With the FA capable Grenade launcher, and the rules in War! for Supressive Fire using SA weapons, it is now possible to use Supressive fire with grenade launchers.

How would you people resolve this?

Especially with the FA version, there will be explosions galore somewhere...

Has this come up in anyone elses game?

With Suppressive Fire from a bullet-firing weapon, you can suppress a doorway, window, or even an alleyway.

With Suppressive Fire from a full-auto grenade launcher, you can suppress a STREET. (You also decrease the property value in the area by a significant amount and cause people to move away RFQ.).

Yeah, but how do you determine who is within blast radius and not? Scatter? Damage? (still go 'half base damage' for SA weapons, for instance?)

I plead the Fifth. "You're Canadian, you don't have The Fifth." I'm drinking a Fifth. "You have no booze in the house." Shut up, they don't know that. "I just told them." Damnit inner voice, stay inner!

Have to read the rules again... Which means, *shudder*, opening War!.

Yeah, I'd do something like 'suppress a larger area than bullets do' and just use the basic flat DV no-net-hits rules of Suppression. Just assume that the whole area gets evenly-distributed blasts. Maybe remove the prone and Edge effects entirely?

Using impact-triggered minigrenades I'm thinking doing it just like bullets - no reason not to, really - and only trigger the area blasts if someone is hit.

Otherwise, I'm thinking targeting a circle instead of a cone - launcher style arc and cover a circle of ground.

Question is how big a circle, and how to handle dodging (presumably even on full-auto the entire circle wouldn't be exploding at once for the entire time).

Maybe let ppl get the standard defense roll to find cover/get out of the area before the fun starts? Anyone caught in the middle of it all once the 'nades start going off will take standard damage (no drop off) - more if they glitch/critical glitch their defense?


I have a player who loves explosives, and so far he only has an SA launcher - but I know he's gonna aim for FA sooner or later...it's bound to be nasty.

Mostly my table just doesn't use grenades. We understand that they're preposterously cheap, very deadly, and crazy loud.

Yeah, I can see both of your solutions. Personally, I don't think I'd *opt* to suppress with grenades; that's expensive, even at SR4 grenade prices.

When trying to cover hos traces after a theft at MIT&T, this player blew out half of the building...mostly unintentional.
Arranging for a diversion to slow security coming up an elevator, he dropped an entire back-pack full of C14 on a timer down the shaft. The team just barely made it out of the blast radius before the entire penthouse went bye-bye.
Most recently, we ran the Burning Bridges SRM and he managed to disintegrate a sizeable chunk of the brooklyn side caisson.

Each incident was with a different character, and the last (and current) didn't even have Demolitions.

His most recent explosives-related feat was taking out a 12 man mounted go-gang with 2 grenades...

(...and you wonder why I want to enforce hit caps at my table... pfft! )

He seems like a liability, as a shadowrunner.

Yeah, there was one big scene that two of us just ruined in a game once, because a couple UBGLs that we barely knew how to use destroyed huge amounts of the opposition. They're just fully game-breaking.

Demolitions shouldn't be defaultable. Solved.

Definitely a liability, as a Shadowrunner...
I don't know. Keeping Demolitions Defaultable WILL weed out the Incompetant Idiots trying it. Seen it happen IRL, why should a game be any different?

I mean, by that logic, everything is defaultable. Hehe.

Well, a lot of things, anyways.

With a fully-automatic grenade launcher, just pick a 90-deegree cone from your current location. Everyone and everything you have line of sight to in that arc within 500 meters that isn't behind a hardened wall is Suppressed. Alternatively, if you're fighting in a built-up area, just pick a dramatic direction - such as "north along the street" or "every high wall on the west side of the street." Everything that meets those (GM-approved) criterion is suppressed.

Remember, suppressing with an automatic grenade launcher is second only to suppression fire from a vehicular autocannon. You're shelling the whole damn area. If it wasn't a warzone before, it'll become one when the High-Threat Response team shows up.

Yeah, problem is that 20 grenades won't really effectively cover a 500 meter long cone, unless you do imact-triggered of course. I'm figuring more you can pick an area of roughly 50m diameter, and guarantee that everything in there takes more or less full damage.


The main problem comes from handling suppression with a Semi-auto GL, and that's what I can't quite get to work using existing suppression rules from War!...

Frankly, I'm amazed that grenades from any kind of launcher have any options other than impact and air-burst. Frankly, they should all be impact with an air-burst option.

I was expecting impact, by the way. Just shell the whole friggin' neighborhood. Everybody will get their heads down when that much shrapnel starts a-flyin'.




Well, the point of suppression fire is to make someone get down behind cover and stay down behind cover. You may be overthinking this one.

Just launch a grenade somewhere into his immediate vicinity. It's not like with bullets where you need a lot of them to spook someone into getting down. They'll be shouting "Full defense! Full defense!" faster than you can say "Airburst Link" when you start lobbing grenades at their position.

And that means they're not going to be acting in the next IP, because they pre-spent it diving for cover.

Cyberpunk used a simple rule : trained user failed to get teh desired result and blew themselves up with a fumble. Untrained attempts made every failure a fumble. This tended to weed out the wanabee quickly and effectively.

In SR4 rules, having 'gremlins' like extraglitch cances could to the trick, with a severity adjusted by how touchy an explosive is used (easier to blow yourself up with nitroglycerine than C-4)

I would make it simple.

- How many grenades are there in a full auto barrage? I would say about 20'
- Add +1 to the base area effect of a grenade per shot fired.
- The total area is the area suppressed, calculate scatter from impact point as normal for the entire explosion radius ONCE.
- That is your supression area, if you want less scatter, start over and shoot again.

