My group is playing SR5 and have - several times - expressed incredulity at just how deadly and generically useful AoE spells and Grenades are.

Reading the SR5 book does seem to imply that only the thrower needs 3 hits and the defender does not dodge (though there is a -2 modifier in there aparently? What are they dodging against at that point?).

Is there an official source I can point people to that explains the correct ruling? With the best will in the world a post in a random forum thread isn't all that 'official' sounding.

Does an FAQ or something exist?

There is a FAQ thread on the official boards, where the basic word was that there was, indeed, no dodge; to the tune of "that's right, grenades are very deadly".

The other caution, however, is that grenades are extreme force, and will draw extreme response. Spells, meanwhile, don't get into serious damage until you get into extreme Force, and thus major Drain.

Pretty much what Rhat said.

Grenades are too good to be used in the same way as they were in 4th Ed. I tend to think that this wasn't intended and that dodge rules need to be implemented.

I was toying with the idea that it should be an opposed roll where the attackers gets -3 (to simulate the "at least 3 hits" thing) and that success on the defenders part would allow them to move to the outside of the area of effect. If this blows out their movement allowance then they get the penalties.

Alternatively the defender could roll with the -2 penalty (not opposed) and each success lets them move 1m to either outside the AoE or behind some cover, etc. This would make grenades tactical but not necessarily lethal.

In this general direction:
Chunky Salsa?
And how does AOE work with the whole "only one attack" mess?

What do you mean? It counts as your one attack action.

And Chunky Salsa does get pretty nuts, yeah.

So, i can do several attacks if i don't throw the grenade as a throwing weapon at people to do damage but instead throw them in between them to get them cought in the blast again and again?

Or throw multiple grenades at once.

Though I suspect multiple grenades at once counts as multiple attacks.

But with the Threshold of 3 you could realistically split your pool and hit with both.

Is an attack, if i don't aim them at people?

Aren't you just throwing it at multiple people? Suppression fire counts as an attack right?

No, i am throwing it into a room.
The People in there are purely coincidental.

That is what we call bullshit.

Your action is an attack because it directly effects the enemy.

So a Samurai who shoots at the armoured vest, but not the dude wearing it is freed from the restrictions as well?

Sheesh! Talk about Semantics..... The RAI is pretty obvious here.

So, everything that affects anybody is an attack.
So i can only throw one grenade.
Because one grenade equals one attack?
If i throw into the room one dozend of grenades at once, does it still count as one attack?

And think this further:
if i MISS when i shoot at somebody, it does not affect anybody at all.
because i missed. so i do get to shoot again then, untill i hit and affect somebody?

Man, it's amazing what happens when you read the rules.



and as for grenades:



Why did I bold those 2. Well here's why:



Hmmm, so firing or throwing a weapon is an attack right? I don't see it specify a target, or whether it ceases to exist as an attack if it happens to miss.

Let's throw this in there too:


The worst part about this is that that should have all been completely unnecessary because your point was one of total semantics (albeit wrong) and shouldn't have required debate.

The biggest thing to remember is that the damage has to go through anything in the room as well as an targets in the room. It's not very often that you'll be tossing a grenade into an empty room other than the guards inside. If a character has time to dive behind something like a desk, a door jam, etc the damage has to go through the object used as cover before damaging the targets. If it's a frag grenade, don't forget to add the +5 armor to the cover on top of the +5 armor for the targets as well.

... and the reduction of the blast damage based on the distance between where the grenade landed and where the blast hits the first obstacle (be it furniture or meat) and then the 2nd obstacle, etc. Plus the reduction in damage of the blast for every obstacle that it passes through.

Grenades are certainly cool, they just aren't the Instant Death! ™ that some people here are portraying them to be if you keep your wits about you and consider all the factors going on.

I did the math in 4th once for a frag grenade against a brick wall. The +5 dice was almost irrelevant. The grenade still did enough damage to completely blow a hole through a 20cm thick section of wall (no chunky salsa rule used, grenade was assumed to be point blank; e.g. sitting in the corner between the wall and floor). The 3rd 10cm was not completely destroyed, but did take significant damage.

Oh, and that was including granting the 2nd 10cm the armor from the first 10cm, or something along those lines, as the rules were a little ambiguous. I recall that it could have gone one of two ways and I continued on the assumption that the wall got the better end of the stick.

