Hey guys. I'm gonna be running my first SR4 campaign in a few weeks and I'm trying to get a handle on the rules but I have some questions regarding grenades.

So, you can either target an opponent directly as a stardard Oppose Test or you can target a spot on the ground as a Success Test. The shadowrun4.com FAQ says that if the intent is to catch an opponent or a group of opponents in the blast radius then it should be considered an Oppose Test whether the grenade is thrown at a target or a few meters away.

Question 1: Why is that and why does it matter?

Question 2: If you do attempt to throw it at a target as an Oppose Test, what happens if you fail? You miss your target but where does the grenade go? It's not like bullets that miss and are gone--the grenade's gotta go somewhere! How is that determined? What does it mean for the defender to "dodge" a grenade?

1) They do something equally silly for area affect spells, because they seem to feel that it makes sense for people to be able to dodge fireballs and grenades without actually moving.

2) Your guess is as good as mine, as they don't cover that little bit. As far as I can tell the rules assume that the missed grenade vanishes, as does the missed fireball. We typically used airbursted GLs, so we assumed that if you hit the grenade went off within 1 meter and that the fireball went off where the mage planned. So we really didn't care whether they dodged or not.

Kzt, you're simply not understanding the scope of the artistic vision and hardcore game design through thoroughly crunched possibilities that the SR4 authors have delivered unto you with a silver platter. The answer is that the dodging character bends backwards at the knees and flails his arms in order to be completely invulnerable.

I'd say that the answer to Question 1 is just a matter of game balance. They didn't want to allow for an attack that didn't provide an opportunity to defend.

When you miss with a grenade, you roll scatter as normal. You always roll scatter, but then you reduce it by the number of hits, so the better you roll, the closer you are to your target. If you get no hits, your grenade just lands way off target.

I use grenades/rockets/missiles a little differently than you guys apparently, by using the mathematics behind the rules as presented in the BBB.

For example, Bada Boom the sammy throws a grenade at Ground Chuck the mage. Bada Boom rolls his throwing skill+AGI as normal, and Chuck rolls his REA as normal for ranged attacks. Chuck actually BEATS Bada Boom's roll by 2 net hits, so the grenade does not magically disappear and miss, but instead becomes a negative net hits on the scatter roll: 1D6 - (-4), or 1D6 + 4, therefore scattering further away the more the defender beats the attacker.

This makes a little more sense to me, and also keeps the rules pretty clean. I know there isn't a NEGATIVE net hit concept in the game, but it works pretty well for scatter.

There is no scatter for Fireball, apparently it always targets a point in space and not a single target as grenades/rockets/missiles do.

This is a houserule, but we always run with grenades as targeting a specific spot (+scatter ofc). People inside the target area get a Reaction+Edge (+Full Defense) roll vs. a TN based on half the distance to safety (if there is any).

Scattering further away still may not scatter far enough away to put the defender out of the blast radius potentially though would it? Do you say that even though Chuck managed to dodge the blast and got two net hits, it's up to the luck of a dice roll for whether he dodged far enough to get out of the way?

In other words, the scatter on the above 1D6 + 4 from the intended point of impact (on top of chuck) has a range of 5 to 10 meters of scatter. If Chuck gets unlucky and you roll a 1, then 5 meters away is still going to be enough to cook poor Chuck, despite his awesome dodginess in that moment, wouldn't it?

I mean, that's cool if you want grenades to be that lethal, but I just always treated it that if they succeeded on the opposed roll, they managed to dive out of the blast zone. And if it was a group being rolled, I think we hand waved it as someone managing to warn the others to scatter in time for everyone to dive out of the blast zone.

Then again, I admit I've only ever had one time that someone managed to avoid a grenade blast since the heavy weapons guru at my table is the only one who uses grenades and he doesn't miss often.

Its a grenade. I have an idea, a fun little experiment that you could try. Get a bunch of flash-bang grenades, they're relatively safe, and go out to a nice open field or quarry. There, split up into teams and have a grenade fight. Throw live flash-bangs at each other and try to dodge out of the blast radius. So he well that goes. For extra fun, practice resisting MOUT entry in the comfort of your own home by sitting in a small room and having your friends throw grenades inside.

