My character is big and strong and the yoski that he is currently carrying is small and weak. Would it be possible within the bounds of the rules to attach two frag grenades to the yoski then later while still carrying the little bugger pull the pins on the formerly mentioned grenades and throw the dirty rat into a mob of other dirty rats, thus blowing them all up?
Only by GM fiat of "I'm going to allow this.
The closest you can get to doing it by the rules would be if you happen to be a soldier who is high enough level to make three attacks in a full attack, you have the quick draw feat, and if the Ysoki you are carrying is unconscious so that we can treat it as an improvised projectile.
Then 3 thrown attacks: Ysoki, grenade, grenade.
Calling them a single toss at this point is flavor, not a big mechanical change, and if you do manage to miss and a grenade deviates, it wasn't attached very well.
So. you're saying its possible with one grenade?
you have left the rules behind at that point. But combined grenades really shouldn't work, or people would just use them instead of buying more expensive grenades.
I said it's the closest I can get it to being a legal action, not that it is a legal action. Throwing the unconscious Ysoki, as an improvised thrown weapon, would still be GM fiat to allow it, not an action that you can assume to be legal by the rules.
If that assumption was made (because there is not a written legal way to fulfill this requirement), the rest of the action economy would work, since Quickdraw would remove the issue of needing an action to draw the grenades, and there would be three "attacks" in your full-round action.
Also, if you could do this, the DCs on those grenades would be so low that the other ysoki would probably be fine.
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It is within scientific and proven limits of the RAW to fill the Ysokis mouth with 19 Grenades (Mind you he can still talk eat and breathe), tie all of them to say a cord with a bunch of zipties looped through the pins and then tie that cord to say... your belt or even better yet a Gear Clamp in your inventory.
Then all you'd need to do is let them wander further way from you than the X feet of cord you GIVE THEM or they go kaboom.
To ensure they don't spit the grenades out, use Ion Tape and a simple battery to close their mouth.
Voila! 19d6 MINIMUM Automatic Dirty Rat Bomb. As for THROWING the Ysoki, that's probably an Athletics Check with a DC of 15 depending on how far you wanna throw them IMO.
What if I used the yoski like a melee weapon? Also would a grenade exploding next to another grenade cause the unexploded grenade to explode?
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What if I used the yoski like a melee weapon?
Unwieldy 1d6 bludgeoning damage knockdown and nonlethal special properties
Also would a grenade exploding next to another grenade cause the unexploded grenade to explode?
Definitely not. Otherwise anyone with grenades would explode any time they got hit.
Ty all ^_^
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Am I the only one to find this question rather disturbing?
You want to use a Detonator.
So you need one minute to set them up the bomb before combat, you can pick up the unconscious ysoki up as a move action (I'd qualify this as a "Manipulate an item" action) then you can throw the ysoki as an improvised weapon (-4 to Attack bonus) with a standard action and press the button as no action.
Keep in mind, though, there are no rules for throwing a person, not even a small person like a ysoki. People have no listed bulk; we can only estimate from the "5-10 pounds = 1 bulk" estimate. Also, if the ysoki is conscious, there is no way I could even justify any of the above; MAYBE if you got the lil' guy in a Grapple, then a Pin, I could house rule that you could throw him, but good luck getting him to stay still for a minute while you cram explosives in his mouth.
My character is big and strong and the yoski that he is currently carrying is small and weak. Would it be possible within the bounds of the rules to attach two frag grenades to the yoski then later while still carrying the little bugger pull the pins on the formerly mentioned grenades and throw the dirty rat into a mob of other dirty rats, thus blowing them all up?
Sounds like a situation where you later get something you don't want to get but don't want to lose. Ysoki have rights under the law you know.
To update everyone on how this went, I ended up going with Metric's idea. To put context into this my character is insane (clinically) he escaped from an asylum. For some reason My character was allowed to pilot the ship and not knowing what buttons mean our ship ended up captured by a group of Yoski pirates who had a base on an asteroid. 3 of the lil buggers boarded our ship demanding our cargo or our lives we chose to take theirs instead(I now have 14 yoski tails in my backpack).
