Hi all, I'm curious whether there are any rules for species with multiple limbs wielding more than one pair of blasters? I've been thinking of playing a Harch Gunslinger who wields six different blasters, but I didn't know if there were specific rules beyond the normal dual-wielding rules?

1 hour ago, Cassian Ordo said:

Hi all, I'm curious whether there are any rules for species with multiple limbs wielding more than one pair of blasters? I've been thinking of playing a Harch Gunslinger who wields six different blasters, but I didn't know if there were specific rules beyond the normal dual-wielding rules?

There are not. And likely wont be. But a dev for the book with the book with the Basilisk suggested upping difficulty in the same pattern as a possible house rule

Don't species with multiple limbs normally get an extra free maneuver?

8 hours ago, hereticdave said:

Don't species with multiple limbs normally get an extra free maneuver?

They do. However, the question seems to be about what they can logically hold in all those arms and do with all those potential weapons.

IIRC, it’s still normal dual-weilding rules. Your Harch Gunslinger would be able to spend 2 adv to hit twice, 4 adv to hit 3 times, 6 adv to hit 4 times, etc.

4 minutes ago, Yaccarus said:

IIRC, it’s still normal dual-weilding rules. Your Harch Gunslinger would be able to spend 2 adv to hit twice, 4 adv to hit 3 times, 6 adv to hit 4 times, etc.

Yes. But the difficulty is upped once per additional arm. So 2 arms is upped once. 3 arms upped twice 3 arms upped thrice.

I don’t think I’d rule it that way, upping the difficulty for each added weapon. I’d treat it more like autofire, upping the difficulty once, and spend two advantage for each additional hit. Spitfire would still only allow for one additional target.

@Cassian Ordo

The Gunslinger Talent "Guns Blazing" only refers to fighting with 2 pistols, but could simply be used to ignore the first Difficulty increase, with GM permission.

Still, increasing the Difficulty by 1 Purple for every additional weapon will make the check less and less feasible, as you would still need an extra 2 Advantage per hit (10 with 6 pistols).

Technically, Difficulty stops at 5 Purple, and any further increase would require a Destiny Point to be spent just to attempt the check.

Some people go with Upgrading to Challenge dice after you reach 5 Purple (so RPPPP for a Difficulty of 6), but again, this requires GM approval.

The Paired Weapons Attachment is meant to be only for a pair, so I'd only allow it to drop the Advantage cost to activate your second hit to 1 (meaning that you'd need 9 Advantage to hit with all 6).

The Difficulty would either be 5 Purple for Short with Guns Blazing, and 5 Purple ("Impossible") for Medium+, requiring a DP to be spent...

...or for Short Range (using the alternate method, and assuming Guns Blazing to ignore the first increase) it would be 5 Purple, Medium would be RPPPP.

And this is before the Adversary talent or any Setbacks.

I'm not sure that you'd actually be generating a successful attack and the necessary Advantage, but it's possible.

Now, narratively, you could wield 6 pistols and stick to the normal Two-Weapon rules. Each round, you could use different pistols for different effects.

A better build might be to have 2 tricked out damage dealers, 2 stunners and 2 Ion pistols, for flexibility.

Of course, you have to deal with the Encumbrance of all those weapons, not to mention the reception you'll get on civilized worlds...

The Devs had plenty of opportunities to address this and they chose to leave it at the current Two Weapon Combat rule, and I suggest leaving as it is. You have to remember that the RAW isn't intended to be a simulation but a narrative combat system and the limits provided are there for balance and gameplay reasons. A combat roll isn't just your shot(s) but result of your action within the scene, that's why you can spend your Advantages and such on related things within the scene not just against your target. As for how many weapons you can "logically" hold it isn't relevant in this kind of system, all that's relevant is how many you can use to create the dice pool and that limit is two. You can narrate it however you want saying that your PC was blazing away with all half dozen of your pistols but mechanically the Devs have given it a hard limit of two weapons per Attack roll.

salamar_dree also rightly points out that you have to count the ENC as well and six pistols is at least 6 ENC, and likely more since if you're going for Damage you are probably using Hvy Blaster Pistols. So keep this in mind because you aren't going to be carrying much of anything else (unless your GM ignores this really important balancing rule). Further if do House Rule it to extend the Two Weapon Combat rule and add more difficulty dice for more than two weapons then realize that you are going to miss a lot until you dump a good amount of EXP into your Skill and Agility...