Dodging grenades at all is a balance conceit.

I've never been satisfied with the FAQ's stance on grenades as it seems to disregard an important factor in the grenade rules: Once a grenade's scatter has been reduced to 0 meters from the target, any additional successes begin to stage up the damage inflicted on the grenade's target. It's the difference between a grenade that detonates at your feet and a grenade that due to an exceptional bounce detonates a centimeter away from your body, right at chest level.

Sure, it's a lot easier to target a point in space, than a mobile, dodging opponent, but by targeting a location, you give up the ability to up the damage against a specific opponent. Seems to be a fair tradeoff to me.

This also leads into my method for handling the Dodge vs. grenades question. At my table, dodge lets the grenade's target stage the damage back down to the base damage for a grenade hit at 0 meters, but no further. You want to get away from a grenade blast, that's what held actions and running are for. Oh, they're using airburst links, and you don't get that short window of time before the next Initiative Phase to react? Well, tough shit. Grenades are supposed to be painful, and airburst linked grenades especially so.

I think I saw a simple house rule for grenades that reads to the effect of "Grenade rules as in book, but grenades obey the laws of physics and will not scatter into another time zone." That's worked pretty well for me. Appropriate situational modifiers have helped the keep grenades not retared in my campaign. If you try to peg a moving target 25 meters away with a non airburst grenade... well things are going to get interesting. If you roll a flash bang through the one entrance/exit of a 10 by 10 room, you're going to get a lot of people with long term hearing problems.

Thrown grenades, unless you're a talented thrower, should be an art rather than a science. That's why airburst grenades exists, someone got tired of seeing grenades roll into ditches or bounce off things.

To quote from training:
"Alright doc, there's an sniper in the 2nd story window above you, what do you do?"
"Uhm, I guess I'd throw a grenade through the window... sergeant."
"Alright doc, your grenade bounces off the window, the window frame, or gets thrown back down to you. Can a MARINE tell me what we're supposed to do?"
"Shoot a fucking 203 through the window Staff Sgt!" (For the non-military fetishist in the crowd, M203 is the grenade launcher that fits under the M16)
"See doc, the Marine Corp's been kind enough to provide you with a device that is DESIGNED to keep you from killing yourself and all those good Marines around you."


I'd also check the damage tables to see if scatter is going to be a deal breaker. A flashbang has a 10 meter blast radius. That's uhm... pretty substantial. If you uses Hyz's example and the RAW I think you'll find that you'll have a great number of runners laying around with bleeding ears.
Scatter on a standard grenade (flash bang) is 1D6 -2 per net hit. As long as the thrower gets a single net hit (representing that he has indeed succesfully thrown a grenade in the general direction of the enemy and the enemy has not managed to move the hell away from it) the worst that can happen is that the grenade skitters 4 meters away from it's intended target. And... suprise! Still applies it's full 6S towards making their ears ring. If you start using grenade launcher with a smartlink airbust, suddenly you're putting grenades within 2 meters of your targets with a single net hit.

Now the rules do seem to include a disappearing grenade rules (ie. The person manages to get a whole bunch of succeses on their doge roll). I think a simple "Is it dumb" ruling would prevent the dodge ninja from avoiding damage in a 10 by 10 room. Plus, appropriate application of situational modifiers. Bonus to someone shooting into a confined space, negative to someone trying to dodge in a confined space. And like RunnerPaul said, want to run away from a grenade? That's what held actions are for.

Flashbangs aren't good for your eyes. And they might leave unsightly scorch marks.

Instead, there's an ideal toy for these sorts of experiments. Hornet's Nest nonlethal grenades. Supposedly they can break bones and rupture organs at close range, but that's only at close range; everyone should be fine since they're dodging. It would merely cause pain, nausea, and disorientation at that point.

