But this refers to only the areas covered by armor, right? Rolling 2 hits would inflict a crit if there is no protection?Also, a person with any form of protection in the form of armor value need not fear critical hits from hand grenades, as no critical injuries could happen
In general the effectiviness of grenades is exaggarated in games, they are not as powerful tool as many think they are. That being said, not having a chance to incapacitate with one seems rather odd and gameplaywise rather boring. Though indoors the blast power is increased by one step as in UO p.16 so there is that at least.
But yeah, I also wonder where the need to "nerf" grenades came from? I mean they have been working ok in my games so far with the older rules.
We had a separate thread for questions about grenades in the Referee forum - in general, there was just a lot of confusion surrounding ROF for heavy weapons, direct damage existing on grenades, etc. I believe the reasoning here was to help clear up some of the confusion to simplify gameplay for Refs and players. Here's what Tomas said on the other thread:
Hello!
For vehicle cannons 20-40mm, the idea is that they are fired like machine guns (with ammo dice), with the added effect that they also trigger an explosion in the hex where a target is hit. The vehicle cannons are different from the automatic or semi-automatic grenade launchers and mortars in that they are typically aimed at a specific target, not a hex.
And yes, when targeting a hex (not a specific target) with an explosive attack, targets in the blast radius suffer only explosive damage, no direct damage. In the reprint, the direct damage from fragmentation hand grenades has been removed. We will include this change in the updated PDF and errata.
The last bit there, especially with context, seems to indicate that a player may only target a hex with a grenade attack, rather than attacking a specific target.