserting explosives into one's body.
We also need rules for shooting in the head at point blank range.
We also need rules for running while singing or while holding an open umbrella (or both!). We need rules for inventing rules...

Seriously... I agree that the power of commercial explosives might be too low. I agree that we need rules to deal with the explosion of a wall... But the explosion inside a metahuman body!? Give me a break; is it too hard to guess what will happen (the metahuman dies in a horrible and messy explosion, maybe?) without using rules?

The other issue is the linear drop-off in damage. It actually drops rapidly initially, with some minor effect out quite a way. IIRC, it's an inverse cube law effect.

This isn't that important using 1kg charges, but it really makes large bombs (like car bombs) vastly more destructive than they are in reality.

But the charge going off somewhere between his espphagus and stomach may count as "attack against vital/exposed area" or something, upping the DV by what, 4 points maximum?
Ooor, we spoil the fun for everybody by applying some common sense and say that the rules for explosives were designed as an abstraction do quickly determine wether your character manages to blow a hole in a wall or not, and not to simulate what happens when somebody shoves a stick of TNT up his.

The other problem with the confined space count he was doing was it assumed the explosive detonated at one end of the confined space rather than in the middle.

If you really wanted lethality with it, have it explode in the middle of the 3D space of the stomach.

That will have the added effect of giving you chunky salsa in 6 directions rather than 3.

(As a side note, I love the example they gave in SR2 or SR3 about how a simple frag grenade became instantly lethal. One of my players at the time was the kind of guy who would toss a belt of grenades or C4 into a room and close the door behind him.)

...in the just as silly category "John Q Normal" in the Hero System could step off the roof of a three storey building (30 ft in game scale), stand up, brush himself off, and walk away with little or no ill effect. I had a friend who was rock climbing and slipped from a third that distance. The result was an seriously broken ankle that required several pins & screws to put back together again.

I'm convinced that if RL behaved like gaming we would have a serious overpopulation issue.

...depends on who the GM is...

...but like you said, you were braced for it, and probably didn't decide to tempt fate & do it again.

I was one of those, what they used to call "Hot Dog" skiers back in the 70s & did some pretty insane stuff myself with 170 - 200cm skis strapped to my feet. Mind you I took a lot of spills, (one which was pretty spectacular sending up a huge cloud of snow) but I got back up & went right to the lift again. The only time I ever hurt myself was on the lower slope one time when I unexpectedly hit a patch of ice and jammed my wrist in the fall while skiing back to the lodge.

Maybe a better term would be "pushed" JQ Normal off a three storey roof, for the same effect would happen by the rules whether or not he was prepared.

...yeah I think we lose that "resilient" quality as we get older, Kind of like the Otaku Fading.

...or is it just replaced with common sense?

There are points when you just need to say it's an automatic kill, even if it's not in the rules. Swallowing a live grenade is one of them. (Same for the bullet to the head of a immobile target.) It's the simplest solution to the problem, until such time as the designers decide to change it.

We used to have a joke in first edition:
Q:If your buddy swallowed a grenade and is choking on it, what do you do?
A: Pull the pin. He can die from choking but will only receive a moderate wound from the grenade.

Now, with the given example of the troll's stomach: If you want to say that the troll's body doesn't have a barrier rating, then you should say that his body automatically fails and the explosion goes through the (non)barrier. How much damage is having your torso cut in half? Could you somehow clench your stomach muscles so well, while opening your throat so that all of the force is vented as the world's biggest burp? I'd say no.

Something to remember, is that grenades, thrown near a target, don't kill because of the explosive force of the blast. They kill because the explosion sends out bits of shrapnel traveling at thousands of feet per second. The chunky salsa effect is when the blast itself is doing the damage and I think it applies nicely.

Makes you wonder just how much belief defines reality, doesn't it?

I think we missed something critical in the midst of all this rules/realism conversation. Namely Hyzmarca never got props for referencing an Illudium PU-36 Explosive Space Modulator. so um ... props

Good point. That was a very nice reference. I meant to comment on it initially, but got distracted somehow.
Hehe, I can hear the voice now.

But he failed to mention the "Earth shattering kaboom". One must always mention the lack of it when talking about the Illuduim PU-36 Explosive Space Moduator.

Demolitions should definitely be a non-defaultable Skill.

Jopp, why not just let them make a Logic + Demolitions skill for it, and then default to logic -1 if they don't have it, with a threshold of 0. The trained guy places it better and causes more damage to intended targets, and the untrained guy just needs to not glitch/crit glitch.

Successes gotten by the defaulter would still up dmg, because whether through simply thinking about a better way to place it, or just pure luck in doing so, he made it more effective, so why not give him the benefit of the dice should they fall that way.

If a guy's using demolitions to tape dynamite to his chest and doesn't care if they go off, then yes, he can do that for free without a test. If he succeeds, he explodes. If he fails, he explodes. The roll is pretty much meaningless except to determine how far the pieces go. Or don't go, in this guy's case.

And it's pretty easy to get 3 sticks of dynamite to go off at once. Once the first one goes off, the other two are gonna follow suit in a few nanoseconds.

so the test is to determine if the bomb goes of as intended on his chest, or at some "other" time?

bank robber walks into bank, yells, i have a bomb strapped to my chest, give me all your money, or i'll blow the place.... everyone complies.. he starts walking out the door and BOOM, bloody money!

Jopp, those are valid concerns for an ordinary game. The man in question is simply an automaton in a thought experiment designed to illustrate oddities in SR4's explosives. You don't need to roll dice for that.

I can't believe I'm even writing this!

Trust me, I know.