I know this sounds like a buzzkill but just remember what I said about narrating your character doing the six blaster barrage because that's the core of this system. The only limits are mechanical not storytelling.

1 hour ago, FuriousGreg said:

The Devs had plenty of opportunities to address this and they chose to leave it at the current Two Weapon Combat rule, and I suggest leaving as it is. You have to remember that the RAW isn't intended to be a simulation but a narrative combat system and the limits provided are there for balance and gameplay reasons. A combat roll isn't just your shot(s) but result of your action within the scene, that's why you can spend your Advantages and such on related things within the scene not just against your target. As for how many weapons you can "logically" hold it isn't relevant in this kind of system, all that's relevant is how many you can use to create the dice pool and that limit is two. You can narrate it however you want saying that your PC was blazing away with all half dozen of your pistols but mechanically the Devs have given it a hard limit of two weapons per Attack roll.

salamar_dree also rightly points out that you have to count the ENC as well and six pistols is at least 6 ENC, and likely more since if you're going for Damage you are probably using Hvy Blaster Pistols. So keep this in mind because you aren't going to be carrying much of anything else (unless your GM ignores this really important balancing rule). Further if do House Rule it to extend the Two Weapon Combat rule and add more difficulty dice for more than two weapons then realize that you are going to miss a lot until you dump a good amount of EXP into your Skill and Agility...

I know this sounds like a buzzkill but just remember what I said about narrating your character doing the six blaster barrage because that's the core of this system. The only limits are mechanical not storytelling.

Your points are reasonable and well taken, though I'm not super concerned with the game balance on multiple pistols, especially given how the difficulty ramps up, the encumbrance, and the need for so much Advantage that you won't be activating many crits or other weapon qualities. It's already hard for a dual-wielding pistol user to compete on damage against someone teched out for Ranged (Heavy), so I'm not convinced allowing as many attacks as guns held (with the attendant ramp up in difficulty) will be game-breaking.

What worries me much more about 4+ arms is a character dual-wielding 2 handed-guns. A Besalisk dual-wielding with Ranged (Heavy) seems like it could lead to trouble (but it is an awesome mental image).

On 7/30/2019 at 7:00 PM, Dr Lucky said:

It's already hard for a dual-wielding pistol user to compete on damage against someone teched out for Ranged (Heavy) , so I'm not convinced allowing as many attacks as guns held (with the attendant ramp up in difficulty) will be game-breaking.

I think too many people get caught up in this idea that it's a contest of damage potential and not an role playing game, but to each their own

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What worries me much more about 4+ arms is a character dual-wielding 2 handed-guns. A Besalisk dual-wielding with Ranged (Heavy) seems like it could lead to trouble (but it is an awesome mental image).

The RAW is clear you can hold two two handed weapons and narrate it as if you're blazing away with both, an awesome scene for sure, but mechanically you only roll for one because Two Weapon Combat only allows one handed weapons, so nothing to worry about.

As a GM I House Rule as little as possible partly because I don't want to have to remember too many, but especially I avoid changing rules that will increase a PC's damage potential. It's hard enough to keep combat challenging and dangerous, as well as keeping my well crafted and badass BBGs alive very long with reasonably experienced and outfitted PCs as it is, why should I make it harder for me?

17 hours ago, Dr Lucky said:

What worries me much more about 4+ arms is a character dual-wielding 2 handed-guns. A Besalisk dual-wielding with Ranged (Heavy) seems like it could lead to trouble (but it is an awesome mental image).

I'm not so concerned about dual-wielding rifles, simply because once you're using Ranged (Heavy) weapons, Auto-fire is a commonly available option, and Auto-fire is superior to two-weapon fighting in pretty much every way. Dual-wielding two-handed melee weapons might get a bit silly, but if a Besalisk wants to Pong Krell it up, it's probably not the most broken thing they could do.

Disclaimer: I played a Besalisk that leveraged four arms to use a riot shield and rifle simultaneously, so I might be biased.

3 hours ago, FuriousGreg said:

I think too many people get caught up in this idea that it's a contest of damage potential and not an role playing game, but to each their own

I'm not saying it becomes a contest. In the groups I've played with, we haven't had to deal with a lot of serious munchkins. My point is that as a GM, if I'm stating out an adversary that I want to present a combat challenge or simply survive for a couple of rounds of combat, generally I'm going to be looking at folks using Ranged (Heavy) as the ones most likely to provide large spikes of damage at range. The Ranged (Light) based character, even a dual-wielding Gunslinger, isn't likely to be the one setting the upper limit. I'm not particularly worried that a Ranged (Light) based character will change that calculation much even if they could multi-wield 3+ blaster pistols.

