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Na, I have a rebuttal since people seem to be leaning hard on Unwieldy.
The Unwieldy trait doesn't stop you from using a second weapon. It doesn't even stop you from using a second of the exact same weapon. You can also bring yourself another not Unwieldy gun to use with reactions while having an Unwieldy main weapon.
Multiple arms effectively eliminate the downsides of wielding an Unwieldy weapon. They're basically unaffected by the trait.
It's somewhat likely that this kind of gameplay is the intention behind the 9th level feats to let you use all of your arms for a single turn.
Also, I've seen the idea of being able to swap your hands as a free action at the start of your turn thrown around. Such a thing would remove the option, or at least limit the usefulness of, of them making feats that benefit from having multiple arms. There's at least one Soldier feat that I saw that is basically better if you have multiple arms and are carrying around two guns. Limiting them by default, while still making them useful as they have, is more healthy for the game and gives them more design space to work with.
That entirely depends on how you phrase Unwieldy in 2e. If it's phrased something like "Attacking with an Unwieldy weapon is a Flourish action." then the problem of multiple unwieldy weapons is solved, since you get only one Flourish action per turn.
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I feel we all agree that this should be better. And there are so many good options given here.
I'd love to see a little more free actions without rolls (open doors, reload, etc), and it doesn't need to be all the time, just x / time. And then the others that give good feats (level 9?) for using more hands should be used more than just 1 / day.
Like others have said, you get fly and you can fly all the time that you have the room to fly. Having more hands isn't just about carrying more stuff, but being able to have more interactions to do during the action phases.
I personally do not need to throw out mega damage to be cool, I tend to play charisma characters that like to support. Having some special feats for using those hands in neat ways would probably fix most of this.
Getting a reaction for a raise shield if you have it in your hands but it isn't as good as the regular raise shield reaction would be great. If everything is gated behind feats, but you get great use out of it, I'd be happy. I'm just a skittermander holding this medpack just in case you need it, and I want to be able to toss it to you.
All in all, I feel that it should more closely resemble dominant hand non-dominant hand. I am right handed and can throw and write and do all kinds of things, but if I try to do that with my left hand, I'm not as good and have a penalty for use. But some things I am good at with my left hand (using a mitt to catch a baseball) because I've trained my left hand with it. Others can be really good with both hands (ambidextrous) and that all can be in feats.
Having seen it mentioned about OP having multi-hands could be, adding the augmentation to get them and having that open up the feats to the multi-handed would make any race have these options.
Anyways, I'm just following this thread as a new PF2 and SF2 player and I instantly fell in love with skittermanders and want to do more with them
One advantage I saw people mention was swapping from one pair of arms to another does not require a manipulate action so some advantage there to just being able to swap to stuff you already have out in various hands.You also already get action compression since it can be equivalent to drawing 2 items for 1 action.
As far as I can tell you can also hold things that only require to be held, like a flashlight, and get full effect.
Which could be interesting for things like thaumatuergs. Can have your lamp/regalia/whatever and a two handed weapon or weapon/shield.
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The game engine is designed around hands and action economy more than most anything else.
If the engine can't handle ancestries with more than two hands, why include them at all? The current meta of "you have 4-6 arms but you can only use 2" just shines a spotlight on how badly the engine handles extra hands, and makes multi-armed a waste of word-count in a given ancestry.
Fix the engine instead of crippling ancestries that were just fine in 1e.
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I'd like to reiterate that the multi-arms as-is are pretty good for a lot of reasons, and saying they're worthless is straight hyperbole.
Could be better, but if it shipped without changes I'd 100% use them.
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Hands are one of the three things that worry me about SF2 Vs PF2. The others of course are large size and easy flight. All three challenge some of the basic operating assumptions in a fantasy game.
Sure you can hold all the things but with the 3 action economy and MAP prevent you from using all of them at once. Can there be a feat tree that eventually lets a skittermander "6 gun mojo?" Sure why not. We are also in playtest mode. All the cool toys are waiting in future books at this point. The corner case of using multiple heavy weapons feels like an easy fix. Just say they are too bulky and you can't do it.
Spending an action to change which hands are primary does feel off to me but I'm not sure. We do have the "change grip" action for combination weapons, maybe start there. I know its from Guns and Gears but an ORC version is likely in the works. Combo weapons (maze core?) let you have extra weapons in the same hands. Not sure how different that is from extra weapons in different hands. The d20 assumption has always been if the weapon or item is held in the correct number of hands it is ready to use. Not all games have that built in.
