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Originally Posted by ericthered
From the most popular post of all time on my blog:
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One of the most expensive builds known to gurps is the tentacle build. You know, building an octopus with 8 arms. It costs a whopping 100 points to by 6 arms and then upgrade all 8 to extra flexible! But is that really what an octupus should buy? With gurps its important to buy the effects rather than the name. What does extra arm actually buy you?
Well, it gets you a 'hand' and a +2 to grappling. 'Hands' are measured comparative to human hands. So ask yourself, can an octopus use all eight arms as effectively as an human with eight arms? can it play two key boards at once while pulling organ stops, turning the page, drinking coffee, and waving hello? No. And its not just the effects of ham fisted. Its the fact that humans have fingers and opposable thumbs. To some aliens, we have 10 'arms' very short ones on the end of a stump. a LOT of multi-limbed aliens can't use one limb for each hand -- to do what a human does, they need to double up or use some other leverage trick.
Its worth noting extra flexible is often paired with short. Realistic hydrostatic limbs don't have the leverage that a human arm does. Take an elephant for example. Yes, the trunk is huge and fairly long, but so is the animal, and the trunk is used fairly close to the body, especially when its full strength is used. It doesn't have much swinging strength either. Octopi are the same way.
So the 100 points we spent for 6 extra arms (flexible) and 2 flexible arms don't describe an octopus. They describe a grappling demon with intricate control and digits on the tentacles and immense arm strength. Our actual octopus as two extra arms (flexible, short) and two flexible, short arms for a total of 20 points. And that's just one way to do it. A case can be made for a single arm. Remember, you get what you pay for...
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I'm not sure all of the characterisations are fair. First, an elephant being unable to apply all of its strength to the trunk is already accounted for with the trunk having the Weak limitation.
Second, octopodes
do seem to grapple way above their weight class, taking on sharks which are larger than themselves, and reportedly sometimes even tearing stuff out of humans' hands. And yes, octopodes, for all we know,
can multitask their limbs the way you describe (IIRC they have 60% of their motor decentralised to enable such arm autonomy).
Extra Arms on their own seem to be a pretty decent deal; the problem is that applying Extra-Flexible to
all of them hits diminishing returns very fast, but the
total cost of the enhancement scales linearly with arm count. It's a situation where one part of the package has diminishing returns and another doesn't. Having Extra-Flexible cost [5] for one arm and [10] for all arms (like in 3e) would be fairer, IMHO; I'm not sure why the change was made.