All I'm saying is that it's easy to bullseye people midcombat in such a manner that they are not allowed to respond nor are allowed any test beyond a damage resistance roll, be they a dodge adept or hapless security guard. Also, combat is illegal and noisey, people can scream when you shoot them whether your gun is silenced or not (people who pimp tasers as "silent" knockout weapons make me laugh;  if I'm the GM odds are your target sure as hell won't be silent if you don't down him in the at most 2 shots) and most importantly, this is Shadowrun we're talking about. Look at the Halloweener's place in Shadowrun history, for god's sake! There's literally an avant garde neo-anarchist gang that dresses in halloween costumes and favors targeting corporate facilities. I'm going to go out on a limb and say in such a universe grenades and molotov cocktails are in slightly heavier rotation than they are in the present.

Personally, I'd just like to see people be allowed to declare movement in response to a grenade location strike just like they're allowed to declare full defense in response to an attack by charging their next initiative pass.

Quoted for truth, this is exactly what I thought when someone argued to nerf grenades. Guess what, grenades are bad news. End of story.

Also important to note, grenades don't just blow up in a big ball of hurty, they toss shards of shrapnel at the speed of some bullets in every direction. You pretty much can't dodge that unless you're far away or behind cover. (See: Mythbusters.)

You don't dodge bullets either. Again, the trick to "dodging" in this game isn't getting out of the way of the explosion or bullet, it's actually making sure you aren't where your opponent expects you to be when the trigger is pulled. Aiming a grenade launcher at an opponent directly is an opposed roll because you're trying to bullseye someone and as such you react to what they are doing and are prone to misdirection. Aiming at a location isn't an opposed roll because people are free to move from that spot as their movement is handled and the firer of the grenade launcher isn't allowed to attempt to compensate his aim as they move from point to point and the grenade doesn't go off until the next pass this, btw, is shot to hell by burst links). Holding an action or even simply going last against a stationary opponent defeats this, and oddly, is more effective than aiming -directly- at a stationary opponent because in that case they're suddenly allowed to oppose again. I guess you can go ahead and keep trying to bullshit me into thinking that's working as intended, or consistent somehow but hey, whatever.


[EDIT]I bolded the parts I changed after 08:51:15 AM and subsequent discussion with Tear. Doesn't change the meaning much, but hopefully it's a bit easier to follow.

This would be the time to note that you do get a dodge test against blasts, as I recall.  Blasts simply impose a penalty to the dodge test.  Look it up!  If there's anything that is NOT something that anyone should do ever, it's create a house rule to fix a misreading of the rules.

I think the dodge mechanic itself raises a much more pertinent house rules related question: should we treat dodge as a game mechanic, or should we jazz it up with some cinematics?  If someone totally dodges a grenade blast, should we say that they leap dramatically, the blast throwing them free, and they land prone?  Assuming of course that they were near the blast center and it would require a dramatic leap.  It's not really something you could house rule, more of just a general approach to the combat system that you'd have to play by ear, just for fun.  If you tried to make a house rule about how far you moved, when you moved, what direction you had to move...  You would kill yourself.  Because I'd point a gun at you and tell you that you have to kill yourself or I'll shoot you 100 times without killing you and then leave you. >.<

I phrased it poorly when I used the terms defense roll and dodge but your interpretation isn't much better (I think you're thinking of AOE Indirect spells, which are handled rather differently. Why? No clue). The way it works is there's an opposed test vs. your target to reduce scatter. Basically, I aim at you to reduce scatter, you oppose, and if you move "well enough" or make me giggle as I pull the trigger or something, the scatter isn't reduced as much or I miss completely for some arbitrary reason. Then distance from the blast radius is used to determine damage to you as well anything else caught by the blast. This means I can aim at your pokey cousin who's standing right next to you and your fate is inextricably tied to his, because he's now the standard being used to determine success, scatter and by extension the final location of the grenade. And if the scatter distance happens to be reduced to zero or less, net hits get added to the DV. You could feasibly nuke a whole mess of dodge adepts by blasting the statue next to them via a success test with a pair of simple actions and some HE grenades.