Mostly thinking out loud here.
That entirely depends on how you phrase Unwieldy in 2e. If it's phrased something like "Attacking with an Unwieldy weapon is a Flourish action." then the problem of multiple unwieldy weapons is solved, since you get only one Flourish action per turn.
Don't even have to look at what other flourish actions Soldiers have access to to assume that will have way too many knock on effects.
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Don't have a lot of skin in this game (I tend to play more human-esque ancestries), but just wanted to throw an observation or two in:
A quirk of the Active Hands setting is that it actually allows a level 18+ Soldier Skittermander to hold more weapons than if all hands were active at once. Thanks to Damoritosh's Grip's wording Explicitly only allowing you to wield one two-handed Melee weapon in one hand and one two-handed Area or Automatic weapon in the other, if you could use all of your hands at once you would either have to forego using anything in your other hands at all, or ignore this feat. With this method though, you can hold three two-handed melee weapons (say, a Slashing one, a Piercing one, and a Bludgeoning one) each in one hand, and three two-handed Area/Automatic ranged weapons (say, a Fire one, a Cold one, and an Electric one) in the other three, and since there's no rule against Holding a two-handed weapon in one hand, and you'd only ever be Wielding one of each at a time, you could technically be battle-ready with 6 two-handed weapons at once, compared to the max 3 you could get without this combo.
Not that that's intended to be a selling point, again just an observation.
Now for an observation on "but what actually happens if they can just use all their arms" because I just wanted to experiment:
From personal testing, looking at a single round, when dealing with two-handed Unwieldy weapons that aren't Area weapons (and thus don't need the extra action to use), even with all hands available a 4-armed Kasatha's advantage over a 2-armed Human basically comes down to just the flexibility of their third action. Both can attack with 2 Unwieldy weapons each turn, the Human just has to spend an action to swap in the middle while the Kasatha could just hold them both and have their third action free. The real... quirkiness comes in when you get to 6+ (like the Skittermander) as they can now wield 3 Unwieldy weapons at once and fire all 3 each turn. That said... if you use ranged Unwieldy weapons (e.g. Snipers) this does not hold true across more than one round.
Once you have more than 1 round, assuming your goal is just unload as many bullets into the enemy as possible, the two-handed human basically just matches the Kasatha the first round, then basically just spends every turn reloading and shooting their one weapon, with one spare action for... whatever. At this point swapping is a waste of time, because unless they basically spend an entire turn to reload a weapon, swap without firing it, then reload the other weapon (or have some other action economy compressor, e.g. Instant Reload), they would just swap into an empty weapon. Meanwhile across a 4-round cycle the Kasatha and Skittermander even out, spending half the time firing and half the time reloading. In fact, if anything the Kasatha might actually be better off than the Skittermander here, since they would functionally have two attacks and 1 reload per turn, never dealing with worse than -5, while the Skittermander would alternate 1 turn of full/-5/-10, and 1 turn of just reloading.
Now when it comes to Melee Unwieldy weapons (of which there is currently only the Doshko), Human with 2 Doshkos will always match Kasatha with 2 Doshkos in attacks (though the Kasatha can move if need be) while the Skittermander can literally just be a blender, constantly whirling their three Doshkos every round. Yes the third attack is at -10, but even -10 attacks can hit sometimes, and when they do that's an extra d12 with full Strength hit on the enemy. And if they do need to move or something... they're still just as effective as the Kasatha, and have that mobility over the Human.
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All that out of the way though, I do support either the "pick your active arms each turn" or "1/turn can swap arms as a Free Action", and would also support making "All Hands on Deck" be usable once per ten minutes (aka, 1/encounter usually) rather than 1/day. And allowing spare hands to do simple check-less actions (e.g. opening doors, retrieving items, and all the other stuff that prehensile extra limbs can already do in PF1e).
Also would support a specific Multi-Armed Combat Archetype, allowing stuff like just unleashing with every weapon you're wielding (possibly as a Cone attack like I swear was a feat in SF1e, or possibly just as a 3-action Flurry on a single target... though that might be limited to 4 guns rather than "All Guns" just to keep it a bit more balanced across all comers).