But for gods sake, dont mix grenades (Smoke, Incendiary, Frag) Enemy cannot see, they are on fire, and they explode...)

And yea, property value will be somewhat dimished.

just supress with splash grenades + dmso + narcoject

The problem with that is that people will overdose and die...not that they will survive a grenade barrage of frags...

I would suggest the following mixture:
-Nausea Gas
-Riot Foam
-Pepper Punch
-Flourescent Ink (Pink)

Now everyone will feel like shit without dying...hopefully.

Ugh, not *this* again. Didn't you guys have enough 'fun' in the other thread?

Hehe. Can you even suppress with not-all-the-same ammo? I mean, tracers definitely work, but that's just 'tracer ammo'. Off the top of my head, I'd say it has to be one type for the entire action.

DMSO + Deepweed = End of combat: "Dude, quit harshing my buzz." "Aw man, I got the munchies! We got any chips?"

Why aren't we discussing the real issue - suppressive fire from pantheon (read rapid fire aesir) satellites.

Shortstraw: Suppressive Pantheon fire suppresses an entire district of the sprawl.

I kinda like that suggestion...

Found a relevant section of War!:


So, using an SA grenade launcher to suppress would use up 5 grenades; an FA one 20.

Having 5 grenades cover 15m radius may work. I like that.
Using the same suggestion, a FA suppressive zone would cover a 30 meter radius. Yeah.

I think I'll stick to half base damage for SA suppression, to make things a bit less deadly. Use full damage for a critical glitch, indicating a direct hit.
A 20 'nade suppression-fest would be full damage though.

It works, and I fear my explosives-nut player will now start using his GL equipped rotodrone for supression... *sigh* The city will never be the same after he pulls that stunt

I expect that in the future, glass will become a lot less popular as a building material compared to, say, reinforced concrete with spall liner.

Still though, once you start pulling out the math, I say bleh. That's why I just say go with a narrative description of where you're suppressing and let the GM veto it if you're asking to do something ridiculous, like suppress an entire facing of the ACHE with a machine pistol.

Normally with "SF" you would follow the rules as written, i.e.> make the test or be suppressed. using grenades does not change this rule, but since the ammunition has changed you also have to follow that rule.
If you are shooting out 20 grenades you would resolve each grenade separately, note that this does not affect the Suppression test at all.

Neither the Grenade rules nor the Supression rules override each other allowing both to be used simultaneously. Sadly the "AOE" effect of the suppression is not increased by using grenades, there is simply nothing that allows for you to get a bigger area.

See my quote from War! above about different weapons creating differently shaped suppression areas (A Cluster bomb creates a supression area of 15m radius, for instance).

The question isn't how to handle if ppl are suppressed or not, really - the question is what damage do they take if they fail their test (standard is 'base damage' for normal suppression and 'half base damage' for SA suppression).

Why would you resolve each grenade separately when you don't resolve each bullet separately in normal suppression, and how on earth would you determine where the grenades hit, and scatter, if you supress a cone? If you suppress using grenades set to contact detonation, then it can be treated just as standard suppression, but if you suppress using grenades on a timer things get a bit more convoluted - you're effectively delaying the activation of the supressive zone by one pass.


For that matter - how do you handle a FA tight burst from a grenade launcher? Just add 9 to the power of the explosion? How do you treat a wide burst? Scatter each grenade separately and calculate overlapping fire zones? There's not even a single hint at how to deal with the issue.

A burst of ten grenades hitting the same spot should do 10+((10/2)x9) =55 DV. But an FA burst should just add 9...

The narrative in the case of fully automatic HE grenade suppression being: 'they all die'

Yeah, pretty much. I don't have any problem with something like FA grenade suppression fire just wiping out the riff-riff nameless soldiers* and leaving only the named guys and armored vehicles alive.


*Depending on available cover. If there is good, hard cover available, they're going to ground and they're going to stay suppressed for a good long while.

because you are not firing bullets you are firing Grenades and they have their own specific rules as how to function. However the rules are silent as to how you would determining the original placement in the area suppressed, any decision made is a house rule since nothing tells us how to resolve it. That is assuming you let someone do this in game, as YMMV.

Well, with the introduction of FA grenade launchers it would be a house rule to *not* let people do it. (The 'suppression for SA/BF weapons from War! is easier to ignore).

Plus, supression rules is a special case from the normal rules as you don't count hits the same way, count damage the same way, or count defense the same way.

If you want to use both rules strictly RAW it would be something like (using HE nades):

Suppress using 20 grenades, everyone makes R+Edge tests to avoid, those hit take 10P, -1/meter
Possibly you'd roll scatter with the person who failed their defense test as ground zero, deducting as usual per number of successes.
It'd probably work, but seems unnecessarily compiclated. Using SA suppression, they 'nades would only do 5P, -1/meter, by RAW.

That is actually IMO very resonable
as for the Suppression damage, a Grenade Launcher does not have a Damage Code assigned, it is a **, the damage code = whatever grenade you use. So it would be correct to say 10p.

...if you go by that reading of the text (only the base damage of the weapon is halved, not the base damage of the attack, any ammunition would add it's full effects while the base damage of the weapon is halved. And SnS would do full damage on SA suppression (making them more effective for suppression than a assault cannon rounds) while suppression from a taser would still inflict half damage.

I was under the impression SnS replaced the weapons damage code with 6s.

But it's not the weapon's base damage code. It's the base damage code of the ammunition, much like with grenade launchers.

Sounds good then