I'm currently working on a setting for a DnD campaign that I'm making in the same vein as Eberron and Guilds Ravnica. It's sort of meant to be an alternate world based off of the standard Forgotten Realms. As such, this includes new races, and one I particularly want to make are a race of six-armed, two-legged spider people. However, I'm not quite sure how to balance for the fact that they have six hands. Obviously, just letting them act like normal arms can lead to stupid shit like dual-wielding Greatswords while holding a shield and still being able to cast spells without need for War Caster. Fortunately, there's no danger of this race making six attacks in one round thanks to the fact that using one offhand weapon uses your bonus action. So, I'm looking for suggestions on how to balance this feature to make it useful but not overpowered.
This is an issue that came up in earlier editions too. The solution generally comes down to abstracting from having multiple arms in mechanically important situations. I'm looking at the Thri-Kreen race in 3.5e and 4e. In 3.5e creatures with multiple arms could make an extra attack with each limb, but took heavy penalties. In 4e, the extra limbs allowed the Thri-Kreen to manipulate an object/draw or stow an object/weapon freely, but nothing else.
I'd consider doing something like the combination of these two traits, for the 3.5e trait, you may consider allowing a similar mechanic here, where you can make two extra attacks as a bonus action (potentially with different weapons) when fighting with multiple weapons, but with disadvantage on both. The equivalent of the 4e trait for 5e would be to allow the creature to manipulate two objects freely. The character can hold as many swords as they have arms, but the RAW act to limit how many times it can do so. As for shields and free hands for spells, I'd argue that any round in which they take advantage of a shield or engage in two/multi-weapon fighting is one in which they have no free hands for casting/grappling etc.
Here and here are two Thri-Kreen homebrews that have similar language.
Thanks for the help! I figured that multi-arm races would've underwent discussion before (I mean, there are stories with multi-limbed monsters dating back for thousands of years), but I didn't know where to look.
No problem. Unfortunately monsters aren't much a help in 5e for figuring out these mechanics, since the number of attacks they make is always determined by the Multiattack feature. So in other words, the monster stat blocks don't give guidance for dealing with monsters that get multiple attacks for different reasons. Although one block you may want to check out is the hydra, since they get an extra attack and AoO for each head they have.
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I'm currently working on a setting for a DnD campaign that I'm making in the same vein as Eberron and Guilds Ravnica. It's sort of meant to be an alternate world based off of the standard Forgotten Realms. As such, this includes new races, and one I particularly want to make are a race of six-armed, two-legged spider people. However, I'm not quite sure how to balance for the fact that they have six hands. Obviously, just letting them act like normal arms can lead to stupid shit like dual-wielding Greatswords while holding a shield and still being able to cast spells without need for War Caster. Fortunately, there's no danger of this race making six attacks in one round thanks to the fact that using one offhand weapon uses your bonus action. So, I'm looking for suggestions on how to balance this feature to make it useful but not overpowered.
This is an issue that came up in earlier editions too. The solution generally comes down to abstracting from having multiple arms in mechanically important situations. I'm looking at the Thri-Kreen race in 3.5e and 4e. In 3.5e creatures with multiple arms could make an extra attack with each limb, but took heavy penalties. In 4e, the extra limbs allowed the Thri-Kreen to manipulate an object/draw or stow an object/weapon freely, but nothing else.
I'd consider doing something like the combination of these two traits, for the 3.5e trait, you may consider allowing a similar mechanic here, where you can make two extra attacks as a bonus action (potentially with different weapons) when fighting with multiple weapons, but with disadvantage on both. The equivalent of the 4e trait for 5e would be to allow the creature to manipulate two objects freely. The character can hold as many swords as they have arms, but the RAW act to limit how many times it can do so. As for shields and free hands for spells, I'd argue that any round in which they take advantage of a shield or engage in two/multi-weapon fighting is one in which they have no free hands for casting/grappling etc.
Here and here are two Thri-Kreen homebrews that have similar language.
Thanks for the help! I figured that multi-arm races would've underwent discussion before (I mean, there are stories with multi-limbed monsters dating back for thousands of years), but I didn't know where to look.
No problem. Unfortunately monsters aren't much a help in 5e for figuring out these mechanics, since the number of attacks they make is always determined by the Multiattack feature. So in other words, the monster stat blocks don't give guidance for dealing with monsters that get multiple attacks for different reasons. Although one block you may want to check out is the hydra, since they get an extra attack and AoO for each head they have.