Also supporting additional limb augments. Bonus points if it's not limited to "hands". Let me have my artificial prehensile tails dang it. Even if it isn't a fully functional limb but just like PF2e's Prehensile Tails, I just want my tail grafts....
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Count me in on the camp that thinks the current version of multiple limbs is fine for level one but the ancestry feats to expand them at higher levels could use some work.
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A quirk of the Active Hands setting is that it actually allows a level 18+ Soldier Skittermander to hold more weapons than if all hands were active at once. Thanks to Damoritosh's Grip's wording Explicitly only allowing you to wield one two-handed Melee weapon in one hand and one two-handed Area or Automatic weapon in the other, if you could use all of your hands at once you would either have to forego using anything in your other hands at all, or ignore this feat. With this method though, you can hold three two-handed melee weapons (say, a Slashing one, a Piercing one, and a Bludgeoning one) each in one hand, and three two-handed Area/Automatic ranged weapons (say, a Fire one, a Cold one, and an Electric one) in the other three, and since there's no rule against Holding a two-handed weapon in one hand, and you'd only ever be Wielding one of each at a time, you could technically be battle-ready with 6 two-handed weapons at once, compared to the max 3 you could get without this combo.
That sounds awesome.
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While I recognize the need for balance in general, I think that the most important thing is for the game to let people build the characters they want to build. As others have noted, when people see a four armed alien in a sci fi setting their immediate desire is gonna be "using tons of weapons at once".
I think that if we're so scared of how someone might exploit anything that we take away stuff that will just be plain fun 95% of the time just to cut down on that 5% of times that someone's gonna do something broken with it, then we've kinda lost the plot.
Maybe this is just me having been lucky with who I play with but basically all of the people I've encountered who try to make busted builds or otherwise exploit stuff to the point it gets unfun for everyone else have been literal children. I'm not convinced we should build the system around a hypothetical player who's never grown out of adolescence.
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As someone who regularly uses potions, it's wild to me to see so many people claiming that being able to effectively draw 2 potions for one action to be useless.
Even that use alone would make me want to use multiarmed ancestries
Commenting my one complaint first: seems like the climbing heritage skittermander can't actually Climb with those 2 dedicated climbing limbs. They have to be active hands to use actions, even with a climb speed, you're technically auto-succeeding at the Climb action, which requires two free hands or combat climber for 1 free hand.
Kind of a weird bummer tbh, my soldier climbs up walls for fun and weird angles, which hasn't felt too strong given the many ranged attacks available to enemies.
Otherwise, a two-handed weapon is historically roughly +2 damage dice size upgrades over a one-handed weapon, the difference between a d6 and a d10, which scales to multiple dice with upgrades. 2-handed weapons already come with action taxes in general to restore your grip after you use a free Release. That's where the two-handed weapon plus shield plus free hand is already too strong if unrestricted.
It's a tough position to balance around and may end up costing archetype class feats honestly, though I hope something becomes available to grow it from where it is.
You might start with something like: wielding a two-handed item requires all of your other limbs to be free; if you're wielding more than one weapon, you can't wield a shield in a hand; you can only benefit from a maximum of two wands at a time, etc.
That's quite a long list and it'd get longer.
That said I do expect or hope that some of the existing extra appendage feats (usually tail related) make it over, though they are probably excluded because they don't need to be playtested.
The Skittermander heritage specifically calls out that 2 of your hands turn into feet. Anadi can take a feat to gain a climb Speed in their true form - which famously doesn't even have "hands", so it seems that the implication is that the gaining of a Climb speed might eliminate the need for "proper hands" depending on how it works.
Would be nice if these cases were properly clarified, though, so they didn't have to go through the "specific>general" question filter in the first place.
As for how multiple arms currently work, I will say they seem a little overly restricted. Even Anadi can do simple manipulate actions with their non-hand leg-limbs, but fully-dexterous and articulated hands can't hand off a potion after their owner swings a sword in a separate pair? I completely understand not letting you use Attacks and item activations and shields and stuff, but I feel like they should still be somewhat animated, even if not fully capable
I don't mind the occasional specific overrides general filter, but the rules only clarify anything regarding feet being used to climb in Combat Climber, which still requires a hand. So it's in this very unclear area.
I think the point about the Anadi is a good one though so I think I'll stick with being able to Climb using those extra feet and include this confusion in my playtest feedback.
Thank you!