Unless, the other ones use one or two grenades, with motions sensor or wireless Link plus neural interface. In that case it comes down to: “Can you soak 16 or 32* physical damage, AP -2?”

So basically 100% of all character I know, who use lethal grenades.

The plus side is that you now have a pretty good chance against high force Spirits, Dragons or MilSpec drones.

*multiple simultaneous blasts

Now I am just waiting for some gunsmith to try and make a Grenade Launcher with a 3 round BF setting to submit for approval.

Make your own Salsa indeed;p

*practices his Gibbs Slap for that moment*

There is a Reason that the Mk 19 AGL is a fearsome weapon.

if you consider that most rooms are probably not more than ~5 m across in at least one direction, you don't really need 3 grenades. if you're using it in a hallway, they probably won't even be more than ~3 m across (note: that's the full distance across. which means that if you're that full 3 m away from one wall, you're 0 from the other... also, did i mention that ceilings are probably not typically more than 3 meters up?)

so unless you're using that grenade outdoors, you're probably just going to smear people even with one grenade.

Well yes, buts a whole other level of boom boom....

Oh I agree, just saying am just waiting on a player to try and submit a design for one just because they would want to try it.

Plus am sure I could sell it to FuelDrop, he likes the boom boom.

Tis True...
Though MOST interior walls/ceilings will blow apart pretty easily (they are just fiberboard after all), so no chunky salsa for you.

Also keep in mind that the effectiveness of a hand grenade and the effectiveness of a grenade launcher round are completely different things. Shadowrun has chosen not to make this distinction in game.

Your post made me wonder about the actual differences between the two weapons, and the numbers I've found in researching it are kind of bizzare.

For comparison I went with one of the most common US versions of each type of grenade, the M67 hand thrown fragmentation grenade and the M381 launcher-propelled HE grenade.

The numbers I found for the M67 are as follows : total weight of 14 oz, payload of 6.5 ounces of Composition B, effective casualty radius of 15m, effective kill radius of 5m.

For the M381 : total weight of 8.048 ounces, payload of 1.12877 ounces of Composition B, effective casualty radius of 130m, effective kill radius of 5m.

It seemed odd to me that the M381, with less than 20% of the payload of the M76, was listed as having the exact same kill radius and a massively superior casualty radius, so I double checked the payload and found it to be accurate according to multiple sources.

I'm still somewhat perplexed, but I did manage to find a detailed description of the round's construction and functionality which cites a "ground burst effect", a term which I'm unfamiliar with and which I cannot find a solid definition of. It may, however, merely be referring to the mechanism of impact detonation present in this grenade? Not sure.

The only other thing of note I found is the description of "producing blast and fragmentation of the projectile body", which is decidedly ambiguous. I had assumed that the M381 being designated a HE round meant it wasn't a fragmentation grenade (although I was already aware that fragmentation grenades necessarily contain high explosives).

Of course, the actual design of the two different shells themselves and their resultant fragmentations must surely play a large part in determining their effectiveness, no? Clearly the bulbous M67 is shaped to fit in a thrower's hand while the bullet shaped M381 employs a form suited for launching from a firearm, but how that affects their individual fragmentation patterns is beyond me.

I'm not sure what to think of the smaller payload producing a casualty radius almost an entire order of magnitude bigger than the hand grenade's. Putting that aside and focusing purely on the kill radius, however, it seems pretty evident that the supposed difference in effectiveness between hand grenades and launched grenades is nonexistant, and that for once SR seems to have actually reflected reality accurately.

Edit: Found a private blog post purportedly from a soldier who has used a number of different US grenade launchers, excerpted here.


This revised casualty radius is back in line with that of the M67's, which reinforces the notion that there isn't any significant difference in effectiveness between these two grenade types. (Aside from how they get to the target.)

~Umi

And the old OSS manuals stated that cutting someone's carotid artery would knock them out in 5 seconds and kill them in 15 seconds...it's a confidence builder.

Was watching TacTV and Larry Vickers was popping off some good ol' HE grenade launcher rounds at a group of three standard cardboard shooting targets. No certain about the distances involved but they couldn't have been much more than 5 meters apart, if that. Grenade round goes off and most targets had two or three holes in them, so you could say they had been wounded or maybe killed (far more likely just wounded, if you had asked me). The real rub, however, came from the target wearing a soft protective vest. A soft vest has a maximum protective class of IIIA, which will stop a soft-nosed .44 magnum round but a rifle round like a .223 or 7.62x39 will go through it like it wasn't even there, and the vest had stopped the fragments easily with only damage to the surface and few underlying layers because of the sharp edges of the fragments.