My character was kind of hungry and went through the base and found the kitchen where one of the Yoski was making himself dinner, where my character walked up beside him at the counter and promptly took out a yoski tail and started cutting it up to make some chili. This terrified him so he tried to shoot me, I disarmed him. Some old god stuff, related to a certain character in our party started happening outside (like someones character going blind) and we were attacked by some otherworldly creatures. I managed to grapple one that made it into the kitchen and told the yoski cowering in front of me that he could either play my game or he can play with this and I shoved the creature into his face. the yoski agreed to go along with me and I killed the creature. The yoski who I named Dickbag allowed me to attach two grenades onto his back and I tied the pins via cable to my waist. Dickbag then got onto my shoulders and became my own personal turret(yes this came with heavy disadvantages but I feel like the pros outweighed the cons). Dickbag sadly became the number one target for the pirates as they saw him as a traitor. We got in an incredibly tough fight in a hallway where several of us nearly died. Dickbag got knocked off my shoulders from a critical gunshot to the face, if he had gone one more tile we all would have blown up. so I did the only thing I could think of I dropped everything and tossed that glorious rat down the hall, my roll was not the best He only made it 10 feet from me. in total 8 characters were inside the blast radius including mine. everyone failed their reflex save, everyone except Dickbag who rolled a nat 20. 3 enemies died I went down to 5 hp dickbag went down to 3. 2 of the enemies took shots at my brave and very hurt turret on the ground and missed but sadly the yoski at the end of the hallway got a lucky shot off as he was retreating and there ended the life of Dickbag. If anyone has any suggestions on how to bring a dead character back to life I would be very interested in it and once again ty all for the help.
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i would not have allowed that.
You mean: Chaotic Evil alignment for a PC?
I so enjoy players who want to dive into the evil alignment sphere. Nothing is more enjoyable than watching that hash out at the table and end with the party turning on itself. I never restrict alignments, but always give my players a simple bit of encouragement. If you choose this alignment, I expect you to play it. Then I point them to some literature on characters who exemplify those alignments so that they know the expectation.
Good times.
I so enjoy players who want to dive into the evil alignment sphere. Nothing is more enjoyable than watching that hash out at the table and end with the party turning on itself. I never restrict alignments, but always give my players a simple bit of encouragement. If you choose this alignment, I expect you to play it. Then I point them to some literature on characters who exemplify those alignments so that they know the expectation.
After 20+ years of gaming I have a problem of most players ALWAYS going that way and playing it. In homebrew it's not a problem but in Paizo AP it tends to make things...interesting when characters want to eat NPCs who irritate them etc...
Evil characters are fun to watch for a session or two, but there is no life to a campaign with them in it, at least not without some serious out of game discussions beforehand.
If nothing else, from a game balance perspective you really can't allow one grenade to set of others or to have some contraption that allows you to set off multiple grenades at once.
Why?
Because as someone else noted:
Level 1 Frag Grenade does 1d6 in a 15ft radius and costs 35 credits.
Level 20 Frag Grenade does 20d6 in a15ft radius and costs 216,000 credits.
If I could just duct tape 20 level 1 frag grenades together and rig the pins to all pullout together, I would have the same effect as something that costs ~308 times as much.
So no, it's not balanced.
If nothing else, from a game balance perspective you really can't allow one grenade to set of others or to have some contraption that allows you to set off multiple grenades at once.
Why?
Because as someone else noted:
Level 1 Frag Grenade does 1d6 in a 15ft radius and costs 35 credits.
Level 20 Frag Grenade does 20d6 in a15ft radius and costs 216,000 credits.If I could just duct tape 20 level 1 frag grenades together and rig the pins to all pullout together, I would have the same effect as something that costs ~308 times as much.
So no, it's not balanced.
...but the detonator in the core book does that (I quoted it above).
...and it isn't unbalanced because saving throws and damage reduction applies to each of the grenades separately. We detonated a pack of 20 incendiaries on the BBEG of an adventure and he took...1 point of damage because he had Fire Resistance 5.
...and it isn't unbalanced because saving throws and damage reduction applies to each of the grenades separately. We detonated a pack of 20 incendiaries on the BBEG of an adventure and he took...1 point of damage because he had Fire Resistance 5.
And against targets that DON"T have fire resistance five?
No. That is horrifically unbalanced and i wouldn't expect any dm to let you do that.
...but the detonator in the core book does that (I quoted it above).
No, it doesn't. Explosives have the same effect as grenades, so one at a time.
Being able to explode a pack of "whatever number of level 1 grenades I can put together" would just blow anything that isn't fire resistant. And remember the soon to come Biohacker can remove resistances. So, cumulating both would just be a one-round killer for most combats... pretty boring.About evil alignment, there are 2 "evil alignments".
There is the monster evil alignment, where your character indulges in a lot of absolutely unacceptable things (rape, serial killing, torture for fun, sacrifices and such) and is unable to live long term in a civilised society.
And there's the psychopath evil alignment, the guy who just doesn't care about others, but who's not stupid enough to end up in jail. No remorse, no issue with assassination, torture, dealing hard drugs, use poison and things like that. But someone who can interact even with characters of good alignment without triggering an automatic assault.
Yeah, the detonator doesn't let you do that.
It allows you to remotely set of an explosive, which functions like a grenade. You are again assuming you could combine multiple packages of explosives (like making a combination of grenades) to do this.
