Becoming a machine gun, how many arms would you allow?

[Soranar]

I've been toying around with making a few urban druid high level builds and here's my first one: the skiprock machine gun.

skiprocks are everything shurikens should have been : 1d6 damage (medium size) + STR and a bonus attack at -2 to adjacent targets if you hit the first one. They're ammunition so drawing them is a free action and (roleplay wise) they're small weapons unlikely to cause a panic which fits the urban druid roleplay restrictions

Race: Silverbrow human (to be dragonblooded)
Templates: none

Assume urban druid 20

1 dragon tail, TWF
3 skiprock proficiency
6 prehensile tail
9 brutal throw
12 multiweapon fighting
15 power attack
18 power throw

Level 1-4 you use skiprocks and TWF to fire off 2 attacks per round
Level 5-15 you use skiprocks to trigger 3d6 sneak attack damage from the dark stalker urban shape
Level 16+ you turn into an animated object with an arbitrary amount of arms

At level 16 you can turn into a huge animated object so your skiprocks deal 2d6 + STR damage+ whatever enchantment you put on them and you get 3 attacks from your BAB + x attacks from whatever your DM decides is a reasonable amount of extra arms you can put on an animated object.

By level 20 you're a gargantuan animated object with 30 STR (24 base + magic item or buff) dealing

3d6 + 15 (power throw) + 5 (offhand STR bonus ,most attacks will be off hands) + enchants

Now how many arms would you allow? At the very least an anthropomorphic octopus gets 6 so I'm thinking 6 minimum. How many arms would be necessary for this build to be worth it?

[Brackenlord]

Let's see, a Animated Object, gargantuan usually has a attack routine of: Slam BaB + 7 (STR) (2d8 + 10 (1.5 * STR)).


Now how many arms would you allow?

None. Without some external effect to give manual dexterity to the Animate Object it could be a two-or-many armed statue and still have just the one primary slam.

I'm not a fan of monkey or ape Wild Shape forms wielding weapons, so YMMV. Unless is a Fangshield Druid with Wild Shape (Hands) then sure.

Let's hope your DM is more permissive. Regardless, I would like to point that Prehensile Tail by RAW only mentions grasping and using melee weapons.

[Soranar]

Let's see, a Animated Object, gargantuan usually has a attack routine of: Slam BaB + 7 (STR) (2d8 + 10 (1.5 * STR)).



None. Without some external effect to give manual dexterity to the Animate Object it could be a two-or-many armed statue and still have just the one primary slam.

I'm not a fan of monkey or ape Wild Shape forms wielding weapons, so YMMV. Unless is a Fangshield Druid with Wild Shape (Hands) then sure.

Let's hope your DM is more permissive. Regardless, I would like to point that Prehensile Tail by RAW only mentions grasping and using melee weapons.

Prehensile tail is just to qualify for multiweapon fighting (which is does in the description)

And animated objects animated by a spell might be limited but, in this case, I'm the one transformed into one

[Eurus]

Let's see, a Animated Object, gargantuan usually has a attack routine of: Slam BaB + 7 (STR) (2d8 + 10 (1.5 * STR)).



None. Without some external effect to give manual dexterity to the Animate Object it could be a two-or-many armed statue and still have just the one primary slam.

I'm not a fan of monkey or ape Wild Shape forms wielding weapons, so YMMV. Unless is a Fangshield Druid with Wild Shape (Hands) then sure.

Let's hope your DM is more permissive. Regardless, I would like to point that Prehensile Tail by RAW only mentions grasping and using melee weapons.

For what it's worth, there are monsters with slam attacks which can also wield weapons. The presence or absence of a slam attack isn't enough to infer anything about how many weapons a creature can wield, or how many limbs it has, or which of those limbs are capable of wielding weapons.

Unfortunately, "number of limbs" isn't something that D&D 3.5 usually sees fit to explicitly define in a monster's stat block, so there's not a great answer for this. Monsters with more than two arms, like a Marilith, usually have that mentioned, but a lack of arms, or a creature that has the typical humanoid two, generally just goes unstated.

I don't think there's a RAW answer here, but there are three options. An animated object has no arms capable of wielding weapons; an animated object has no more than two arms capable of wielding weapons; or an animated object has however many arms capable of wielding weapons you can fit onto a statue. The last of these three isn't really any more textually supported than the first two, and obviously breaks the game immediately, so I'm inclined to discard it.

[Gruftzwerg]

I agree mostly with Brackenlord.
By RAW an Animated Object (AO) is stuck with its Slam attack and those mentioned as optional.

Turning into an AO with multiple arms would still require "multiweapon fighting" to make any use of em.


As a sidenote, Warforged can also turn into AO via Alter Self (note that Alter Self don't give everything wild shape does). Then there is the Tattooed Monk prc which can get a tattoo to use Alter Self for h/class lvl (usable "amount of tattoo/day). I can offer you an iron chef build of mine if you are interested: G.R.8 (https://forums.giantitp.com/showsinglepost.php?p=24938996&postcount=113) (has some saber rider Ramrod fluff)

[Mlmiii]

I'd likely implement a limit like the Ozodrin (https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?320374-Tooth-and-Tentacle-Remix-3-P-PEACH) homebrew class around here does for natural attacks--its limit is (OzodrinLevel+CHA)/2, but as a Druid you might argue that over to scale off of WIS instead. Capping it at just WIS might be safer, in vsdr you somehow manage to get Improved/Greater Multiweapon Fighting in the build after some reworking.

I'd also require the Animated Object in question to, you know, actually have that many arms. No grabbing a random wagon, you have to cart around a multi-armed statue or Huge octopus plushie or somesuch.

[Soranar]

You wildshape into an animated object so no need to cart it around. I guess the only non cheese option is improved unarmed strike/superior unarmed strike and just morph into something vaguely humanoid