It has been discussed as side topic in many places. Some of the grenade rules are very very unclear.

Topic a) No defence roll
There is a list of situational modifiers stating that you get a -2 penalty to defend against an aoe attack, but throwing a grenade is a success test, not an opposed test. The penalty is printed on the Defens Modifiers Table (p. 477 and p. 189)




But, throwing a grenade (Generally) is:


This is not opposed, so no defence roll. All you need is 3 hits (or 2 hits and roll 1-2 on 1d6, or 1 hit and roll 1 on 1d6 for scatter). The chances of this happening is 28% at dice pool of 4, 57% at 7 and over 80% at 12. (To be 95% sure you need DP of 17 and you have 100% at 24+). However, a bog standard grenade blows up next combat turn at -10 initiative giving everyone a chance to move away. So far so good.

But...

A Wireless link lets the attacker detonate the grenade as free action (with DNI), simple action (otherwise). This lets the attacker throw a grenade after the victim has acted his last time for the combat round and then throw the grenade and detonate it after (if the attacker has another action phase this round) without DNI, or simply as free action the same phase making the attack have no defense roll. (A smart runner has a jammer to make the Change Device Mode action to detonate the grenade fail if it is too close to the runner. Or, the new job for hackers isn't autobricking expensive cyber but to detonate grenades. Mark+detonate takes two actions to perform though.) In theory, jammers is a defence against grenades thrown this way.

Or....

Motion sensor.


This means the target gets to defend and if the defence fails THEN you check for scatter. Against clumsy targets this means it is easier to hit a person than an area (1 hit is enough to hit the wounded troll Slomo-no-intuition). This is where defending against aoe attack modifier comes in play.
But, any smart player will not attack the actual target but the ground at his feet or the wall next to him. Or the guy with less defence. If Ninja the Combat Sense Mystic Adept stands next to Slomo-no-intuition he is at great risk of getting obliterated by a grenade since the troll 1m away from him can't dodge. If the grenade targets him the grenade misses but scatters, and with many grenades the damage is still not laughing matter and some grenades (Spells and Stun grenades) don't care about scatter.
This method has partial no defence roll (Spells and Stun grenades don't care about 1d6 scatter, they automatically hit anyway). Frag grenade gets 1d6 less damage so it deals 12-17P even when the attack fails completely.
Only glitches change this and glitching is extremely rare for any pools above 6. The rules are unclear of what happens when the attacker targets the floor instead of the target.. RAW say it gets the default treatment with 3 hits success test and no defence allowed.


And, once again, Grenade launchers and missiles (despite being in the example of -2 defence modifier)


Stupidly enough, the projectile modes (Timer, Motion sensor and Wirless link) is repeated on P182 with only minor changes. Consolidation of these would have been nice since the only difference is min range 5m on motion sensor detonation instead of.. ehm.. ??? Profit!

Same problems return. What happens when you target the floor with motion sensor?

Grenade launcher (Ares Alpha!) has longer range, but scatters way more on less than 3 hits. Ares Alpha is probably best weapon in book as it is, adding some motion sensor grenades to fire at people's feet is a great way.

I have here a graph of hit chance with an Accuracy 4 weapon and a grenade at various dice pools. The Acc4 gun is targeting various defence pools with 6 being weak, 9 average-ish and 12 a strong pool (+15 as bonus for a decent defence, still far behind what a mysad can do but who cares). I also added a supergun (accuracy 7) versus defence 9 (average target). No matter where you look, the grenade wins all the time (and this is ONLY counting direct hits, ignoring all partial hits with 1-6 meters blasts that deal at worst 12P for a frag)
[img]http://reptid.se/datas/users/1-grenadesautohit.png[/img]

The huge gap between firearms and grenades/aoespells is what makes regular guns pretty useless for anything other than bar fights and where you can only smuggle small guns past the security. Automatics skill is a niche skill meant for super-sneaky missions using small machine pistols or silenced smgs. Grenades are for all high threat targets and as bonus they deal superior damage (16-18 instead of 9-11) in addition to superior hitrate.


So, how to fix?
Forbid targeting 'floor at his feet'.
Partial solution, but what happens when you place a grenade between two targets? Who gets to defend? Defence characters need to avoid their slow friends to avoid getting autohit by a grenade they would easily dodge if they were the target? That is wierd...
Also, Wireless with decent hacker defence still ignores this since wirless grenades use the (3) success test anyway.

Allow some kind of defence at all times/drop prone interrupt
Could work, anyone in an area effect could roll defence (-2 for aoe) and add HITS to the distance from the blast? Maybe make it a drop prone interrupt or just let everyone move? Adds new problems where you can rocket jump/run Quake style by "dodeing" away from grenades behind you to get higher movement rate than normal.

Just nerf damage a bit to make it less of an issue
Easier, could at least nerf microgrenades from underbarrel grenade launchers to mitigate their awesomeness, could be combined with 'forbid motion sensor' below.

Forbid motion sensor option
A rocket launcher that does not blow up on impact sounds strange. The rocket is supposed to just land there and chill out until next combat turn? It makes more sense for grenade launchers and thrown grenades because AIRTIME is a factor. YOu can't throw something and have it land <1 second from throw unless you throw reaaaaaly low angle and close. And if you baseball pitch your grenades and expect them to drop dead within 1d6 meters from where you aim you really don't know anything about throwing.

1d6 meters sounds like lobbing it pretty high and slow in the air, taking a full combat turn to actually land no matter how much wireless crap you put in it. The grenade takes time to travel, it won't teleport!

Launchers are a bit faster, rockets much faster so the ban on motion sensor will not work very good.

Letting people throw themselves away from blasts adding defence hits to distance is the best I think, but it isn't in RAW, there is no active defence like this, drop prone is a free action so that works.

Prone targets take half damage from aoe
My other favourite, prone targets take less damage from explosions, like half sounds good. This fixes a lot of stuff...

Have I missed anything? I thought I'd look at the rules where I could find them and tried to interpret them as good as I could.

The damage is extremely high too, 18P (or even just 16P HE) is more than a capped out rifle hit. With the stuff mentioned above making hitting targets easier it does not really make sense to have so high damage.

It is almost as if the damage was set so high that your average target gets hit a few meters away from the blast, making it survivable but still nasty.

Making grenades about area control, cover denial and flushing out people hiding in cover and not being a top damage, top accuracy attack that require minimal effort in terms of dice pools to be effective with sounds like a good thing and what grenades are supposed to do.


Topic B) Chunky salsa effect is terrible
While explosions in narrow areas are indeed more effective, the scaling of chunky salsa is way too high, it also assumes pellets from a frag bounces and it requires super super annoying calculations to figure out what breaks and what doesn't. It also suggests the ground is included. If that is the case, why are BOUNCING betty more effective than a regular mine you step on?

The quick and easy fix is to simply drop the "chunky salsa effect" alltogether, if you need some similar effect, let drop prone not halve damage (suggestion above) in really narrow spaces or add +50% damage, or reduce the damage falloff by a step (so frag does -1 per 2 meter, HE -1/m instead of -2/meter).

Operation Valkyrie showed that even blasts indoors are very survivable.