[EDIT] I wish I was a better writer. NES could have made this a billion times clearer at least two or three times now. Also, I checked the FAQ and this is basically considered a "known issue" and your GM is supposed to handle it by determining intent and if you're trying to catch someone in the blast radius it should be treated as an opposed test. Oddly, they still say only your "primary target" gets to oppose the ranged attack test in the event that you're launching a grenade into a crowd. The primary targets success or failure then determines whether the grenade mauls everyone or flies off harmlessly into the night. My advice? Don't stand next to guys in wheel chairs. Or get some houserules.

I dunno about that, english is NES' second language.  NES' first language is gibberish.

As for grenades, yeah that is a little messed up...  As a GM, I would never let you target the ground or a statue next to your target, since that's an obvious way to circumvent the rule.  They get to defend if you shoot it at them, but not when you shoot it next to them?  Yeah right.  As for how one person's defense determines what happens to everyone else, that's 100% pure streamlining.  They wanted people to be able to defend against grenades, but without developing some kind of insane, multi-point spatial grid which requires an equation that takes everyone's defense into account...  As a GM, I would simply tell you that when you are trying to kill the physad, you can't target the wheelchair guy next to him.  That is metagaming - your character doesn't know the rules of Shadowrun, or how the ninja won't be able to avoid the grenade when you shoot it at a hapless cripple.  And metagaming is cheating.  Hence, you would not be allowed to do it.  Now, maybe if there was a clumsy mage and a physad next to him, and you had a real reason to kill the mage, that would be more acceptable.  None of this is a house rule though, it's simply the GM preventing you from cheating by using loopholes to circumvent the actual rules of the game.  The loopholes aren't there to be used, this is not tax law.  The loopholes are there because they didn't figure out how to close them, but that's not a lisence to metagame.

If I WERE going to houserule nades, I would make it easy - you determine scatter according to your own hits.  Then everyone in the radius gets a defense roll.  If they beat your hits on the attack test, they leap to safety in some dramatic fashion, and are moved out of the radius.  If they don't beat your hits on the attack test, each defense hit they do score takes them 1 meter away from the blast.  That means if you targetted someone and didn't scatter, and they didn't beat you on dodge, you would definitely hit them, but they still have a chance to survive, rather than just suffering instant death.  This rule would not introduce any new and bizarre mechanics into the game, it would just bring the grenade rules more into line with the rest of the combat system.

But really, all you need to do to avoid being chunky salsa'd by your teammate's inept dodging is to stay far away from your teammate.  If you're within 1 meter of each other in a scenario where grenades are likely to be used, maybe you deserve to die.  And as I see it, the grenades are fundamentally more unfair to NPCs than PCs.  After all, when's a last time your GM pulled an NPC with an airbust grenade launcher on you?  Here's a hint: it was probably a time when your whole team died.  Grenades, at least in their airburst version, are just too powerful for GMs to use against players in everday situations, since they end the game.  Nor is it realistic that NPCs will regularly carry grenades - when they're corps, you're probably attacking their facility and they don't want to damage it, or if they're attacking you they're probably trying to be kinda quiet and not make a big fuss about it.  When they're cops, they're very worried about collateral damage, even SWAT probably wouldn't carry grenades on a normal basis.  Grenades, especially grenade launchers, are military hardware.  If you attack a military base, prepare to be naded into oblivion quickly, you moron.  But if you go about your shadowrunning in a less stupid way, you will probably only face hand grenades, or the occasional airburst neurostun if the GM wants your team to be captured as part of the storyline.  The only place where it gets truly iffy is in PVP.  But even there, it's usually pretty clear who's fighting who, and the GM is under no obligation to let a player target the drunken dwarf at table 2 instead of his enemy, ninjasamuraiman.

Perhaps I was being a bit too adversarial before. I should state that it's not so much that I'm in favor of houserules as I am in favor of clear policies (and in many cases policy can be tantamount to a houserule). There's a lot of niggling issues, awkward "legacy code" relics and ambiguities with the SR4 RAW that can be used to "break" various mechanics game mechanics. I don't think houseruling them all into oblivion is practical, but I'd really love to drag some of the most egregious offenders out into the light of day ASAP rather than pretend I never knew about these things until I experienced NS beta.

