so my last session ended with a bang, quite literally, with two players falling out of their YT-2400 while they were entering the lower atmosphere of the planet. One of which had a active grenade on him and 10 more on his person. One player used force push to push the other character back towards the ship prior to them exploding.

My question is would you as the GM make the one grenade trigger the rest of them and kind of make a mini "bomb". I know the book says frags don't affect heavily armored foes and a ship would definitely fit that bill but that's one not eleven. I was thinking that the one grenade would trigger all of them (or at least have a chance to)..

Vs a ship here are some idea's I had:

1. counted each grenade separately then they would never get past the Armor (soak).

2. roll once and if it's a successful hit then add addition successes to base damage and multiple that by 11

3. roll for each individual grenade and keep a tally of each successful hit and then add that up and the misses could just mean that grenades didn't trigger. If total is above the soak then remaining damage goes to ship. Which means they will have to get some repairs done at next stop.

4. One grenade goes off and does not affect the others

This isn't going to have a real mechanical effect other then they will have to pay something to repair the ship (or take the time to fix it themselves when they get a chance to). If the grenades did do a lot of damage and then they get into a space battle that extra HT damage can change the outcome of a fight since they are not at full health.

cool encounter!

i would say its likely that at least some of the extra grenades would go off, but they would be being spread by the blast before they exploded. it would be more like a cluster bomb, spreading havoc all over the place. the danger of things like Thermal detonators is the concentrated explosion, which this would not be.

Had the character been in a confined space then the story would probably be very different, as the shockwaves from all the blasts would work together rather than spreading out.

my answer:

ship suffers nothing but any one engaged with the original target suffers a crit and blast damage, any one within short range suffers blast damage.

probably wrong, but its my gut for the situation

I never really thought of it as a "cluster bomb" as I was thinking more concentrated but the idea that the grenades would be spreading out does make sense. Yeah these are just Frags no Thermal detonators (lucky for the ones on the ship). One thing I guess I didn't make complete clear is that the ship is in the sky they were beginning to enter the lower atmosphere of the planet when this all went down.

I don't think there really is a "wrong" answer to this I just want some other thoughts and opinions from other GM's .

I think you need a demolitionist character. Using grenades I'd give a sizable bonus to an improved/improvised detonation check.

Otherwise the grenades would have to be put on something to act as the booster charge, fuel, ammo magazine, etc.

While it's technically possible for one grenade to set off the others, it's really unlikely. Chances are they'd just become large, round projectiles. Chances are, a society as advances as the Star Wars universe would have insensitive munitions.

As far as the ship itself is concerned, it shouldn't matter in the slightest whether all, some or none of the extra grenades go off. The blast simply won't be powerful enough to damage the ship. If you duct-tape a cluster of fragmentation grenades to the outside of a tank you'll barely scratch the paint job. A ship's armour is meant to withstand the stress of deep space travel and immense power of laser cannons on other ships; hand-held, antipersonell munitions shouldn't be a threat at all. The danger of a frag grenade isn't the explosive charge, which is actually very small, but the shrapnel cloud it creates upon detonation. The shrapnel is much too light to penetrate vehicle-grade armour.

If you want them to go off, sure. Realistically? Probably none of them would go off if you are talking the typical fragmentary grenade. Hitting the explosive itself won't set it off in my opinion. It's a shock resistant explosive material (unless things have changed since I left service) that can be shot with a bullet and not go boom. It needs an explosive fuze set off inside of the explosive material to set it off. You would need an unlucky (despair?) hit versus a fuze that hits it just right and sets off the charge. A.i. the pin and spoon is blown off a grenade causing the fuze to start ticking. All of them going off? No I think it would be rare for one or two of them to be set off.

Some other grenade type such as an incendiary might be very easy to set off other grenades (any kind) in my opinion. An incendiary grenade melts. Extreme heat/fire that will melt through steel. So, all 10 of them would easily start burning in my opinion. Also, one incendiary in the middle of 9 frag grenades might be enough to set them all off in my opinion.

But, in a game, don't let your players read this thread and set all of the standard grenades off if you wish.

Explosives in one of the expansions allows Mechanics to string them together. You get the base damage of one plus a lesser bonus for each additional. You could take a que from that and add 1 damage per additional grenade? But, be warned that grenades are cheap and your players may take note of this and use it themselves later.

ETA: Another thing to consider is the one grenade may toss the other grenades off in different directions. Think lighting a string of firecrackers. They don't all go off in one spot. Some get tossed in wild directions before going boom. Multiple grenades blowing up everywhere may be more fun then one big boom in one spot.

Consider the possibility that, rather than doing "damage" to the ship (hull threshold), it damages exposed systems of the ship. As powerful and tough as ships tend to be, there is a lot of sensitive and comparatively fragile equipment that needs to be exposed to do its job. Off the top of my head, sensors and engines would be two systems that could easily be effected. As the ship was entering the lower atmosphere, the landing gear could be lowered, which would not only expose them to damage, but also expose the internal works through the gaps in the hull the gear had previously occupied.

As for a chain reaction, unless all the pins were pulled, the likelyhood of secondaries from a single grenade is minimal. However, 3 or 4 grenades could definitely generate secondaries with nothing but the combined pressure wave collapsing the pins and blowing them apart, allowing the springs to activate.

I was going to say, exploding inside the ship could certainly cause a good degree of system strain as consoles and tubing is shredded. I might make it a flat 1-2 system strain per exploded grenade and 1 Hull Trauma, but would consider the remaining crew's ability to remove the system strain - don't want to make it too easy.

I was thinking that the one grenade would trigger all of them (or at least have a chance to)..