Sadly Flash Bangs are NFA controlled devices, with a multi-hundred dollar license per. No refund when you blow it up. As someone said elsewhere, it's going to be the most expensive half-second of fun you'll ever have.

Only sorta. See, the balance conceit is the low casualty radius; once you somehow manage to imagine a grenade with a casualty radius as small as Shadowrun's, it starts making a little more sense.

Our group's take on grenade-dodging (the SR3R rule, actually) is that each success gets you one effective meter away from the point of detonation, so -1 Power/success for SR-Offensive and -2/success for SR-Defensive. Exactly how you achieve this "effective meter" is left unstated.

~J

They do? Got a page reference or quote?

Flashbangs are also not good for the ears, I imagine. appropriate eye and ear protection is required. I was originally going to suggest it be tried with fragmentation grenades since the results should be obvious without actual trial.
Sting grenades are better for reasonably safe realistic wargames.




That's why you buy them off the back of a truck from Nicolas Cage. Or you make your own, which isn't terribly difficult. The hardest part to get right is the fuse.

For non-thrown varieties, there's the Grenadelink from Cannon Companion. For the thrown stuff there's no statted gear I'm aware of, but the Smartball Link exists.

~J

Everything about creating improvised explosive devices is not terribly difficult. Even keeping them from blowing up as you make or deploy them isn't terribly difficult, but it's extremely unforgiving of any mistakes, forgotten steps or similar issues.

Yeah, I know. The post I quoted was specifically referring to thrown grenades.



Smartball Link did exist (but not in SR4 ... and I don't think it was listed for SR3 either), but only really as fluff, as no rules were given for how it interacts with throwing anything in Shadowrun.

Hm... the way we use grenades, we aim at a location, in special cases with a treshhold (like when trying to put one at the feet of a running target), and usually do not stage the damage up. The people in the blast area make their damage resistance checks, using reaction and possibly dodge as well.

Usually though the grenades in our campaign are used in a less detailed manner, we only really roll when they are used against PCs.

"You fire a flash bang inside the room, then charge in, shooting at the stunned targets" or "after the WP goes off behind the crates you hear screaming, and two human torches start rolling on the ground, trying to put out the flames... which are rapidly spreading over the dry, wooden crates. You notice a bunch of barrels and a no smoking sign nearby. I suggest to start running".

That's a very entertaining anecdote. My first answer that comes to mind is, "suppress the window". I'm sure that that's wrong, though, knowing how these things go...

Oops.

I meant to say "airburst grenades" , let me go fix that.


I probably should have specified that I-, I mean my friend, was standing underneath the window at the time. In my very limited understanding of suppressing fire, that's not a particularly helpful place to be doing that from.



My group seems to do that when they use grenades. Since it's just a success test against the ground (which doesn't dodge) they can typically put grenades more or less where they'd like it to go.

Reminds me of grenade training... two recruits teaming up first managed to both forget to get training grenades for the exercise, noticing it after they announced they'd throw one in the middle of the exercise, then, after stocking up with them, managed, on the first try, to hit a branch, bouncing the firecracker off it so it went off right betwen them in their ditch.

After that, I got teamed up with one of them. Suffice to say, if he had not been firing blanks he'd have shot me in the legs while "covering" me.

Yes, grenade simulators ARE loud when they bounce off a tree limb and go off at your feet. Umm, don't ask how I know that....

I don't think anyone wants to admit they make mistakes withe grenades, it doesn't exactly inspire your buddies to... uhm... stick close to you.

Another amusing story was related to me by a friend who watched someone attempt to roll a inert grenade into a room no less than three times. Boy those pesky door frames with their obscene dodge pools. I guess he caught it on the rebound the first time.

I'm not so sure about that—I mean, it's worse than a better angle which would restrict the available non-hazardous space in the room more, but you still keep whoever it is from sticking something important out the window to try to take a shot at you.

Of course, you need to make sure there aren't any non-targets downwind if you start shooting up in the air like that.