And as far as my chargen complaints go, I'm not really that interested in houseruling them, I'm just a hopeless rules wonk and drama queen.

Clear policies, what a misnomer.

I don't think we need a policy.  The policy should be good GMing.  I don't think any GMs are out to slaughter their players using rules loopholes, and if they are, nobody will play their plots.  The remedy to dumb situations should not be a policy, it should be a review by neutral staffers.  If someone is killed by what is essentially a rules exploit, that review would retcon or alter the situation so that they're no longer dead.  Or it wouldn't, depending on what they think.

The mistake in MUXing is when we start treating it like a legal system where people have a proprietary interst in their characters.  Some people want that, since they want to keep playing the same person for 10 years until they are a god.  But the only way to set up a system like that is to create rules on top of policies on top of appeals.  The end result is a very complicated, legalistic system, and it STILL doesn't work.  The admins who control everything can always change the rules and apply them retroactively whenever they feel like it.  Good friends will get their deaths retconned, annoying players will be met with skepticism no matter how rigid and mechanical the rules purport to be.  And it will seem even more unfair when it happens, since the game APPEARS to be run by neutral rules, not interested staffers.  It is much better to simply recognize that cheating, favoritism, and inconsistency will always result, and that the only real way to remedy such problems is for staff to get together and decide on them.  If they think a GM exploited a loophole, or failed to bend the rules in favor of the player when they should have, than that's that.  Too bad if a similar thing happens another time and the death isn't retconned.  Too bad if you throw a temper tantrum and quit the MUX because of it.  In fact, the game ought to be engineered so that tantrum throwers leave ASAP, and we're only left with actual grownups who just want to play a fun game.  People who can shrug and say "Ok, not doing that guy's plots again," or "Guess I'll be more careful next time," and make a new character.

Right, but it rather helps to know about particular rule glitches and potential pitfalls when you rule on them.

And that's what this forum is for!  The minute you code it into a policy though, people will start waving it around and thumping it against their chests like horny chimps.  Just let the staffers pay attention to the rules discussions on the boards, and they'll be aware of what the controversies and rules pitfalls are.

I think it's Polly Annish to think that you can prevent people from thumping their chests by reducing transparency and ruling that you are going to handle grenade tests contrary to the RAW in the event that you choose to aim at a location occupied by a few people. That in itself can be construed as a houserule, even if you do think it more accurately reflects the spirit of the rules. I'm not asking for a petition system here, I'm just saying that I think giving people a heads up on how a rule that is obviously somewhat broken in a lot instances will often be handled isn't something that's going to cause the downfall of civilization. Honestly, if the policy was "If you do this with grenades, we're very likely to call you on your bullshit", I wouldn't even mind. Hell, I'm actually pretty comfortable with living in a dictatorship. I just want to know as many of the rules as I can going in.

Anyway, from now on I'll just keep bringing up snafus when I seem them and avoid the dreaded phrase "house rules", since I think that's honestly about the only real sticking point that's come up in this entire discussion.

I think Tear is right, on multiple counts, save that I still don't think it needs a houserule.

Nobody is going to be using grenade launchers on you unless they're psychopaths or military people, and in either case, you should probably be dead. (Noted exceptions being non-lethal grenade types, which again, aren't as 'unfair'.) I think that reducing the effectiveness of grenades is folly, much like any and all nerf calls I tend to ever hear. It tends to be people taking a 'problem' out of context and they harp on it so much someone eventually just caves.

That's the problem with houserules, though, the game is a system, you can't change one part of it without changing the others. If some random security guard pulls out a grenade launcher? He's a shitty GM.

See, that's funny, because between Silence, Physical Mask, Channeling and Possession, I've got a Mage who uses grenades as often as other characters use their SMGs with little problems, and the current grenade rules mean he's pretty much a death machine the few times I bother with them. It'd probably be worse if he had Materialization spirits and just let the Guardian throw the grenades for me with throwing as an optional power, but I think possession is fun thematically.


Anyway, I find the idea that the grenade rules aren't broken because like, nobody uses them ever anyway, and if someone does use them that means you totally deserved to die anyway kind of funny. I mean, hell, the FAQ basically says "btw, the aiming at the ground option is a lot less broken if don't let them do it".