Right, so last night. Last night...

There's a motor home. Lets say for arguments sake it's 4m wide and 10m long (I don't think it's actually that big but hey). It's armoured and full of angry gentlemen, one of which is our target (we hope). I jumped onto the roof of said motor home, smashed in the skylight and fired grenades in through the roof. Fun!

Now I fired Flash-Bang first, but I have the Frag option if I find our target isn't actually in there. The thing is grenades in a confined metal box are hella-bad and I want to work out the damage properly using the 'chunky salsa' ruling.

I figured it like this: In a 4m wide metal corridor, a flash-bang (10m radius) would hit each target 5 times; 2m to wall, 4 back the other way, and 4 back again, twice for 2 directions. I could also use roof and floor but haven't done yet. This would make a flash-bang 30S damage. Does that sound about correct?

If I switch to Frag, each blast will do 12+(12-4=+(8-4=4)=24 damage, twice, so 48P.

This is assuming, for easiness sake, that each target is standing in the middle of the room. I think if you worked it out it's be the same everywhere anyway as it's equal distance one way or the other.


Does that all sound correct? We stopped playing before the grenade went off thinking it would be a good place to start off next week.

Thanks for any insight.

Fragments in a frag grenade doesn't bounce, so no chunky salsa makes any sense whatsoever (moreso, chunky salsa doesn't even make sense at all. You don't see that kind of perfect rebound ever. What you could rule is that everyone gets full grenade damage, i.e. not -2/m like you would outdoors.

In addition, Flash bang has magical 10m full effect but then no effect cutoff without any of the normal falloff that you would expect from a grenade. So, it basically just saturates an area with "flash bang effect" so it isn't covered by chunky salsa either. It can not be an explosion (since it has no falloff), it works more like a magic spell and they don't get chunky salsa either.

To make any use of chunky salsa you'd need to use plain explosive (aka concussion) grenades.

Sounds like good messy fun.

However one question, why would the trailer be armoured so heavily that it can bounce grenade blast (otherwise they just would blow out the walls and no rebound then) off them yet they didn't reinforce the skylight?

@Surukai: Well I was under the impression that all grenades had a shockwave of sorts as that's what's used to distribute the contents? Either way, surely if a flash-bang has a 10m radius spread and it's condensed into 2m then that would concentrate the effect? I know it's not technically 'chunky salsa' but that's just a fun name. Really it's 'blasts in a confined space' and I'm sure this still applies. Also Frag grenades definitely have a shockwave as well as the obvious shrapnel damage. I don't really get that it makes no sense whatsoever. Shock waves don't require a perfect rebound, and they cause massive damage. I actually wanted concussion grenades but we couldn't find anything that fitted in the book, which is why I went for flash-bang.


@Sendaz: The skylight was ballistic glass, but I brought a glass-breaking hammer (pointed) and one meaty Str10 swing later it wasn't there any more

Concussion grenades are labeled "explosive grenade" in SR.

Regarding flash bangs in confined spaces, It all makes sense but if that is the case, the opposite has to be true. Standing 9 meters away from a blast exposes you to 1/81th the pressure and light intensity compared to at 1m. Yet you somehow take exactly the same amount of stun damage for no reason. If distance to grenade has no effect then being in a confined space does not matter either.
My conclusion is that stun grenades work a bit backwards and my own ruling is that you get -1/m (even though -2/m just like other omnidirectional explosions would make even more sense).

My own version of chunky salsa is to halve the "damage falloff" if the explosion occurs in a confined space.

For reference, please watch the Mythbusters episode about Operation Valkyrie (it is about blowing up Hitler) and they found that while explosions indoor are nastier they are still very survivable if you just have a few meters distance to the blast and the effect of confined spaces like being indoors are not nearly as big as people might think. You need reaaaally claustrophobic spaces to get chunky salsa.

Hehe, we were talking about that mythbusters episode just last night while I was happily firing grenades in

I understand what you mean about the damage fall-off and flash-bangs, it's a case of rules not accurately simulating the effects I think, though even if you assumed that flash grenades DO spread out equally over 10m, confining that spread over 2m is surely worse?

I didn't know concussion grenades are HE. Maybe I'll use them instead as flash wasn't really what I wanted anyway. Isn't there a Stun Damage form of concussion grenade?

Standing a few meters away from a HE makes it stun if you wear armour. (Grenade DV < Armour = damage is Stun) Also the frag grenade had a tendency to cause stun in SR4. The +5AP makes frag cause stun more often than not in SR5 too, despite the insane buff to its damage (armor jacket + helmet, the bare minimum anyone wears). Not that it helps survivability. 18S is often worse than 18P thanks to the generally lower Willpower than Body stats of all races (including dwarves).

With SR5 grenade damage you don't need any ill thought bouncy rules. to roll 18 hits on average you need a total damage resist pool of 54 dice. And even with 54 dice total Armor+Body you end up getting hurt in 50% of the time. (+5 from AP so you need some 8 body and 31 base armour. That requires some dedication to get.)

So we continued playing last night and actually did this. I swapped out the grenades for HE as suggested above. We worked the motor home out as being 3m wide and with a 2m high ceiling. For easiness we also assumed each person was standing in roughly centrally in the vehicle.

So 10P damage, + (3m to the wall and back so 10-6) 4P off the left wall, 4P off the right wall, and 2P off the ceiling. We didn't do the floor as that seemed harsh. So 20P -2AP. There were 5 goons in there. Only 1 wasn't outright dead, and he was in overflow.

Grenades are fun

It's worth noting an odd effect of chunky salsa that shows how ridiculous the rule is.

Take that square room, now make it a pentagon, hmm, five surfaces five rebounds so more damage. Now make it a hexagon, hmm six surfaces six rebounds even more damage. Follow ad nauseam, until you have infinite surfaces, i.e. a circle, and you have infinite rebounds. So an explosion in a circular room with a radius that is half the blast radius or less does infinite damage.

We just use a fixed damage increase (+50% to DV if the blast is mostly contained, like in a hallway, +%100 to DV in a small space that can reasonably contain the blast) and assume that grenades normally explode on the ground, so we ignore the ground.

Edit: Realized that what I meant might not be clear, we increase the initial DV by that amount and then have drop-off as normal. It makes the math much easier and faster and yields somewhat similar results. So in you're example 10P -2AP becomes 20P -2AP and it still experiences the -1/m. So figure they're spread out they take somewhere between 20P and 17P damage.
We also allow taking cover and other things to add armor against grenades. So if you're in a hallway and you duck into a doorway or you dive behind a potted plant or even just hit the dirt, your chances of survival go up. So depending on what's in the motor home, if they have time to react, and where they started you might see anywhere from 2-8 bonus armor. Everyone in the motor home is still probably dead though or close to it.

If they aren't exploding on the ground, do you halve the base DV, then calculate surfaces?

No, even an air burst isn't usually exploding more than 2 or 3 meters off the ground, so we just use the base DV.