Alternate Core Documents

[TyrannisUmbra]

Has no effect on emotional damage.

If that's not included in the description of the final version of that perk, I will be very sad.

[Night Light]

I am not sure I like this change. Ponies are, by and large, all extremely fast and so a single move action from any pony can take them out of the primary blast radius of almost all explosives. This means that immunity to grenades only costs a single readied action per round, which makes grenades really weak before Demolitions Expert becomes available at level 6, and makes Demolitions Expert a 100% must take for any pony who wants to be able to throw grenades as a primary combat style.

You have some solid points here. Though, readying an action does cost 10 AP, and (usually) an additional 15 AP for the move action, and you can always just lob your next one at wherever they move to. So, maybe that's okay? And it's not like this change removes the power from any of the grenade launchers.

Spray and Pray (though I prefer Friendly Fire) Level 10: Whenever you accidentally injure your allies reduce the damage by 75%. Has no effect on emotional damage.

Given the power of Battle Saddles with explosives is really only countered (though it has shown to be a pretty hard counter more often than not) by the danger of harming your allies with your blasts, it might be a poor choice to include this as a perk.

[Thanqol]

You have some solid points here. Though, readying an action does cost 10 AP, and (usually) an additional 15 AP for the move action, and you can always just lob your next one at wherever they move to. So, maybe that's okay? And it's not like this change removes the power from any of the grenade launchers.

So what actually happens in play? Does the GM just knock 25AP off all the opponents to have them able to dodge the first grenade each turn? So by being present with grenades in a battle I cost all my enemies 25AP but can then never hit them? Do I hold a grenade menacingly with one hoof, forcing them to invest AP into potentially dodging it, while firing a conventional weapon with my other hoof and wait for them to forget to ready an action?

Because that's a really lame way to play an explosives character. Remember, this is discussing a level 1-5 explosives character who'd only be armed with dynamite and fire bombs. At the moment this character already has a lot to worry about with scarcity and expensiveness of ammunition and keeping allies out of the blast radius of her weapons. Now she's either forced to waste a stick of dynamite every round before she can even start doing damage, or reliant on the GM to forget to set aside AP to screw with her.

It creates this really weird standoff and order-of-operations conflict between attacks and readied actions and I think it's generally a really awful layer of metagaming. After level 6 you take it because you have to, the question goes away forever, and that's another layer of awfulness in itself.

Given the power of Battle Saddles with explosives is really only countered (though it has shown to be a pretty hard counter more often than not) by the danger of harming your allies with your blasts, it might be a poor choice to include this as a perk.

Add Explosives 70 as a prerequisite then.

[Zepheniah]

I have this ruling in regards to thrown explosives.
Long Range targets can dodge by their Movement Speed and make an AGI+2 check to dodge again and any further attempts are made at a cumulative -2 to the check. At Medium Range roll AGI+3 to dodge once, but only once. Auto-succeed at Short Range, but may roll AGI to move up to twice Movement Speed. (AP is spent on movement as normal and may be subtracted from your next turn if you already acted this turn.)

The logic being that at short and long range the explosive can either be seen a long ways coming, or has enough of a fuse left to be dodged semi-effectively.
The Short Fuse perk (the house 'cooking' perk I'm using) reduces the amount of times the targets caught in the blast radius can move by one.
The last clause prevents turn-order-fiddly-doo, because it's basically to explosives what parry is to melee, except it's much less frequent.

Also information on the power of explosives in the source-system of the mechanic, because this is relevant for scale of the dodge checks: The average damage of low-mid tier explosives is ~75, but explosives can't crit. Movement AP is 15 and the average movement speed is 8.
So somebody at short range could make it to the edge(20-16) of a AoE(5) grenade when succeeding her check, while somebody at long range can make it out entirely if she rolls well.

[Thanqol]

I have this ruling in regards to thrown explosives.
Long Range targets can dodge by their Movement Speed and make an AGI+2 check to dodge again and any further attempts are made at a cumulative -2 to the check. At Medium Range roll AGI+3 to dodge once, but only once. Auto-succeed at Short Range, but may roll AGI to move up to twice Movement Speed. (AP is spent on movement as normal and may be subtracted from your next turn if you already acted this turn.)

The logic being that at short and long range the explosive can either be seen a long ways coming, or has enough of a fuse left to be dodged semi-effectively.
The Short Fuse perk (the house 'cooking' perk I'm using) reduces the amount of times the targets caught in the blast radius can move by one.
The last clause prevents turn-order-fiddly-doo, because it's basically to explosives what parry is to melee, except it's much less frequent.