Per the CRB page 218:
Explosives have the same price, effect, and weight as grenades (see page 183).
I see no reason that a person couldn't buy 20 explosives that are lvl 1 and behave like a grenade and package them together with a detonator. Then they could explode them with the simple click of a button.
However if a grenade caused enough damage to another grenade within it's blast radius to sunder/destroy that grenade I might allow that to 'detonate' the grenade as opposed to just destroy it. A simple 50/50 on the dice sounds about right.
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For the same game balance reasons you're not allowed to duct tape 20 grenades together and tie all the pins together you're not allowed to combine multiple explosives together with one detonator.
For the same reasons you weren't allowed to combine 20 flasks of alchemists fire in a package in Pathfinder and break them all at once.
The game isn't designed to handle this.
And in Starfinder, it's clear the intention is to buy higher level grenades/explosives to get more damage.
...a detonator triggering multiple explosives is even a plot point in an AP.
You could just say that this is plot licence, but it seems pretty clear that the detonator works on "packages" of explosives... that sounds like more than one to me.
It would be pretty anemic (and unbelievable) if a single grenade was the limit of what you could use as a bomb. I refuse to believe that a mechanic capable of creating an A.I. doesn't have the technical acumen to do the Starfinder equivalent of running a fuse between sticks of dynamite.
I think that the thing that would really limits it is the bulk; it's way easier to throw a Light bulk grenade than a 2 bulk pack of thermite. Well, the price, too. 35 credits might be very cheap for a level 1 grenade, but is it worth spending all that money on weak explosives if they're just going to give twenty DC 10 saving throws for half damage and perhaps hit DR/resistance 20 times? Starfinder Society characters are notoriously stingy about buying grenades because they're on a budget.
The other limitation is that the explosion is no larger than a single grenade's. Those incendiaries had a radius of 5' if I recall.
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I think that the thing that would really limits it is the bulk; it's way easier to throw a Light bulk grenade than a 2 bulk pack of thermite.
This is a role playing game. There are factors in play besides feasibility.
For starters, it doesn't matter what penalty you have for using a shotput as opposed to a grenade. A pumpkin launcher or water balloon slingshot is even easier to make than a detonator. You only need to hit a helpless hex with an AC of 5, so even a -10 penalty is trivial.
You could easily be overcome by just running up to someone while having a thermal capacitor or DR 5 and pulling all of the pins.
There's nothing in the rules that says that damage from an explosion scales linearly. If it did, there would be no reason to make grenades the same cost as a space ship. 2d6 damage might me an order of magnitude more force than 1d6 rather than just 2 sticks of dynamite stuck together.
alchemists fire but the same principles apply
Claxon,
I think that you might be oversimplifying a bit. Grenades are prepackaged explosives with a detonator already part of the package. As a DM, I would definitely allow that you could duct tape 20 grenades together, and that you could string all the pins together. However, much like real life, pulling all 20 pins and throwing the package would be rather difficult and may not work as the player intended.
As far as the game handling it, I can't see how it doesn't handle it. It seems quite clear to me that it handles it rather easily.
There's a reason people don't tend to walk around with C-4 in a combat zone. It's easy stuff to set off. Where as something like a grenade isn't so prone to damage causing it to explode.
I think that if a GM wishes to allow such a thing, the results could be fun and interesting. Grenades don't always explode at the exact same time ;) Not all the pins are pulled simultaneously. Would be rather interesting to see this Ysoki bounced around the room as the grenades detonated one slightly after the other!
Thank you for the link. While I tend to disparage linking rules discussions for other games, John makes a compelling argument based on possibilities that are applicable to both games.
There's very little in the way of rules for explosives in Starfinder at all... far less than even other hot topics we've discussed. I quoted the relevant bits above, and they are not conclusive. As far as I know the only time that they are used in an AP they support my interpretation, at least for one detonator being able to trigger multiple grenades at once, though their effect in the game is normally to create a hazard zone from falling debris, not to inflict grenade damage.
In my opinion, it seems silly to say that 1 detonator = 1 grenade worth of boom, when the level of technology required for 1 detonator = many booms has existed for a century on real world Earth. It beggars my suspension of disbelief.
In my view, treating each grenade separately with its own cost, radius, resistance, and saving throw checks is what keeps it roughly balanced; players are unlikely to want to spend a lot of credits on explosive solutions when they typically don't control the battlefield enough to get the most benefit out of it, and a lot of DC 10 saving throws for half of 1d6 damage several times (you wouldn't get a dex bonus to your DC if you don't throw it) isn't the most inspiring attack, or use of time/money, in the world.
But maybe there is a better way of handling it. Doing no extra damage but increasing the blast radius, or increasing damage on the specific point of explosion (on top of halving the hardness, mentioned in the Detonator's description) but not in the radius.