So here is what I get from your information above combined with the video footage I saw. Can the M381 kill someone with a fragment at 5 meters? Certainly. Is the M381 guaran-damn-teed to Instant Death! ™ someone at that same distance, even if they're not wearing any protection at all? Certainly not.

Now, they also have to remind their soldiers and/or Marines that these toys are dangerous, right? I mean, if you operate with munitions based solely upon averages, you're going to see a whole bunch of your troops killing themselves. That said, can an errant chunk of a M381 hit you or a fellow on your side at 130m and place them squarely in the FUBAR zone? Absolutely. If you pop off a M381 grenade launcher round 130 meters away from a bunch of folks can you count on even one of them to take an incapacitating wound with anything close to certainty? Certainly not.

Here is a show that is a little over the top - but does show some interesting stuff.

Skip to about 12:18 - you see that the grenade is lethal with blast damage to about 10 feet, even 15 feet with a flimsy guard shack in between, the blast is not enough to hurt or kill - although the shrapnel happened to hit a vital area and still cause a kill.

Grenade - skip to 12:18

I think that 15 foot guy was killed with the rifle. They used the word "round" and the contestant(?) did pull out his AK and fire several shots before moving up to the house.

Yes, rewatching it, it appears that the 15 ft target was killed by him shooting, rather than shrapnel.

So the M67 has 6.5oz of Composition B, about 1.625 times the explosive of the RGD-5 grenade in the video. Composition B with RDX and TNT also has a bit more "oomph" than the straight TNT of the grenade in the video so the 10ft kill could conceivably become a 15ft blast kill with an M67. Add that the Russian weapon tosses about 350 fragments on average while the M67 has a specially notched steel casing to produce approximately 2000 fragments and you can see where the M67 has that dead, Deader, DEADEST radius of up to 15ft/5m.

How works "trageted by an area-effect attack"? (SR5 S.190)

You mean the -2 dodge modifier?

That doesn't exist and should be removed from the table.

Sold! However, a good man-portable MLRS (Multiple Launch Rocket System) would also go down well

Working on it, but it is just never as easy as to pack them in as Macross/Robotech makes it look.

Yes, we know that was a much larger Mech, but could make for a fun one battlesuit system....

How about an MLRS with an under barrel burst fire grenade launcher... Because go big or go home.

Underbarrel Thor.

~Umi

Underbarrel full auto Thor. With a Gas vent system to help with recoil.

Yes, because that extra 9DV on a narrow full burst from a Thor is gonna matter ever so much.

Realistically, though, the Firing Selection Change mod doesn't work on weapons with "Exotic" ammunition types. Gas Vent likewise wouldn't help. So no, I'm afraid you can't add insult to injury and will just have to settle for normal nuke-grade damage.

~Umi

I was actually hoping someone would point out the insane stupidity of expecting a gas vent system to have any effect on what is basically a giant coil gun.

Welcome to Dumpshock.

*punches alien fighter craft pilot in the face*

~Umi

Let's play 4a edition, untill 5a comes out... I guess thats the smart thing to do...

It's my current philosophy, so I'll take that as a compliment!

~Umi

RHat, can you please provide a link to the FAQ? I tried poking around at various boards, but, as you know, there are a lot of Shadowrun boards now and I could not find this in a FAQ.

Also, consider that AOE spells do allow a Reaction + Intuition roll, according to the example on pg. 283. Which is to say, you can apparently stand in the middle of a Fireball spell's area and "dodge" it with Reaction + Intuition.

If that is the case, however strange that sounds, why would a Grenade not also allow a Reaction + Intuition roll?

the example doesn't follow the rules presented. which one is accurate is unclear, but as written you don't get a dodge against AoE combat spells either.

Yes, the rules seem to need some clarity, but the example on pg. 283 explicitly describes the targets rolling Reaction + Intuition vs. a Blast AoE spell.

