Quote:
Originally Posted by vicky_molokh
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.
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I suppose hydrostats act like they have EITHER weak or short. they can pick up a small object at reasonable distance, or they can manipulate a heavy object at a close distance.
I agree that octopodes grapple above their weight class. Just not at +12, which is what 6 extra arms gets you. Above I eyeballed it at +4. It should also be noted most of the time octopodes are up against poor grapplers.
Octopodes still can't do with one arm what you can do with one arm. They can grab and move things around, but they don't have fingers. there is some complexity to the grip of each tentacle, but nothing like what a hand has. If you made me choose between 8 vertebrate limbs and 8 tentacles, I'm going to choose the vertebrate structure for everything but prying open clams and retrieving objects from cracks.
I do agree that the eight limbs of an octopus are better at manipulating objects that my two arms and ten fingers. I just don't think they're as good as eight arms and eighty fingers.