RLhoshi's page

Oh I see, yes, I was indeed proposing to only apply modifiers when switching pairs of arms between actions during the same turn, so the modifier would have reset after your turn is finished. Thus I thought there was no tracking issue - granted, applying a penalty to your shield AC would indeed mean you have to remember something, also, delaying an action...

So, yeah, my intention for allowing to switch for free between turns was to keep the coolness of being a multi-armed character, while still giving it a bit of an edge when switching during a single turn (apart from spending additional actions), to keep it from being overpowered. Basically, your primary pair of arms would then be determined by the one you used first during your turn. But still, if that doesn't solve the issue, it's not a solution.

And I fully agree that tracking in between turns is not feasible at all and I'm all in for reducing complexity!

Thanks both of you for your insights! :)

What do you think of, instead of the cost of an additional action, a penalty of lets say -1 is applied for each shift to another pair of arms to represent some additional brain work?
So for example the Multiple Attack Penalty after switching to another pair of arms is increased by 1; raising a shield provides 1 less AC; -1 for skill checks...

There might be an ancestry feat at later levels to remove this penalty.

Please note, that I only have played SF1 but no PF2 yet, so I cannot tell if a -1 penalty makes sense, but since the soldier inflicts a -1 with their Suppressed condition, it looks like it has some weight to it.

(Also thank you Teridax for your detailed post, that helped me PF2 n00b a lot to understand the possible problems concerning action economy.)