This is a balance, gameflow and concept question - the Righteous Fury rules trigger on damage dice. This obviously is reflected in some weapons getting a 2d10 damage check over the 1d10 normal.

But is this rule intended to be used with grenades? Especially with the Filament load's 4d10 damage (leading to almost a 20% chance that one of the four dice will trigger), but even with just a common frag grenade - you have a blast of 4. So let's take a MILD case that you get four enemies in one blast (which can technically cover 81 square metres).

4 damage rolls of 2d10 = 8 dice = far more likely to hit an RF check. Now here's where it gets a little foggy. RF says to reroll the ATTACK and apply damage again. Since a grenade roll is one attack roll and separate damage checks, do I reroll the attack and reapply the damage to ALL targets in the blast? Do I recalculate the blast from the enemy that tripped the RF check?

Let's assume for a moment that I don't (which feels to be the saner assumption). However, each individual figure now has a 19% chance of generating an RF check. That means that you've gotten a 59% chance that at least one die will trigger RF. So on one attack, you roll 2 for the hit, 8 for the damage, 2 for the RF, and 2 for the second damage. 14 dice is a bit clunky.

Now consider the problem from an in-game contextual angle.

You attack with your chainsword! The Emperor's fury is upon you, and you swing twice in your frenzy!

You attack with your laspistol! The Emperor's fury is upon you, and you shoot twice in your frenzy! (Does this deplete ammo?)

You attack with your frag grenade! The Emperor's fury is...

...well, if it's with you, you throw an extra grenade? And get the damage checks all over again?

...well, if it's not with you, the emperor's fury is with the GRENADE? It blows up better because IT was proud of the Emperor?

It seems like the high frequency of damage increase, the multiplier of dice rolled per attack AND the problem of investing a grenade with spiritual strength are solved by exempting grenade and missile damage from EF.

OR we can just say that the EF rules are why frag grenades don't start at 4d10 - that the RF rules for them basically reflect a grenade's performance volatility. (But that still leaves decisions like whether or not you retarget a new grenade or reroll ALL damage checks.)

What *was* the intent here? And what *is* the decision?

Righteous Fury doesn't involve you shooting or hitting or whatever for a second time, it just means the one shot you did do did a lot more damage. This would mean no extra grenade would be thrown, and no extra ammo would be depleted. The damage from the RF is also combined with the damage already done, it's not separate, which means it's much more likely to punch through armour/TB and cause massive damage.

RF triggers based on damage taken. The re-roll of the attack is to see if RF activates against the individual target who had the unfortunate 10 pop up on the damage roll against them.

Grenades are awesome. Grenades are my friends. Grenades most definitely trigger RF.

If you need a mystical Emperor intervenes excuse: The Emperor makes sure that extra bits of shrapnel from the exploding grenade are funneled into the poor heretic caught in the blast radius. Shrapnel from your grenade shreds armor, clothing, flesh and organs until there is little left but a pulp of charred meat, bone, a slippery coating of gore, and the smell of BBQ, cordite, and excrement hanging in the air.

There is only one attack with a RF. One bullet, bolt, plasma charge, las bot, swing of the sword, grenade, missile, cannon shell, etc. The extra damage is like rolling a crit in D&D.

Remember that rolling another 10 on the extra damage allows another d10 to be rolled without the attack!

Also in your question you said you roll damage sepratly for each person in the radius... i would recomend just rolling damage once and applying it to all who got hit, this both speeds gameplay and also reduces the chance for righteous fury because you only roll once for 4 people instaed of 4 times.

Fair enough - grenades are just awesome. The RF rules basically equal a hefty damage increase for them - but a little unreliably so.

But now flip it around. Frag grenades are common availability, and do 2d10 at range. The only advantage a Laspistol (the common ranged weapon) is that it has substantially more range. But this tends to go out the window as a big factor in most combats, as nobody wants to deal with a 100" x 100" map, so most combats fall pretty much within grenade range.

Why would someone not just load up on frag grenades and a decent melee weapon? If grenades are awesome, why shoot at all?

(I tend not to react well to "ability X is awesome". Usually it means "ability X could use a nerf".)

Oh, and good suggestion, Cryhavok - that's a great shortcut to working out RF damage taken.

GamerInterface said:

There are sevreal reasons to choose the grenade over laspistol. Ammo for one thing. How many grenades are you going to bring? The las pistol tends to never blow up in your face. Range isn't (or shouldn't be) disregarded, why would you even need a tactical map for long range combat? Besides, if you choose to play out all combat within a certain range that's your call, it's not a problem with the game system.

Grenades complement other ranged weapons, they are not a substitute. If you come at me with a bag of grenades and a chainsword I'll just hold back and take cheap shots at you or your bag of boom from afar.

And last but not least , comparing the las pistol to grenades simply because both are common availability is a bit off. Are you going to buy ONE grenade and duke it out with the las pistol guy? Probably not, you're going to secure a steady stream of them at +-0. The las pistol on the other hand will be a single one, +30 to the aquisition test. So getting the supply of grenades is as hard as getting a single extremely rare weapon, that means any weapon except graviton gun, crux beam gun and archeotech las pistol.

So you go ahead, get one grenade and I'll shoot you 30 times with my laspistol from beyond your range before I have to reload. Or get many grenades and taste my stormbolter or good quality plasma cannon.

Good points all. I like to take on both sides of an issue in turn - I was concerned about the damage potential of grenades, and got both the pro-grenade and anti-grenade point of view. (Well, not exactly ANTI-grenade, but at least the grenade got put in the hot seat.)

I'm preparing to run two intro sessions of Rogue Trader at a convention in March, and I've never run it before (or really been familiar with the 40K universe beyond Space Hulk), so I'll probably toss a few more questions out to the madding crowd - who have my thanks for helping the newb.