Rapid fire explosive rules, again

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by cmdicely

Grenades are, by the actual rules, explosive attacks. Those are the actual rules that apply when explosive attacks miss. The rules on that page don’t handhold you through calculating the margin of failure for each round in the case of rapid fire attacks, but the roll needed for the round to hit and the difference between that roll and the actual roll – the definition of margin of failure – are well-defined in the rules.

So I think it is odd to say that those are somehow less the actual rules for this situation than “Hitting the Wrong Target”. (I would agree that, actual rules or not, they aren’t particularly satisfying for, say, an autocannon firing explosive shells in a direct fire as opposed to high-RoF indirect fire, as they are more optimized for aerial or high-arc attacks targeting a spot on the ground, but “satisfying” is a different question than “actual rules”.)

Margin of failure for each round is not, in fact, a thing that has any existence under the rules. Margin of failure is a characteristic of a success roll. There is only one success roll in the scenario, and that roll succeeded. Inventing a virtual roll for each shot is just that - pure invention, not anything supported by the text.


Really, the problem is your first sentence: grenades are not explosive attacks. Grenades are grenades. They can be used to make explosive attacks. But when you make a RoF N attack using N grenades, you make 1 attack, not N attacks.

[sir_pudding]

It's probably not RAI that the extra rounds just vanish, either.

Regardless of whether scatter by Rcl is actually the RAI or not, it's still an unwieldy amount of rolling, first to hit, then for scatter, then for explosive damage for each round, then for fragments to hit for each round and finally fragment damage.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

It's probably not RAI that the extra rounds just vanish, either.

Regardless of whether scatter by Rcl is actually the RAI or not, it's still an unwieldy amount of rolling, first to hit, then for scatter, then for explosive damage for each round, then for fragments to hit for each round and finally fragment damage.

So this is absolutely not RAW, but here's a way to partially simplify that. You'll roll to hit as normal, and then roll once for each shot that misses to determine scatter. For explosive damage, roll only once and use that for all the explosions (you'll divide each by a value based on distance from the target - typically 3*yards - and add them all together, rounding at the end). For fragments/shrapnel, assume the attack is actually at base skill 9 with RoF 50 (enough for a +6 to match with the actual rules, which give them base skill 15). Starting with the nearest explosion to the character, any within the same range band gives +50 to RoF, any within 1 range band gives +30, within 2 is +20, within 3 is +15, and so forth, following SSR. The total resulting RoF determines the bonus to skill.

So, let's say you're using an RoF 6 Rcl 3 automatic grenade launcher. You hit your target with MoS 5 and they fail to Dodge. So that's two grenades on target, one 1 yard away, one 4 yards away, then one at 7 yards away, and finally one at 10 yards away. You roll your 1d6 4 times to work out scatter. For the target, the first two automatically deal full damage; you just use 1 roll for the rest - if you rolled 30 damage, those are 10, 7.5, 4.3, and 3, respectively, for a total of 24.8 (added to the two max-damage hits for contact explosions), which I think would round down to 24 cr. For fragmentation, let's say all are within range (so it's at least a [2d] attack). The closest are actually the two that directly impacted the target*, so you start with RoF 50 and add another 50. The next one out (at 1 yard) is still at +0 to hit, so +50. The next one out (4 yards) is at -2 to hit, so +20. The next is -3, for +15, and the last is -4, for +10. That's a total RoF of 195, for a +7 to hit. Note in this case that's indistinguishable from the RoF 100 you get from the two direct hits (100-199 is +7). So you roll against 16 to determine how many additional fragments hit the target.

For another target in the same area, the divisors on the various explosions will be different, and you'll need to recalculate sharpnel RoF based on the distance of the explosions from this actual target.

*The rules just say you score one automatic hit with shrapnel on a direct hit. I'd say do it as 1 automatic hit, then also roll against 15 to see if there are additional hits.


Note the above isn't something that is likely to be done quickly absent something like computer assistance, but at least it should be faster than rolling individually for each explosion (both for explosion damage and fragmentation). This does make multiple sources of fragmentation less lethal than doing things the longer way, but that's just the nature of the RoF rules.

If you're a real glutton for complexity, note each explosion would be knocking the character back, but in different directions. This would be a vector sum situation, using the adjusted crushing damage for each explosion.