Also information on the power of explosives in the source-system of the mechanic, because this is relevant for scale of the dodge checks: The average damage of low-mid tier explosives is ~75, but explosives can't crit. Movement AP is 15 and the average movement speed is 8.
So somebody at short range could make it to the edge(20-16) of a AoE(5) grenade when succeeding her check, while somebody at long range can make it out entirely if she rolls well.

Impressive, because grenade range is Str+10 yards and Long Range is 150.

Is this in place of an attack roll? Because I want to emphasise that thrown explosives are really expensive, really short range, really tricky to be good at, easy to counter (Hit the Deck!) and this looks like a straight-up nerf. They're already a niche style with a lot of hard counters and a very shallow weapons list, why do they need to be made worse?

Edit: The average damage of dynamite is 30+2X (40) and a Frag Grenade is 50+2X (60). Not 75.

Edit again: The average professional human soldier can throw a grenade 40m (43 yards), so even getting into the medium range bracket is a feat for a pony.

[Thanqol]

Speaking of, while writing the above post I had to convert meters into yards and yards into feet and mess around with the horrible Imperial system way too much for comfort. I'm not asking that we switch to metric, but can we use the one unit of distance measurement throughout the document? The range table and the blast radius of some spells, for example, is in feet while movement distances and grenade range is calculated in yards and this is a clunky and unwieldy conversion for a poor Australian to go through.

This mixed standard also is very annoying when using a battlemap grid.

[Zepheniah]

Impressive, because grenade range is Str+10 yards and Long Range is 150.

Edit again: The average professional human soldier can throw a grenade 40m (43 yards), so even getting into the medium range bracket is a feat for a pony.

That was my bad. I slipped in the range-bracket when reading off the table.

Is this in place of an attack roll? Because I want to emphasize that thrown explosives are really expensive, really short range, really tricky to be good at, easy to counter (Hit the Deck!) and this looks like a straight-up nerf. They're already a niche style with a lot of hard counters and a very shallow weapons list, why do they need to be made worse?

Edit: The average damage of dynamite is 30+2X (40) and a Frag Grenade is 50+2X (60). Not 75.

Read my post again.
If you pay really, really close attention, you may notice that I may have mentioned the differences specifically because it's using a different source.

So yeah, like I said, the explosives stats this mechanic was based around are not the same as the base game and the list of weapons and munitions used is much more extensive.
A frag grenade there does ~120 damage and dynamite does ~75 damage, both at an AoE of 10.
Hit the Deck also functions slightly different to the one in the official perk list, but my main goal here was to present an alternative to the currently clunky way a thrown explosive resolves without the Demo Expert perk.

[Thanqol]

Read my post again.
If you pay really, really close attention, you may notice that I may have mentioned the differences specifically because it's using a different source.

So yeah, like I said, the explosives stats this mechanic was based around are not the same as the base game and the list of weapons and munitions used is much more extensive.
A frag grenade there does ~120 damage and dynamite does ~75 damage, both at an AoE of 10.
Hit the Deck also functions slightly different to the one in the official perk list, but my main goal here was to present an alternative to the currently clunky way a thrown explosive resolves without the Demo Expert perk.

I do not know what you mean by 'different source'?

[Dance_Explosion]

So what actually happens in play? Does the GM just knock 25AP off all the opponents to have them able to dodge the first grenade each turn? So by being present with grenades in a battle I cost all my enemies 25AP but can then never hit them? Do I hold a grenade menacingly with one hoof, forcing them to invest AP into potentially dodging it, while firing a conventional weapon with my other hoof and wait for them to forget to ready an action?

i have to say, if this happened in our game, it would be AWESOME since that's more then 1/3d of most characters AP and would be silly useful, granted this would also require all the enemies you fight to know you have and plan to use a grenade.

The point of this change was to make 'cooking' a frag apple have a point, it also makes using thief work right since the pony using it needs to get out of the blast radius. It is so you can toss a grenade and run away without hurting yourself. The possible down side is that [without the perk] a smart/fast enemy can dodge your thrown explosive. but still has no effect on a grenade rifle or a missile launcher.

I plan to be playing a explosive user in a up coming campaign so ill be able to test it for some one who is using dynamite as their main form of attack.

Incidentally, if you don't want to take the perk, its possible to just toss a grenade and then shoot it, so far in Stalliangrad iv been able to do that by first hitting with explosive, and then making a firearms check at a minus 30.

[TyrannisUmbra]

I'd also like to point out that in the Fallout games, if you throw a grenade, the enemies WILL run out of the blast radius. The only way to make them actually useful are against "dumb" enemies, or by throwing them in such a way that they don't have the space to escape the radius.

Or by getting lucky.