(Disclaimer: armchair general)

~J

Your arm-chair general-fu is weak. It might keep them from sticking their gun out the window, but it doesn't keep them from tossing a grenade out of the window and down to you.

Yeah, I thought about that. Then I realized that neither does a wall, or pretty much anything else they're likely to be hiding behind.

~J

Well the problem with the sniper wasn't that he was trying to kill me, it's that he was in the process of killing everyone else. I had the element of surprise so it made sense to put a grenade in through the window, I just identified the least efficient/safe method of accomplishing this (caused by a steady diet of American action films I suppose).

I don't know, I really didn't think of suppressing fire because I was looking at a 3 inch gap between the bottom of the windowsill and the top. I didn't particularly want to step into the street for a better shot because several people had already been shot there. That might have been selfish of me.

I'm fine with the rule. Grenades are highly random and unreliable devices. There are numerous stories of soldiers survivnig nearby grenade blasts with virtually no injury. Grenades can be duds or the user can fail to arm them properly. Any nearby object might deflect enough of the blast, etc.

Never mind...

I have another issue with grenades: it's the insane damage that can potentially be inflicted due to the rules about blast reflection.

If a frag grenade explodes at your feet when you're walking in the middle of a 2m large corridor, you basically have to soak 72 damage boxes, as long as the walls are sturdy enough to reflect all blast reflections of course.
Even a minimaxed troll tank is killed on the spot.

Depends on the grenade. Frags thrown into a room chock full of wooden dummies that fall over when bumped the wrong way dont budge the things, but when its over theyve all got BB sized holes in em in many locations.

My understanding of mk2 pineapples was that since the fuse actually burned they'd emit smoke when you armed them, and they'd also fail to explode if they landed in water.

Bungie then thought it would be a good idea to make underbarrel launch grenades fail to explode if they were fired into shallow water.

Re: the M203...

I knew a guy in the SCA who was a 2nd Lt. in Iraq for about 4 years before he got himself shipped back to the US. He regaled us with strange and bizzare stories of the desert, often with pictures - such as digging mini coffins in the dirt to sleep in during a sandstorm, only to have it rain on him at night, so everyone woke up encased in rapidly drying mud.

One particular story involved being in Fallujah with his unit. They were camped out in some random building, playing sentry and waiting for further go orders, when some schmoe across the street started taking pot shots at them with a rifle. According to him, one of his squadmates had been napping and was woken up. Calm as a cucumber, he rolled over, shimmied his way over to the window, and peeked out. Apparently he saw the guy with the rifle, because he just sat up and popped a grenade directly into the shooter's window. The shooting stopped.

Apparently the CO took this guy aside and told him, "Great initative, soldier. A bit excessive, but great initative."

What kind of moron decides to take pot shots at a group of soldiers?

Well, a dead one now, it seems. I wasn't there. I just heard the story, man.

Someone who KNOWS that god is on his side. It seems he was wrong....

Says you! Maybe this guy rocked so hard that god was like, "Dude, he's coming to paradise RIGHT NOW!"
God keeps it real for his homies, after all.

being woken up from peacefull resting slumber by someone wanting to kill you?
there is no excessive to the retaliation in that particular situation . .
as for grenades, one of my buddies told me this story wherein the middle of the night one soldier could not sleep and was playing with one of his grenades . . until he suddenly feels the safety ring go pop . . being in the middle of his fellow soldiers, having no idea where to throw the damn thing he counted to 6 on a 7 second fuse appearantly and threw the thing straight up to have it explode above them . . yeah, he was kicked out for that one . .

I had an EOD (Explosive Ordinance Disposal) tech tell me about some hot shit Gunnery Sergeant who picked up an expended but unexploded 203 and took it back to his office to use as a paperweight. At some point he tossed it into one of his drawers where it proceeded to roll back and forth... eventually completing the number of revolutions necessary to arm and explode. He assured me that the results required a mop and several large trash bags.

Who knows if it's true but I've seen people, even/especially high ranking people, make some very poor life decisions.

