Grapple and Grab Damage

[Stephen Ede]

When Maintaining a Grapple from a Grapple Attack the rules say -
Damage

You can inflict damage to your target equal to your unarmed strike, a natural attack, or an attack made with armor spikes or a light or one-handed weapon. This damage can be either lethal or nonlethal.

When maintaining a Grapple from a Grab Attack the rules say -

If the creature does not constrict, each successful grapple check it makes during successive rounds automatically deals the damage indicated for the attack that established the hold.

Is the damage from the Grab attack used to initiate the Grapple stack with the normal ability to do damage when maintaining a grapple or is it instead of?

Thanks

[Nefreet]

That's not what it means.

It means if you grab with a tentacle (for example), and you wish to maintain/damage the creature you grabbed with that tentacle, then it's the tentacle's damage you'd use.

You couldn't maintain with the tentacle, and damage with a bite, for example.

[Stephen Ede]

Thanks. That's what I suspected when reading it. One of my players thought it would allow 2 attacks - which makes the Grab ability potentially useful even without taking lots of feats to support it.

Oh well. My Brawler Class Huge Owlbear with 4 arms still managed to give them the willies before they took it down. :-)
If it wasn't for Mirror Image he would've grappled all of them, one under each arm. LOL

[DM Livgin]

The grab damage stacks with the normal damage option. So if you establish a hold with a tentacle, when you maintain the grapple in later rounds you will automatically do the tentacle damage, and then, in addition, you will have the option to do the other grapple options: move, pin, damage(even bite damage).

[Nefreet]

That's not what it means (see my previous post).

[DM Livgin]

Nefreet wrote:

That's not what it means (see my previous post).

That grab paragraph has been parsed to pieces here .

Time to continue that letter writing campaign for a grappling blog post.

[Nefreet]

That thread is 6 years old, and the first several posts were espousing ideas that aren't kosher with current printings.