QUOTE (Isath @ Oct 2 2013, 01:42 PM)
Well.... I can easily come up with characters and situations where someone, facing 18 gangers, without cover, would survive in SR5 and die rather quickly in SR4 (no grenades allowed). SR4 often is more lethal than SR5 ...until you count the use of matter- antimatter reactions in grenades, since SR5.
Grenades are deadly. Sitting on a grenade detonation point is a one-way ticket to the great runner retirement community in the sky. A modern fragmentation hand grenade is expected to kill everything within a 5 meter radius and produce injuries of varying degrees out to 15 meters.
In that sense, SR5 grenades have it about right.
An average human in an armor jacket has Body 3 and Armor 12.
Fragmentation Grenade: 18P (-1/m), +5AP
0 meters: 18P -- 20 dice to resist. 6 hits on average, producing 12P (armor < damage)
1 meter: 17P -- 20 dice to resist. 6 hits on average, producing 11S (damage = armor)
5 meters: 13P -- 20 dice to resist. 6 hits on average, producing 7S (damage < armor).
Each additional meter out reduces the damage by approximately 1S, meaning at 12 meters the target is likely to take 0 damage.
HE Grenade: 16P (-2/m), -2 AP
0 meters: 16P -- 13 dice to resist. 4 hits on average, producing 12P (armor < damage)
3 meters: 10P -- 13 dice to resist. 4 hits on average, producing 6S (damage = armor)
5 meters: 6P -- 13 dice to resist. 4 hits on average, producing 2S (damage < armor)
Each additional meter out reduces the damage by approximately 2S, meaning at 6 meters the target is likely to take 0 damage.
Now if you ramp your defender up with full body + helmet armor (high-security forces, HTRs, military), he'll have Body 3 and Armor 18.
Frag Grenade: Armor is modified to 23, for 26 defense dice. Armor is always greater than damage, so it's always stun. You can expect 8 hits, for 8S at the detonation point, reducing linearly 1S per 1 meter, to 0 damage at 8 meters.
HE Grenade: Armor is modified to 16, for 19 defense dice. Armor is always equal to or greater than damage, so it's always stun. You can expect 6 hits, for 10S at the detonation point, reducing linearly 2S per 1 meter, to 0 damage at 5 meters.
Further, note that the test for placing a grenade is Thrown Weapons + Agility (3). Since Medium range for average throwers is generally within the blast radius, expect most to be thrown either at Long range. This means that in order to hit the threshold half the time or more, and barring other situational modifiers, you need to have at least Thrown Weapons + Agility of 12, which is pretty high. A little bit of scatter means an incapacitating shot is likely to turn into a mere wound (especially if you're throwing to maximize the damage on multiple targets, making the grenade a really expensive one-shot method of not killing someone. Considering that a sniper rifle is likely to do more damage at 100 times the range, it seems to be a fair trade-off.
So yes, grenades are deadly, but not nearly as deadly as you're making them out to be.