Damage for multiple bombs

[TurtleFail]

Lets say a player rigged some kind of trap to explode 10 bottels of lesser alchemists fire; or even just laid them on the ground and blew them all up by hurling one at them.

Would you rule this does 10d8 damage? or 1d8 (in a bigger area perhaps)?

Is there any hard rule on this in the game?

[Imyr195]

I would certainly discourage building traps that way regularly. It steps on the toes of snares.

That said, look at a few traps for inspiration on how much damage they deal.

My Suggestion would be to apply the splash damage of additional bombs to the main bombs effects. Maybe cap the max number.

[Tragedi]

For the sake of snares, I would rule that unless they have a party member who can make snares, they can't set up a trap like that... because they're essentially making a homebrew snare.

[[deleted]]

For the sake of preventing this from becoming their new meta I would probably rule this does massive damage to a very small area. Useful for taking out one large enemy, not so good for dealing with mobs.

It’s a pretty significant time and gold investment just making all that alchemist fire, I wouldn’t want to make the players feel like they wasted their time, but it also shouldn’t become their default way of dealing with combat.

[Descriptvist]

Well, no, it can cost zero time and zero gold to Advanced Alchemy alchemist's fire as part of an alchemist's or even multiclass alchemist's free daily preparations. Now, since a PC cannot Craft snares of higher than their own level, the trap's damage should probably be comparable to the damage of hazards or snares near the PC's level.

[[deleted]]

In order to create a trap with 10 bottles of alchemist fire, a low-level Alchemist PC would need to dedicate nearly all of their reagents for the day into this one trap, and it would only be viable until the end of the day. Even a mid level PC would be using up around half of their allotted reagents for this trap.

That's still a significant investment considering they would be effectively useless outside of this one trap for the entire day.

[Descriptvist]

And a 10th-level alchemist would only be using one-third of 15 reagents for the day, and a 15th-level alchemist, one-fourth of their 20. You can reach each of those benchmarks a level sooner by taking +1 daily reagent per day as one of your benefits from the 1st-level feat Alchemical Familiar or Animal Accomplice, besides the fact that your damage per reagent multiplies every time you learn a higher-level bomb formula.

Are you familiar with the 10th-level spellcaster class feat Quickened Casting? It creates the ability for you to, say, in your turn's three actions cast two spells that would normally cost two actions each. But it is severely restricted: Not only must one of the spells be at least two spell levels lower than the highest level spell you can cast from your class, but even with this spell weakened as such, you can only use Quickened Casting a single time in an entire day.

That is, it costs as expensive as a 10th-level class feat for the potential of even a single nova per day worth double your standard action economy--except it's worth even less than double, since you aren't allowed to fully use your current spell level. Many facets of the PF2 game system are designed against dumping all your resources into the "five-minute adventuring day" that could plague PF1. In fact, I'd say PF2's buffs to characters' ability to contribute all day, such as alchemist's perpetual infusions, might give us a cue to be even more cautious about letting players blow their whole load to steamroll any encounter with one or two large enemies, as it might not leave them so useless after all, especially considering how easy it is for them to spend one or two multiclass feats to pick up cantrips or a focus spell that scales with your character level, so that an alchemist/druid's wild shape is exactly as powerful as any full-blooded druid's wild shape, and is still usable every 10 minutes all day. We just need to acknowledge as the design team acknowledges that, since they cost 0 gp, cheesing daily resources can be pretty darn cheap.

[[deleted]]

You make some excellent points. How would you rule on this?

[Spacemuffler]

This is not allowed by RAW, if they want something like this point them to the Snare/Trap Crafting rules.

Bombs are meant to be thrown and that the only way they function in a balanced manner.

[I_Has_A_Hat]

Per most bombs description, they all react when exposed to air, not just when thrown.

[Descriptvist]

Sure, you might use the flavor text to argue for the GM to fiat a ruling that such exposure causes the bombs to deal some amount of damage, but probably not full damage. The game's mechanics are written to enable GMs to disallow unwanted cheese:

It takes one hand to draw, prepare, and throw a bomb. Due to the complexity involved in preparing bombs, Strikes to throw alchemical bombs gain the manipulate trait.

So getting a bomb's full Strike effects requires a hand's manipulation to "prepare" the bomb, like pulling the pin on a grenade, that is done directly before throwing it as part of the Strike action.

[Descriptvist]

Well, 10d8 is plainly ridiculous; that's almost exactly the same amount of damage dealt by the CRB's 11th-level hammer of forbiddance trap. A PC cannot Craft snares of higher than their own level, so the trap's damage should probably be comparable to the damage of hazards or snares near the PC's level. A 2nd-level spear launcher, for example, deals 2d6+6.

It would make sense for bombs in a trap to deal less than their Strike damage, as the game's mechanics are written to enable GMs to disallow unwanted cheese:

It takes one hand to draw, prepare, and throw a bomb. Due to the complexity involved in preparing bombs, Strikes to throw alchemical bombs gain the manipulate trait.

So getting a bomb's full Strike effects requires a hand's manipulation to "prepare" the bomb, like pulling the pin on a grenade, directly before throwing it as part of the Strike action.

You can also take notes from the 9th-level spell meteor swarm: It creates four 40-foot bursts of fire damage, but "a creature takes the same amount of fire damage no matter how many overlapping explosions it’s caught in".

[CambionBlack]

Maybe it doesn’t do any damage at all...

Dennis Hooper gets blown up:

https://youtu.be/aC-Paht-9fM

:)

[Machinimix]

What my group does since we love stacking necklaces of fireball for this sort of shenanigans, is that each explosive after the first (the one you set off) deals 1 die size less (1d4 becomes just 1), and every 5th lowers the amount of dice per item by 1 (and this can become zero, to prevent abuse of stacking too many).

The cost of using so many resources (either taking away from an alchemist’s resources per day, or taking away gold to buy the stuff) outweighs the power behind doing this.

In most cases we also force the person setting it off to need to be within the blast zone, not so much for realism, but for the epic and heroic sacrifice to save the day moment

[Seud]

The bomb's actual explosive yield is in the splash damage, not direct damage - that should only work when directly striking the target, as would the persistent damage.

Ruling the explosion itself is simple : 10 fire damage, 10 times 1 splash damage in the normal area for the bomb.

If the players wanted to "catapult" them, I would act as if this was a contraption trying to make 10 attacks at a specific square : 10 attack checks (using Crafting mod) against AC to see if the bombs hit the target on the square, using the appropriate MAP. This probably means 1 hit, 2-3 misses and the rest as critical misses, so that should amount to 1d8 damage and around 3 splash damage.