Bags of bombs- How to deal with more of a bad thing.


Rules Questions


One of my players (relatively new to Pathfinder) is playing a goblin rogue he is expressing some creativity with alchemy and alchemical substances. He wanted to be a rogue for the sneaky but also likes the idea of fire and so on.

He has asked a few times about whether things like alchemist fire or fuse grenades can stack. Not in the I pull more than one out during combat try to throw several but what about blowing up bags of alchemist fire or leaving a bundle of fuse grenades in a bundle and so forth.

My desire for some semblance to the real world suggests just making it up as I go and say well yeah a bag of fuse grenandes make bigger explosion. But I have a feeling he is planning on getting turned invisible and bringing a bag of fuse grenades into hostile territory and setting it off where it will kill some enemies. There are of course consequences to this but I am not sure if this works right.

Shadow Lodge

a bigger explosion? no

more damage?yes

let him play an alchemist over a rogue. it can be the same sneaky character, but his bomb fetish wont cost him a ton of gold. oh and they have flame throwers :D i love the grenadiers with the flame discovery that lets the damage stay for an extra round.

you are the gm, if you want his mundane bombs to be bigger you can do that. honestly i see little consequence to that. but he will eat his gold up fast by spending it on "bags of bombs"

Sovereign Court

If he's taking the risk of lighting multiple 30 gp (if crafted at the 1/3 cost) individually, all of which have different fuse times of no more than 3 rounds, to throw at an enemy at the same time, I'd say that's both a very high-risk, high-reward build and a super goblin-y thing to do. It's not like he's getting sneak attack with them, so his class is even more of a hindrance than a boon.


Yeah it was more a size of explosion/amount of damage inflicted and should i allow it question not a gold piece question or best wy to be a bomb tosser. Its a pirate campaign he is not trying to toss bombs all the time but there are talks of blowing powder or using distractions.


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Rough rules for how this would work based on the real world:

Do not increase the size of the AOEs, for explication a black powder explosion from fuse grenades would travel 7.5 feet in about 1/1000 of a second and unless the grenades exploded in the same millisecond there would be no additive effect to the blast radius but instead a series of explosions in the same area. Use the square root of the number of bombs/flask/explosives to figure the damage so it takes 4 grenades etc to double the damage, 9 grenades etc to triple it and so on - the first grenade to go off will do damage to most easily damaged parts of the body, the second to go off will have fewer easily damaged parts to hurt and by the time the 15th grenade goes off everything which can be hurt by a grenade in the AOE is going to be already pretty beat up.

If your player wants to enbiggen his explosives and you're willing to let him, the better path is to stat out new explosives rather then just letting off a bag of grenades.


I like that idea thanks.

RPG Superstar 2011 Top 16

I'm running an alchemist right now who is doing a similar thing, and my DM and I have found what is a pretty good solution.

I'm making what we're calling the Big Bertha, a steel-banded barrel loaded with 20 alchemist fires. Theoretically the explosion can throw the flasks into an adjacent square before they go off, but its wildly unpredictable.

I've made up a chart of some graph paper mapping out four possible explosion areas, ranging from 20 flasks to a single square and a heavy splash all the way up to one flask to every square in a 15' burst (with the middle square left out) and a minimal splash. It was a bit of work to map the initial blast areas, but now we have a nicely organized sheet detailing what happens to each affected square including reflex-for-half DC's and catching on fire DC's, under the pretense that rather than making a dozen low-DC checks you'd simply make one higher DC check.

When I set the thing off (which usually involves shooting it from a safe distance) I roll a D4, using the four possible blast areas as a random table. If I happened to do a particularly good job crafting the thing then I can roll a D3 and ignore either the biggest or smallest blast area. It's always fun to set off a 'Bertha, but it's not exactly efficient. The damage/gold ratio is certainly not as good as AoE magic, but then, it's not magic so perhaps that's a bit of an edge.

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