Hmm.
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There's a reason people don't tend to walk around with C-4 in a combat zone. It's easy stuff to set off.
It's not easy to set off. Even Slate has written articles about this.
The reason people don't walk around with it in combat is that it's rarely needed, requires special training to use, and the military doesn't issue this stuff unless absolutely necessary. That also goes for grenades.
Neither my armor platoon (doing mounted security and dismounted patrols) in Iraq or my similar security detail in Afghanistan ever carried grenades. I never heard of anyone else in either battalion combined arms drawing them, either. We took over a patrol base from another unit who had a bunch of that stuff in a connex, once, but we didn't touch it ourselves and turned it in.
The EOD guys, of course, carried explosives, because that was a core tool of their job.
In my opinion, it seems silly to say that 1 detonator = 1 grenade worth of boom, when the level of technology required for 1 detonator = many booms has existed for a century on real world Earth. It beggars my suspension of disbelief.
What you're arguing is that 1 grenade = 1d6 of boom and 2 grenades =2d6 of boom and so on. We don't know that that's the case and it very much seems to NOT be the case.
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Hiroshima bomb was a few Megatons one. Which means billions kg of TNT. Nitroglycerin is 25% more powerful than TNT. If I consider 800g of nitroglycerin inside a dynamite, Hiroshima bomb is the equivalent of billions of dynamite.
Japan is 377 billions square meter. If I consider a dynamite has a blast radius of 5 meters, with all the dynamite from the Hiroshima bomb, you could have blasted the entirety of Japan.
If you consider the explosion of a kg of TNT is increasing the temperature by one degree Celsius, it means that the Hiroshima bomb would have increased the temperature by billions of degrees, a thousand times more than the center of the sun, immediately creating a fusion reaction transforming earth into a new star.
Putting 20 grenades together is clearly possible. But the effect is not 20d6. The effect is at best an MKII grenade, and a clumsy one.
...a detonator triggering multiple explosives is even a plot point in an AP.
** spoiler omitted **You could just say that this is plot licence, but it seems pretty clear that the detonator works on "packages" of explosives... that sounds like more than one to me.
It would be pretty anemic (and unbelievable) if a single grenade was the limit of what you could use as a bomb. I refuse to believe that a mechanic capable of creating an A.I. doesn't have the technical acumen to do the Starfinder equivalent of running a fuse between sticks of dynamite.
I think that the thing that would really limits it is the bulk; it's way easier to throw a Light bulk grenade than a 2 bulk pack of thermite. Well, the price, too. 35 credits might be very cheap for a level 1 grenade, but is it worth spending all that money on weak explosives if they're just going to give twenty DC 10 saving throws for half damage and perhaps hit DR/resistance 20 times? Starfinder Society characters are notoriously stingy about buying grenades because they're on a budget.
The other limitation is that the explosion is no larger than a single grenade's. Those incendiaries had a radius of 5' if I recall.
I agree with you from a realism perspective it's possible.
The game system just doesn't support it, so it's basically not allowed.
If you want more potent explosives, spend more money.
As for the AP event, yes, it's just plot license.
It's a very similar sort of issue as the explosive runes bomb in Pathfinder.
Someone packs a box full of explosive runes, and then sets one/all off.
Maybe it works by the rules. Maybe it doesn't. People have tried to come up with all sorts of reasons why it is or isn't supported by the rules.
But at the end of the day, it definitely breaks the system if you let it work. Suddenly explosive runes bombs can kill basically everything by just spending a few days to stack as many together as possible.
This is the same sort of thing, it just costs credits instead of free spell slots. But it has the same problem.
These games have rough edges. As players we shouldn't try to take advantage of them.
I feel like a simple rule change where the overall damage and dc save is lowered per grenade would resolve this issue. It would allow you to use multiple grenades and get more damage but still limit their effectiveness and give you a very good reason to buy the higher tiered grenades.
A clarification on the alignments. Our group decided we wanted to be pirates and thus we have an evil bent or an alignment that allows us to do naughty things. So there is no alignment conflict that would lead to pvp. However do to most of our characters back stories we are more of the do what we want when we want pirates than the loot, kill and pillage everything pirates. My character has a chaotic nuetral alignment and because of his lack of sanity(and intelligence) it's very easy to convince him to do something especially if you convince him he already wanted to do it anyway. I made him this way because I wanted a character that was unpredictable and capable of great evil or great good. Though he does have and evil entity whispering in his head so it will probably be more of the former. Also the we didnt do nuthin! The Yoski pirates captured OUR ship and then tried to kill US! if anything we made the galaxy safer. Also if anyone would like to buy a slighty used and smelling of rat asteroid base(you'll have to clean up the blood) please contact my Captain.