That seems to be a perfectly cromulent usage of a Despair (or Triumph, depending on who did the rolling and who's ship it was) to me!

As with the others above, I wouldn't deal actual hull damage - there's nothing a frag grenade is going to do to harm the structural integrity of the ship. However 2 or 5 system strain from tiny metal fragments in all the pipes and consoles that they can't get reduce until they repair it (@500c a point) seems perfectly reasonable.

As with the others above, I wouldn't deal actual hull damage - there's nothing a frag grenade is going to do to harm the structural integrity of the ship. However 2 or 5 system strain from tiny metal fragments in all the pipes and consoles that they can't get reduce until they repair it (@500c a point) seems perfectly reasonable.

This it would a miracle for pretty much any number of frag grenades to do any considerable damage to something even as small as a YT freighter

I would consider a few things

1. Is the person close to the door/ramp they fell out of? If so then it could take internal damage, maybe roll a crit, showing it did damage inside.

2. If he was not near ramp but near ship and all the grenades went off maybe you could force a piloting check to keep control from the blast, or damage an ion port so turning is hard.

3. If neither of the above...a pretty light show?

I would do the following, look at the dice that come up and depending on who is rolling and if a Triumph or Despair is rolled, then perhaps something bad might happen. Look at it this way, ships fly through space and are hit by assorted micro fragments of junk and small debris all the time with little effect save perhaps a paint scratch or three. Now if those were Thermal Detonators things might be different. As above #3 " A pretty light show" would most likely apply to frag grenades.

KSW

If I was the player with the grenade problem I'd spend a destiny point to make the live grenade a dud. As for setting off the other ten? Only on a dispair and then roll a D10 to see how many go off.

Something similar happened once in one of my first SAGA Edition games. Once we tallied up the full damage of the grenades, the ship itself exploded... Since it was in space / really high atmosphere, the players had a couple rounds of grace to get to the escape pods.

I now avoid letting anyone have that many grenades.

That said, in EotE, I'd check to see if any Despairs turned up, and use that to decide if some more (if any) go off.

Thanks for all the good suggestions.

And the myths about explosives lives on in the mind of us couch potatoes playing fantasy, heheh. While it is true that older types of explosives, like TNT which contained nitroglycerine was sensitive to shocks, modern explosives can be dropped, thrown, hammered, cut, cooked, etc... and won't go off. On top of that, if one grenade was able to set off another, it would have done so by destroying the casing of the grenade, meaning the secondary explosive was no longer in a contained space, resulting in no buildup of pressure when it goes off. Great example of this is black powder in the barrel of a gun vs just laying on a counter top. In the gun, the gas builds up as the powder burns and is only released when the pressure rises enough to overcome the friction holding the "cover" in place (generally a ball or bullet) whereas on the counter top it just burns and makes a nice flash of light and heat, but very little noise.

In the Beyond the Rim campaign setting
*caution spoilers*






While on scrapheap point the Yiyar throw grenades into the engines of the player's ship and disable the ship until repaired. Granted this isn't exactly what you are talking about however I thought it may be of use to you as it is officially in the books the a grenade in the right place can harm a starship although armor stats would say otherwise.

The book states on page 91 that fixing the ship requires one hard mechanics check per grenade tossed into the engine, each repair takes 10 mins, which can be reduced to a minimum of 5 mins by rolling at least 2 successes. However the parts are not immediately available to repair the ship and parts must be scavenged from other locations requiring more time and hard perception checks (the party is on Raxus Prime so tons of parts kicking around.)

SO it looks like the ship would sustain a critical injury (of thematically not starting) until repaired. Not necessarily a super hard thing to fix though, and that is having the grenades explode IN your engines.

I would think that grenades against a ship would be better used to destroy specific parts.

For example, place a grenade into power lines, up against the pilot controls, amongst engine parts and so forth. In order to disable its functionality.

I would think that grenades against a ship would be better used to destroy specific parts.

For example, place a grenade into power lines, up against the pilot controls, amongst engine parts and so forth. In order to disable its functionality.

Yes, targeting specific subsystems rather than just doing "general damage" should be one way to deal with getting around the armor/scale issues. Much like Luke throwing one inside the AT-AT to bring it down.

i think the insides of a ship would be much more vulnerable than the exterior, even firing weapons inside a ship should be having annoying effects; cloud of hot steam here, oil slick on the floor there, setback on firing a weapon or doors that wont open/close properly.

Outside the ship, I imagine it would do pretty much nothing to anywhere but really senstive sensors. Really stratch any exposed plaststeel perhaps but frag grenades are not meant to slice through hull. No matter how many went off a frag grenade probably couldn't meaningfully damage a ship that is well armoured.

That is why called shots and the like area really powerful when it comes to targetting such systems. It adds two setback which can be used to narratively "damage" a key compoment if you could realistically get a shot off at. The success can either damage a compoment as if via sunder or disable it outright. For example lobbing a grenade into the engines, into a sensor bay or into a open door could disable any one of those systems and thus have the desired effect. In this case, the entire idea about turning a party member into a bomb would only really work if the force user chucked the poor sod into the engines or some other critical system that grenades could realistically damage.

Personally I would have him explode epically, with trumphs being used to disable a key system on the ship or damage it, making the ship more sluggish in it's escape, or leaking fluid/plasma which makes following it's tracks considerably easier.

If they want to actually damage a vessel though, he would either have to be inside it (E.g. I would have any grenades going off inside it to be inflicting damage directly to the hull on a 1:1 ratio unless in a hanger or simlarily resistant location. In certain cases I would climatically rule that the system immediately fails) or be using the correct explosive in which to do so (anti armour, Plasma, Proton... You name it literally, it will do it.)