Like that corporal in my company, at the end of basic training. He got a recruit who was a student of chemistry to make him some home-made explosive, and tested a tiny bit of it in our non-com quarters with some machine-gun ammo belt links. Results? Scorched table, and a window with a belt-link-sized hole in it. He also used to (illegally) carry a loaded Walther PPK with a round chambered on leave. (Nothing like seeing a bullet drop from the chamber after doing the old "remove magazine, pull receiver back to check if a gun is loaded when first picking it up" to drive home the fact that every gun is to be treated as loaded, no matter how stupid it would be for someone to hand it to you loaded, chambered and with the safety off...)

who the fuck designs explosives that explode more or less on random?
that concept right there is even worse than conventional mines for fucks sake!

Stahlseele, you miss the point: the grenade is not designed to explode at random, the "only arms after it has gone through X revolutions" is a safety mechanism, it means the grenade, which is spinning when fired, has to travel a certain distance before it'll be armed and ready to explode, so if you fire it too close, it won't explode.

At least 120 mm mortar grenades have the same feature, which saved quite a lot of lives in my company once, when a grenade misfired, and only flew 50 meters instead of 4 km (and landed right behind the soldier triangulating the other tanks).

So, the grenade worked as designed, and did not explode, but then the Srgt. went and put it in a drawer, where it started to roll around when the drawer was opened and closed, and finally armed itself.

i still think that's a dumb system for timing explosions <.< . . what happened to the good old impact boom? ._.

Oh! No, it still goes boom on impact there's just a minimum distance before it decides it's okay to go boom. I can't remember how far that distance is but it's basically just far enough so that an unintended discharge (or some sort of defect in the arming mechanism) doesn't make it explode the first time you take a hard bump.

So goes the story. EOD tech's are an odd bunch who wear witty shirts like "If you see me running try to keep up". He could have been pulling my leg but it certainly seemed reasonable. This story was related to me when I first reached Okinawa because Okinawa still has tons of unexploded ordinance going all the way back to World War II. People stumble across them all the time and the dumb ones take them home because they think it looks cool.

The story was told to demonstrate two things:
1. When you're done with training it's very important that you carefully clear the training area of things that should have gone boom but didn't. When in doubt go find someone who does this for a living. Gunnery Sgt Not Very Smart would still be alive if someone hadn't have missed an unexploded grenade
2. You are not as smart as you think you are. Don't think you're totally awesome because you have a "dud" grenade as a paperweight.

But no, I don't think the 203 would be such a popular weapon if it exploded randomly It takes real hard work and dedicated stupidity to frag yourself.

Again, the "impact boom" is there, it just remains inactive unless the revolution counter has gone down - to avoid the "oops, I stumble..BOOM" problem. The grenade is not armed until it has gone through X revolutions, after which it will have travelled y meters. Past y meters, it's "Impact? Boom

Think of it as magical safety bullets that don't break skin unless they've gone a minimum distance from the muzzle. Can't you see how that would cut down on mishaps and accidents and injuries from negligence and accidents?

Now, remember we're talking about explosives here. Can't you see that it's an even better idea, for a fired grenade to not go off a very, very, short distance from the muzzle of the weapon that fired it?

Aye. A negligent discharge from a underslung GL pointed "safely" at the ground would be the modern definition of "hoist by your own petard"... along with any nearby squadmates or civilians.

About the m203 rounds,

Another safety feature is that the rotations don't start arming the fuze without some pretty serious g-forces. (like being fired from a M203)

So, if you can slam a M203 round on just the right surface with just the right force, while giving it a half turn at the same time, you can roll it in your hands several times and have a live grenade. You still have to smack it on something point first.

What makes dud rounds so spectacularly dangerous is that you don't know what went wrong for it to not function. Is the fuze just a bit too stiff? Did the fuse trigger, but jam half-way? You just don't know.

Which makes "cleaning up the target slope" of an artillery range a very, very risky venture. Not something you should send a company of recruits on after a 5 minutes "lesson" of "this is a safe piece to pick up, this is a dud".