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Old 02-07-2018, 04:08 PM   #31
whswhs
 
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Default Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#51): Extra Arms

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Originally Posted by Refplace View Post
Are you talking about the Polypoids?
Yes. I see that my trick was to apply Injury Tolerance (Diffuse) to the arms only.
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Old 02-07-2018, 04:21 PM   #32
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Default Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#51): Extra Arms

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Originally Posted by whswhs View Post
Yes. I see that my trick was to apply Injury Tolerance (Diffuse) to the arms only.
Yeah thats a good way to prevent arms from being grappled or crippled. Also a RAW example of what I said before in that you dont have to pay for all the Arms you have, only what they can do.
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Old 02-07-2018, 04:26 PM   #33
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Default Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#51): Extra Arms

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Originally Posted by whswhs View Post
Yes. I see that my trick was to apply Injury Tolerance (Diffuse) to the arms only.
Not sure how that achieves the other effects of multiple arms, though. I'd probably add a special enhancement; something like:
Cluster: +x%
Your 'arm' is actually a cluster of smaller arms. Using all of those arms at once gives the benefits of an extra limb, but you can also split your strength between multiple tasks (you suffer normal penalties for doing so).
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Old 02-08-2018, 08:11 AM   #34
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Default Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#51): Extra Arms

I've always liked a combination of Extra Arms (2) [10] + Danger Sense [15]... because four-armed is forewarned... I'll get me coat.
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Old 02-08-2018, 03:50 PM   #35
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Default Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#51): Extra Arms

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Originally Posted by Bruno View Post
Extra arms is one of my favorite advantages. I don't often get excuses to take it, but I'm about to start a new campaign with a mutated Minotaur with four arms (and Ambidexterity).
He'll be simultaneously wielding a kusarigama (of a sort), a shield, and either a harpoon or a hand free for grappling/wrangling the kusarigama, so definitely making use of them.
I've gotta ask, is this character inspired by the anthropomorphic form of the Hindu god Nandi? Because bull's head + four-armed humanoid body immediately makes my mind go there.

As far as my experience with extra arms, I've used it on a number of racial templates I've designed. A few examples are:

- A race of humanoid squidfolk that have two Extra Arms plus the base two arms, all with Extra-Flexible, each representing two cephalopod "arms" in the anatomical sense, plus one more Extra Arm with Extra-Flexible, Long 1, and Temporary Disadvantage (Ham-Fisted 2), that represents a pair of clubbed tentacles.

- A flying monkey-type race with a pair of Extra Arms with Foot Manipulators and Temporary Disadvantage (Ham-Fisted 2). The latter of those modifiers is actually pretty common on my builds featuring Extra Arms.

- A species of mothfolk I'm currently designing for a DF campaign that have two flat-out Extra Arms, no modifiers.

Though I can't recall the exact build off the top of my head, I've also used it to design a projectile tongue, which is where the price for Long was really irritating because I would paying for a damage bonus that the build would never use. I think I ended up dropping that mod and buying a couple levels of Stretching with One Limb Only.
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Old 02-08-2018, 10:11 PM   #36
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Default Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#51): Extra Arms

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Originally Posted by Cowrie View Post
Though I can't recall the exact build off the top of my head, I've also used it to design a projectile tongue, which is where the price for Long was really irritating because I would paying for a damage bonus that the build would never use. I think I ended up dropping that mod and buying a couple levels of Stretching with One Limb Only.
A projectile tongue or a prehensile tongue?

For the former, it sounds more like a striker I designed for a character, except I used... um... Striker. XD
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Old 02-10-2018, 09:13 AM   #37
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Default Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#51): Extra Arms

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Originally Posted by Refplace View Post
So how about taking a page from Extra Legs
Extra Arms cost 10 for 3; 20 for 4; 30 for 5 or 6; 40 for 7 or more. This takes into account the diminishing returns you get for a lot of extra arms.
Change the Grappling bonus to +2;+4; +6, +8 rather than +2 per arm.
And consider it a general and situational bonus for things like Climbing where the GM feels they would help.
That's a strong approach for these things, but its likely to work well. It reminds me of a reworking of G: SPACE's alien limb table I did, where I decided that more than 16 limbs is usually very close to no limbs: compare a snake with a centipede. I'd still quibble about what an octopus can and can't do, but that's a different matter, and I think we've done as much as we're going to there.

Each +2 to grappling could be bought as a racial bonus for [4], and you have to give up a limb to do so, so arguably each +2 is worth about [3]. Gurps doesn't add points in all cases, but its still worth looking at decoupling the grappling bonus from extra arms.

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Originally Posted by vicky_molokh View Post
Though one thing to keep in mind about using the Extra Legs path: each Extra Arm allows using one Extra Attack without having to buy Multistrike, and unlike legs, arms can wield (force-multiplying) weapons.
That's worth about [5]. I think the bigger deal is the extra parry that it gives you. I think both of those give diminishing returns unless you have bought stupidly high levels of extra attack.

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Originally Posted by vicky_molokh View Post
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.
That is an interesting point. I'll have to remember that (I know squat about 3e). It does make the octopus easier to build, and its also easier to track on a character sheet. It still doesn't give as many options for some but not all arms being extra-flexible, so that might have been the issue.
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Old 02-14-2018, 09:47 AM   #38
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Default Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#51): Extra Arms

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Originally Posted by Otaku View Post
A projectile tongue or a prehensile tongue?

For the former, it sounds more like a striker I designed for a character, except I used... um... Striker. XD
Projectile, it's purpose was for grappling and there isn't a canonical way to grapple with a striker. I did give it a limitation 'Grappling Only, -40%' that I got off someone else's projectile tongue build here on the forums, though. Was your striker build capable of grappling, and if so, how did you price the addition of that capability?
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Old 02-14-2018, 10:02 AM   #39
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Default Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#51): Extra Arms

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Originally Posted by Cowrie View Post
Projectile, it's purpose was for grappling and there isn't a canonical way to grapple with a striker. I did give it a limitation 'Grappling Only, -40%' that I got off someone else's projectile tongue build here on the forums, though. Was your striker build capable of grappling, and if so, how did you price the addition of that capability?
Why not Binding?
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Old 02-15-2018, 08:24 AM   #40
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Default Re: [Basic] Advantage of the Week (#51): Extra Arms

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Originally Posted by Cowrie View Post
Projectile, it's purpose was for grappling and there isn't a canonical way to grapple with a striker. I did give it a limitation 'Grappling Only, -40%' that I got off someone else's projectile tongue build here on the forums, though. Was your striker build capable of grappling, and if so, how did you price the addition of that capability?
Nope, didn't think about using it for grappling. The character in question - Spring Heeled Jack - was the one time I was tasked with playing nemesis to the rest of the group. He was not only a ridiculously strong archmage but - because of how the game developed - he originally had been a bouncing/stretching (and eventually shapeshifting) super. So he could grapple at range using his limbs, but the nasty trick was being able to shift and stretch his tongue into an impaling striker.
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