Dual wielding


Rules Questions


I was wondering if their was a way to dual wield pistols in Starfinder. I know you can make two attacks with a full round action but it seems like you would never go for the double gun(our even melee) option if you get nothing out of it. Reloading would suck if you don't have four arms but I think we are missing that trope. Did I miss something or will I just have to figure something out if I wanted to have that in my games?


Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber

No, you didn't miss anything, aside from the Multi-Weapon Fighting feat to slightly reduce the full attack penalty, and the fusillade feat, to use 4 pistols to get an autofire effect.

I would be very careful about adding extra attacks in, though, in a system that has largely moved away from extra-long attack routines.

EDIT: corrected feat name


HammerJack wrote:

No, you didn't miss anything, aside from the Two Weapon Fighting feat to slightly reduce the full attack penalty, and the fusillade feat, to use 4 pistols to get an autofire effect.

I would be very careful about adding extra attacks in, though, in a system that has largely moved away from extra-long attack routines.

"Multi-Weapon Fighting."


I completely missed that. Thanks. The fusillade feat is... interesting.


Zanatsu wrote:
I was wondering if their was a way to dual wield pistols in Starfinder. I know you can make two attacks with a full round action but it seems like you would never go for the double gun(our even melee) option if you get nothing out of it. Reloading would suck if you don't have four arms but I think we are missing that trope. Did I miss something or will I just have to figure something out if I wanted to have that in my games?

As I understand it one must have a weapon carried by the amount of hands required to use it in order to use it. So if you are holding a two handed weapon in one hand you cannot get a reaction (AOO type attack) since you have to hold it with 2 hands to hold it. So having a sword in one arm and a pistol in the other allows you to use either as needed otherwise you have to switch out weapons.

Dark Archive

One less obvious benefit to duel wielding is that you can have one pistol that hist Energy, one that hits Kinetic. That way, if they are strong against one, you can just attack twice with the other.


or ammo saving, the high end kinetic pistols only have 8 rounds each, an operative with one pistol can burn through all of that in two rounds while dual wielding will get you through four rounds.


Zanatsu wrote:
I completely missed that. Thanks. The fusillade feat is... interesting.

Actually, you can do some weird things with it thanks to it being weapon combination agnostic. Count all ammo/charges expended to determine how many targets you can hit but the damage will be based off the largest die pool of the four. So you can have one Gyrojet pistol for 5D12 and three Azimuth laser pistols with 20 shots each giving you 68 total shots, enough to shoot 34 targets. Granted, that is only a 40' cone but you have pretty much shot everything in that cone for much cheaper than buying enough mini rockets to do it with individual attacks.


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Pathfinder Adventure Path, Lost Omens, Rulebook, Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Torbyne wrote:


Actually, you can do some weird things with it thanks to it being weapon combination agnostic.

It requires 4 identical small arms to function.


Can you dual wield two hand cannons and still full attack? Wondering if this gets around the unwieldy restrictions.


Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder Society Subscriber

Not unless you have at least 4 arms.

"Weapons with the unwieldy special property are large and awkward, can’t be fired without cooling down first, or are otherwise difficult to use with repeated attacks. You can’t use an unwieldy weapon as part of a full attack (or any other action in which you could make multiple attacks), you can’t attack with it more than once per round, and you can’t use it to make an attack of opportunity."

Acquisitives

This I understand but with being able to fire one of them with one hand normally, with the unwieldy restriction, you'd think being able to fire twice would work having two separate fire arms.

https://youtu.be/l0EhiiZ15hw

As seen here it can be done, lol


Unwieldy, as a property, doesn't care about whether or not the weapon is 1 handed or 2 handed or whatnot; it's simply a property of the weapon that it can't be used as part of a full attack (without other factors such as Free Hands).

Think of it like the thing kicks like a mule, preventing you from firing twice with any accuracy, even if you had a second gun in your other hand.

In your video, the guy is taking time to aim at a stationary target in a non-combat situation. I would NOT expect him to shoot with any sort of accuracy with those two guns in a firefight. Plus, even under those perfect conditions, his first to shots went low.


Starfinder simply doesn't support two weapon fighting like Pathfinder 1st edition did.

And trying to add it in would imbalance the game, since the baseline assumption is only being able to make two attacks per round, with certain classes getting access to class abilities the number of attacks available.

Short of taking like a -10 penalty to attacks in exchange for an extra attack I can't really see anything working.

The game has some built in DPR assumptions that would be blown away if anyonecould add an extra attack on top of what they already have.


Note that there actually *are* some weapons where you can counteract the Unwieldy property: those with the Free Hands property ( if you have X additional free hands on top of the amount needed to wield the weapon, its not considered Unwieldy for you ). However, those are not exactly going to help with dual-wielding, barring some fairly ludicrous excesses of cybernetic limbs. Its really more for SMG style "medium" weapons, IMO.

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