Greetings brethern,

how would apply the damage of a fragmentation grenade to a body location?

Next Friday, my game group will sneak upon a camp of Mutants in the wilds of Dusk. I am dead sure that the Guardsman will use one or more of his Frag Grenades.

How do you apply damage from a blast radius weapon to a body location? Roll randomly for everyone? I toy with the idea of giving some of them looted vests, but I am not sure how much this would affect it. Imagine some half a dozne mutants sitting around a camp fire and a grenade tossed in the middle of them.. then you get my picture.

Roll 1d100 and consult the hit location chart?

Or if you want a simpler approach: say that all grenades always infict their damage in the body and thus do away with the rolling altogether.

Varnias Tybalt said:

I thought that was the rule to begin with?

Slaunyeh said:

Oh it is (unless my memory is mistaken). But some might not like using that method and demand a more detailed way of establish where someone is hit. After all, shrapnel tend not to be very discriminating to which specific body parts it hits. Even if a blast shockwave might spread itself out over a target's entire body.

I was (am) just puzzled about the rules.

The rules say "It hits the body". In that case, I was wondering why there is a "flakk qualitiy helmet". So I assumed, I have it wrong (or missed some point)

Then, I sought about what a fragg grenade explosion is like. And where the shrappnel might be able to hit you if you are about 3 meters away. Like "over the whole body".

This is reallistic, but more then ackward the "mechanic" way (to much damage, to much roles, etc).

This results in me askin question in a forum.

Perhaps it is really best to stop wondering a simply counting it as "body hits"

Gregorius21778 said:

Well, just ask away mate. That's what messageboards like these are for after all.

The standard rules for damage from blast weapons is usually to assign the damage to the body. I know it's not very realistic (arms and legs can get blown off in real life and all), but it's simplified to make the combats go a little faster.

If you want specific bodyparts to get hit, then I just suggest that you use the body hit location chart for everyone unfortunate enough to stand within the blast radius of any exploding grenade or projectile and assign damage to whichever bodyparts come up.

Though while this method is a little more detailed and allows for arms and legs to get blown off, it also has a few unrealistic "flaws" to it (I mean, while an explosion might do most damage to a particular body part, your entire body is still taking punishment from the blast all over).

Other RPG's I've played usually solve this by having different damage values for different radii (i.e if you stand 1 metre next to the blast you get hit by X amount of dice, if you stand 2 metres away you get hit by Y amounts of damage dice and so forth). While that method is a little more simulationist in nature it can usually be a hassle because if many people are affected by the blast radius that will require a heck of a lot of dice rolls.

So, it's your call if you'd like to change it to a houserule or not. It can be done if you want to, but chances are that it will bog down combat pretty much as soon as someone decides to use grenades.

Hope you find the comments helpful.

My methodology on this is a happy mix of these methods:

If it does not matter then blast hits are resolved against the body and the game moves on.

Whenever dramatically appropriate then roll D100 and consult the random hit locations chart. If you need more descriptives for where the fragments hit you can always use the autofire table and describe the carnage as being spread over several areas. Just be careful to limit this to DESCRIPTIVE damage instead of making it into multiple STATISTICAL hits or frags get WAY too powerful.

I cannot stress enough that it is a BAD idea to try to "field test" this in a LARP format.....

ZillaPrime said:

What? How could playing with explosives possibly be a "bad" idea?

... Oh right, im probably speaking with normal and relatively sane people here.

In the last game I played in, our GM did it this way:

He used the BS roll of the thrower, reversed it like normal, to determine hit location for the first (closest to the origin point) character/creature, then simply rolled randomly for each additional character/creature in the blast radius.

Of course, if a large number of creatures are affected, this could lead to a lot of dice-rolling. I might use this method myself, when the player-characters are affected, or when important baddies are. But if it's just minor baddies or bystanders, I'll probably just let it hit the body location ... unless there is some dramatic reason to make those extra rolls.