FATEwiki - Grenade Rule Thoughts

The following bit was another Home Brew I whipped up and considered using. The main problem is that it introduces another set of rolls, treating the grenades as an independent attacker. The Throwing skill then becomes merely how to control where the grenade goes.

If an explosive goes off in your area (which will be part of the exchanges announced during The Combat Process), the effect of the attack is per the following in all squares in the radius (as scaled down).

Type	Attack Quality	Range incr	Notes'
CS	Great	-2/square rad
Flash	Good	-1/3 square rad	Facing matters.
Flash/Bang	Good	-1/2 square rad	Facing gives situational advantage (+1).
Frag	Great	-1/square rad
Dynamite	Good	-1/2 square rad
C4	Great	-1/2 square rad	1/4 lb. Each doubling of size increases attack quality by 1

Because of the area nature of explosives, success in avoiding them (assuming one does)

You can simply try to avoid the explosive, which is treated as [Fighting Defensively]?. You can use your current combat skill on this, Acrobatics, etc.
You can try to shoot the thrower of the explosive (if applicable). This is considered part of your exchange (thrower + explosive vs you).
- If you succeed against the thrower, the throw fails (and there's no explosion); based on the MoS, the GM can decide what happens to the explosive.
- If you fail against the thrower, the explosive goes off as normal (where thrown), but now gets a "superior numbers" advantage (you split your attention from avoiding the explosion, and now you suffer for it).
You can do something else, in which case the explosive gets a "superior numbers" advantage on its attack on you.

Note that if there's no good reason for the defender to think a grenade is being thrown or going off, their roll (for whatever) is per the Surprise Rules -- better of Alertness or Mediocre (-1).

A suggestion from Fred Hicks: [1]

I'm also going to speak to the idea of grenades and explosions here. This is a "it depends on the game you're running" sort of thing, I tend to feel. (Which honestly is probably part of why we haven't addressed such things as multiple targets and area effects yet -- there are a lot of kind-of-game priorities and decisions that go into that, and, yes, we should probably find some time to discuss them.)

In such a case you should probably think about your dramatic priorities. Is it appropriate to your game for people to be able to jump free? Are any explosions too big to get away from in combat time? Etc.

You also may want to think about how you see this sort of thing playing out -- guy tosses an area effect somewhere (here's a grenade!). Folks get a chance to respond to it (I dive out of the way!). Maybe they have to ditch their option to counterattack and instead go for something completely defensive (the dive), in which case it's the attacker vs defender (the attacker's Thrown skill roll or whatever is the difficulty of getting out of the range of the blast due to the placement achieved with the grenade, the defenders are using acrobatics or jumping or whatever to put lots of distance between them and the explosive), or they can attack the guy back but take the full blast (opting not to defend sounds like you're taking -4 on something appropriate). Maybe they have the option to shoot the guy with the grenade _before_ he manages to throw it, and there's the possibility of the grenade landing at his feet. Maybe if the thrower fails, there's a bounce notion in effect, where a single Fudge die is rolled and + means it gets further from the thrower and - means it gets closer. Maybe maybe maybe.

What I'm getting at in all this is that a lot of you are asking "how should X be handled" before you're answering the prerequesite question -- "what's your reality like?"

Suggestion from [Landon Darkwood]?: [2]

Explosions should be a normal static roll to avoid, I'd reckon, with difficulty based on their size. Grenades might be Mediocre, while oil drums and stuff may be Fair. You'd use the MoS chart for static tasks (0-4) to determine damage instead of the dynamic chart (0-7). So, it'd be like this:

MoS	Damage Effect
0	Injured
1	Hurt
2	Clipped
3+	Scratch or total avoidance

So for an Average explosion, if you roll Average you take an Injury, Fair takes a Hurt, and so on. If you roll Great or better, you take no damage.

More [Landon Darkwood]? thoughts: [3]

To me, it depends on your reality level and the source of the explosion. [...] If a grenade is thrown as part of an exchange, I'd just say that giving the attacker 'superior firepower' bonus is in order - if grenades are supposed to be things to truly fear, +2 or +3 might be appropriate. Warning, though: that can get pretty nasty pretty quick.

Here's something to consider that might help when thinking about how to incorporate grenades into exchange-based combat: not everyone will be aware of the grenade. If you have four PC's and four opponents, and each of them is fighting a pitched gun battle, and someone throws a grenade into the midst of it, not everyone would know what's going on. In which case, the grenadier's Thrown Weapons (or whatever) roll would be made and everyone not aware in the blast radius would get treated as having rolled a Mediocre as per the rules.

And assuming they are aware of the thrown grenade, the nature of the exchange immediately changes, because the PCs' new goal will be "to avoid damage at all costs". That roll to avoid not only counts against the grenade, then, but also anyone else shooting at them. If some of the enemies are in the area of effect, they might be rolling against the grenadier /also/.

[...] Hence, if in stage 1, the GM says: "Well, Thug #2 is throwing a grenade," all the players might say, "Oh. We want to avoid the grenade." Then the GM says: "Well, people are still going to shoot at you, too." So there's maximum range of choice there. One player might even say, "I want to snatch up the grenade and throw it back before it goes off." Which puts you in a Thrown vs. Thrown exchange with just the one dude.

Combat Rules, Grenade Rules