Where does it say they do not get a Dodge?

page 283 also has the rules for AOE indirect spells (towards the bottom of the rules for indirect combat spells on the left hand column):

"Area indirect spells
travel from the magician to the point of detonation and
then go boom. The test is like that for grenades (p. 181):
a Spellcasting + Magic [Force] (3) Test with scatter of 2D6
meters. Unlike grenades, you get to add your net hits on
this test to the Damage Value of the spell, but only if you
beat the threshold; otherwise the spell still detonates, but
the hits are used to reduce scatter by one meter per hit."

no mention whatsoever of any test by the defender, instead it calls for a threshold of 3 and indicates that it works like grenades (which would further imply there should be no test on the part of the target).

also, in case you were thinking in your head "surely this should have some form of errata", you'd be right. there *should* be some errata to tell us which is the correct way.

there isn't. but there should be.

I have made a summary of the rules I found in this post
http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...c=39934&hl=
It might give some insight, but in short:


Even though I frequently point out the stupidness of grenade rules in shadowrun it is not actually as bad as it might seem.

First of.

All attacks that offer no defence also offer no instant kill. *

You throw grenade, it detonates NEXT COMBAT TURN -10. It is, with exception of very specific movements and planning of initative guaranteed that everyone in the target zone gets to move out.


All attacks that detonate instantly are OPPOSED, and the defender may roll something to avoid certain death. (Motion sensor, grenade launcher, rockets, etc). The scatter of regular hand grenades are too low to matter but it makes the Ares Alpha grenade launcher a little bit less I.WIN. because the target may dodge and invoke scatter.

*The exception is wirless grenades, but you techincally got a defence against those by using an aggressive decker in your team. (Or even better, technomancer with Puppeteer, the only thing TM do well in SR5!).

Run and Gun also adds an interrupt action that allow you to move out of AoE, even those with no defence so there is some kind of "errata" or at least basic thinking about the broked state of grenades.


We just have to remember that there is no rule stating that you are ALLOWED to fire a rocket or a motion sensor grenade at the ground. It has to target someone (and they may defend). The only "exploit" is to attack the weakest guard standing next to your intended target to give less defense but that is tricky to pull off.


Also, I never saw SPELLS detonate instantly when I read about them. They say they work like grenades (and that means they detonate next turn) so there is no reason whatsoever to let them have full damage - no damage falloff without defence. Sorry mages. Use Direct combat spells for instant effect, but at least they may defend then.


The "No defence"-game is boring. Just like "No save"-spells in DnD.

Yes, grenades can be deadly, but because they blow up hard, NOT BECAUSE THEY ARE SUPERIOR to SNIPE RIFLES and guarantee hit targets where a master marksman always miss. Grenades are area denial, cover busters and panic inducers more than super-sniper-IDK.

If a shadowrunner can move around enough to avoid gunfire (that travels up to a kilometer a second!) they should have no trouble avoiding a grenade that is thrown in tens meters per second at best. Airtime of grenades is a thing, travel time for a gunshot not so much...

an aggressive hacker won't save you from wireless grenades if the other guy does it right. activate wireless, throw, detonate (requires a ready action in the previous round, though, unless you're using an underslung launcher). you may need an extra person to detonate depending on how you read the rules (so far as i can tell, there is nothing letting you swap a simple action for a free action, but there really should be), but even then a decker can't do squat; if they manage to get a mark (which can be against a fairly difficult target; high rating commlinks are not that expensive), they won't have an action before you can detonate it anyways to do anything with their mark. technomancers do have it slightly better in this situation, if they have puppeteer (and you bloody well should, because you paid way too much to be a technomancer to *not* take the only thing they sort of have going for them) since they don't need to get a mark first, but... well, massive amounts of fading, they need to have an action available and have the worst access to initiative boosts in the game, and they still have to win their opposed test...

even then, if you rule that simple actions can be used to take free actions, the technomancer won't have a chance to react in most cases. though, come to think of it, i think it'd be hilarious if you know your enemy has a technomancer to get a fake wireless grenade and let them blow their own brains out trying to puppeteer it...

also, surukai, it doesn't say that AoE indirect spells work like grenades. it says the *test* is like the test for grenades. in no way do indirect AoE spells ever indicate that they have a waiting period to detonate like a grenade. (which is fine, imo; in order to damage comparable to a grenade, you're probably getting hit with enough fading to almost knock you out. if you actually are aiming for a one-hit KO, you probably need about force 10-11 depending on how much you can reliably beat the threshold by, and maybe more if you're worried about scatter... which means you're taking enough drain that if you don't roll well on your own drain resistance test, or you've already taken damage, it could kill/KO *you* as well.