3 hours ago, FuriousGreg said:

The RAW is clear you can hold two two handed weapons and narrate it as if you're blazing away with both, an awesome scene for sure, but mechanically you only role for one because Two Weapon Combat only allows one handed weapons, so nothing to worry about.

I'll admit, I did not realize that. I haven't actually had a game come up where someone wanted to dual-wield with Ranged (Heavy) so it was pretty hypothetical to me.

I do actually have a player in an upcoming game who wants to play a Xexto Big Game Hunter so the possibility was creeping in at the edge of my mind, however that character is going to be having encumbrance issues with a single gun, so it isn't really a likely question in the forthcoming campaign either.

By RAW no you cannot quad wield in the sense of getting 4 hits with 4 blasters because of 4 arms. The mechanical benefit of a 4-armed species is in their stats, usually an extra free maneuver per turn (which is big). To allow a freshly made character the chance at hitting 4 times compared to everyone else only getting half that no matter what is wildly imbalanced. It only gets worse with the weapons you use (4 blasters with linked, for instance. Now it's possible to hit 8 times in a turn, nope nope nope nope).

Personally I tend to follow the rule of cool. Extrapolating from the current dual weild rules, I let them do so but with the increase of difficulty for each gun. I very rarely saw the Xexto gunslinger in my group do more than fire two guns, even though he had two pairs of matched guns. IIRC, the only real time he did so was when he got into a standoff with a bunch of angry jawas who had tracked him down to Nar Shadda, then had to run for his life as he realized just how many Jawas there were. He was trying to shoot as many of them as possible to try and escape.

Another extrapolation is that for each doubling of weapons is one increase in difficulty. So 2 weapons is +D and 4 is +DD.

Sadly we don't have enough data to extrapolate, though, but we can sure make stuff up!

19 hours ago, c__beck said:

Another extrapolation is that for each doubling of weapons is one increase in difficulty. So 2 weapons is +D and 4 is +DD.

Sadly we don't have enough data to extrapolate, though, but we can sure make stuff up!

Actually we do. There is no instance within the RAW where you double in the way you've mentioned for any reason but there are examples of adding difficulty as people have suggested here, one of those rules being Auto Fire. So if presented with these two options you go with the one that changes the least within the RAW, sort of an Occam's Razor of House Rules...

4 minutes ago, FuriousGreg said:

Actually we do. There is no instance within the RAW where you double in the way you've mentioned for any reason but there are examples of adding difficulty as people have suggested here, one of those rules being Auto Fire. So if presented with these two options you go with the one that changes the least within the RAW, sort of an Occam's Razor of House Rules...

My point is that we only have 1 data point: 2 weapons is +1 difficulty. That's not enough data points to extrapolate anything.

Auto-fire isn't a good comparison, either. Auto-fire has no upper limit on the amounts of extra hits, besides the number of advantages available. And Auto-fire can hit multiple targets. Two weapon fighting is limited to only one extra hit, no matter the number of advantages, and must hit the same target.

31 minutes ago, c__beck said:

My point is that we only have 1 data point: 2 weapons is +1 difficulty. That's not enough data points to extrapolate anything.

Not really. There is more than one data point: there is the one you've laid out and there is the rest of the RAW. There are several examples of increasing difficulty for multiple targets that follow a similar pattern to Auto Fire that to increase the number of affected targets you increase additively not exponentially, and no examples in the RAW of the kind of doubling you mentioned earlier, that's a data point.

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Auto-fire isn't a good comparison, either. Auto-fire has no upper limit on the amounts of extra hits, besides the number of advantages available.

It's not a direct comparison but an example of how the system deals with additional targets. As I mentioned earlier because there are no direct comparisons so you have to look at the RAW for patterns.

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And Auto-fire can hit multiple targets. Two weapon fighting is limited to only one extra hit, no matter the number of advantages, and must hit the same target.

Unless you have the Talent Spitfire (FC pg33)

I do see your point but it's too myopic, you have to look at the system as a whole not just individual rules otherwise you'll miss something important. Regardless there is a rule for using multiple weapons, it's Two Weapon Combat: you are limited to two one-handed weapons . So sure, if you're going to House Rule you can rule it any way you want but if you want it to be consistent within the rest of the RAW you should look to the closest similar rule as a guide.