[johndallman]

Bad Grip and Ham-Fisted are both Mundane Physical disadvantages relating to hands, or whatever your species uses in place of hands. Bad Grip dates for 3e, while Ham Fisted seems to have appeared at 4e.

Bad Grip is [-5] per level, and each level gives -2 to all tasks that require a firm grip, such as climbing, catching things, melee weapon use, and anything else the GM specifies. It only applies once, no matter how many limbs you use for a task. It's mutually exclusive with No Fine Manipulators, which makes the same tasks impossible, at least via manipulators.

Ham-Fisted is worth [-5] or [-10] and gives penalties of -3 or -6 respectively to skills affected by High Manual Dexterity (which is the opposite of this disadvantage, and mutually exclusive with it), and Fast-Draw skills. It doesn't affect larger-scale DX-based rolls, nor any IQ-based rolls. It also tends to make you a messy eater and sloppy dresser, and this may cause penalties on Influence skills and reaction rolls.

Numb gives you a bonus level of Ham-Fisted for many tasks. In Basic's example creatures, dragons have Bad Grip, and apes have Ham-Fisted. This pattern continues in many intelligent animal templates, including were-forms: a lack of true hands or equivalents is Bad Grip, normally a racial disadvantage. Ham-Fisted is usually a personal disadvantage for people with hands, although there are edge cases, such as bears. Bio-Tech has rules for removing or reducing these disadvantages via genetic engineering, or adding them as severe drug side-effects. Present-day robots may also have Bad Grip (Disasters: Meltdown and Fallout), while Ham-Fisted is a surprisingly common disadvantage option for DF, especially for barbarians, and a realistic effect for a poison-needle trap in a DF scenario. High-Tech has sports protective gloves that give Ham-Fisted 1, and prosthetic arms that do a bit worse.

Loadouts: Low-Tech Armour has armour gauntlets that give varying levels of Ham-Fisted, and Low-Tech and Instant Armour expand on this for brass knuckles, mittens and gloves that give Bad Grip. Martial Arts lets you buy Blunt Claws for hands, if you take Bad Grip, repeats brass knuckles and related material, and adds boxing gloves. Powers: The Weird has an example of upgrading animals' handling capabilities, and Reign of Steel: Will to Live has a lot of robots that could use such upgrades, were they sapient. Space has guidelines for giving alien species these disadvantages, and Tales of the Solar Patrol has a variant of Ham-Fisted for engineers who are clumsy with everything except technical stuff.

These are disadvantages I prefer to stay away from, possibly because of my low personal DX. Ham-Fisted can be fine for a "pure" melee fighter, but playing one of those is less interesting to me than someone more versatile. What have you done with them?