I’ve been GMing games of WOiN for probably about 5 years now, and I’ve been drooling over the game since I saw its Kickstarter go live way back in 2015. It’s my favorite tabletop roleplaying game, bar none, and it’s not even close.
WOiN is far from a perfect game though. It has a number of idiosyncrasies that are results of the fact that the game is an indie game and didn’t have a line editor or a final pass before release to ensure that all the wording was consistent, or that every rule was accurately reflected across all three genre books.
There’s a few things though that as far as I can tell are well-described, but which don’t make a lot of sense to me. Grenades are one of those things. This article describes what I don’t like about grenades as they’re presented in the core rules, and what I think can be done to fix them.
These rules aren’t playtested as I don’t currently have a game going in a setting where my players would have access to grenades, but I will update this article or write a new one when I have an experience report about using them.
The Problem
In the core rules, described in the NEW hardcover, grenades are fairly simple affairs. They are exactly like any other thrown ranged weapon, so a character will roll an AGI or INT check, adding their skill in throwing, any equipment bonuses for the grenade’s quality, anything from exploits, sacrifice attack for damage, add LUC, etc. When they land, they have Burst (2), which sets a 10' radius sphere around them, affecting anyone inside the area whose VITAL DEFENSE is lower than the original attack roll.
There is one extra effect which plays into attacks with grenades, however. If the attack is very bad and misses the RANGED DEFENSE of 10 that the target square has, the attack goes wide and the player has to roll to see which tile the grenade actually lands in.
The trouble is that once this occurs, you don’t re-roll the attack, and aside from extenuating circumstances no character, PC or NPC, has any defense below 10.
This has the impact that grenades going wide never deal damage to player characters. They won’t even deal damage to objects because all objects have DEFENSES of at least 10 as well, regardless of size.
To make matters worse, normal range increment penalties apply to this attack. Which I’m fine with that making someone less accurate throwing the grenade, but the distance that a grenade is thrown in my opinion shouldn’t affect how likely it is to damage the people caught in its blast radius, nor reduce how much potential damage it deals (by removing the ability to sacrifice dice).
My Solution
The way that I’ve resolved this for myself, and that I hope will be appealing for you as well, is to rework grenades into a type of consumable item rather than a conventional attack.
To use a grenade, the player must make an AGI or INT throwing check, affected by range penalties as normal for an attack. This check does not benefit from an equipment bonus from the quality of the grenade, but may benefit from a quality bonus for some equipment specific to throwing them. If the character successfully passes the Routine [10] check, the grenade lands in the target square and triggers its attack (more on that later). If the character fails the check, then roll for the direction the grenade lands in as normal, and move the grenade one square in that direction, plus one square per range increment beyond the first that the throw was made. Then, the grenade triggers its attack as normal.
Each grenade that deals damage has attached to it a VITAL attack pool. This pool is static to the grenade, and does not benefit from the PC’s attributes. The PC can benefit from their throwing skill as normal. When the grenade lands, it rolls this attack against all characters and objects within its Burst radius. This attack benefits from the equipment bonus from the quality of the grenade as normal.
A good default I think is for the baseline standard quality grenade to have an attack pool of 4d6, although this should be adjusted by the cost of the grenade. Using these rules, a Frag Grenade attack on a character with an AGI pool of 3d6 and no skill in throwing would be listed in their attacks like this:
Frag Grenade 3d6 (2d6 heat; Burst 2; 4d6 VITAL attack; Thrown 3)
My current thought is that increasing the attack pool by 1d6 should increase the base cost before quality modification by 100, up to a maximum of 1d6 per level of quality above standard. This is just my first thought though, and would likely have to be adjusted for a real game.
The Impact
I think these sort of grenade rules make a lot more sense than the base rules. It means that grenades are dangerous weapons, but also don’t require a lot of skill to make use of. An unskilled person could chuck a grenade into a room and slam the door and expect it to actually do something, unlike in the core rules.
Because the base attack on the grenade does not scale though, it’s quite possible that a grenade will cease to be effective at a high enough grade. This is intentional, and should encourage players to purchase more expensive grenades. With more expensive grenades, greater foes can be fought. This should likely not prove too much of a challenge for the party, and can help keep the monetary investment of a grenade non-negligible throughout a campaign.