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There are no rules covering right/left handedness...
nor are there rules covering using a weapon with a characters "off" hand.
House rules abound on how to cover this.
My question is not how to handle the basic concept; but on a related matter.

How many off hands does a character have if he has more than 2 arms?

Does a Rahu-man have 3 off hands or 2?
what about Jeridu?
Or any other multiple armed creature?

I'd say for precision things every creature only has 1 primary hand. The hand they use to do delicate, precision things; or even common everyday things that only need one hand to use. Which hand is used to clean themselves? Blow thier nose? Catch with? Etc. With a Rahu-man it would probably be an upper hand, either left or right. Or they may even favor a particular side, left or right, with most things done by that "side" of the body. Think of all the things you do everyday that gets used with your "primary" hand, and how it would effect you to have
multiple appendages. You'd still have a primary hand that you did almost everything with, but now you'd have more than one arm dangling forgoten at your side.

I could see it work either way.

Just up to the GM, I guess.

Rahu-man I think would have, but the Jeridu get a special paired fighting as an occ ability so they don't have one at all

dragon_blaze_99 wrote:Rahu-man I think would have, but the Jeridu get a special paired fighting as an occ ability so they don't have one at all

Yeah I was leaning in that direction myself.
It was just one of those odd questions that struck me in the odd hours of the day.

Damian Magecraft wrote:1)There are no rules covering right/left handedness...
2)nor are there rules covering using a weapon with a characters "off" hand.
House rules abound on how to cover this.
My question is not how to handle the basic concept; but on a related matter.

3)How many off hands does a character have if he has more than 2 arms?

3.1)Does a Rahu-man have 3 off hands or 2?
3.2)what about Jeridu?
3.3)Or any other multiple armed creature?

I will skip ahead to what is covered in the books 1st.
3.2) Jeridu can use their arms equally and full, with full 'paired' weapons for all their arms. This is not a OCC ability, its a racial ability.

Now the ponderings.
1) Their dominant hand is the one they trained with.
2) Their off hand would only get the nat die roll + PP bonuse
3) For each pair of arms they get to chose a dominate arm. To use four arms as the example could be both rights, both lefts, uppers, lowers, or one upper and one lower.
3.1)Looking at the Rahu-men entry in PF:M&A, while it does not explicity say that they get full use of their arms. The artwork and the combat section implies that they do.
3.3) see my anser for #3

You left out the idea of an ambidextrous character, obviously that is an easy figure out on how to use weaponry.

As for rules on r/l handedness. There are no rules for it in real life so I would say this should be a player preference thing. They just say I am this hand and when time comes for the trap to remove one of those hands hope they remember which one their character is.

As for training with an off hand I would allow for the person to have full bonuses with his offhand, if they actually stated that was something they were specifically trainign themselves to do. If not and they just went for normal WP then as stated before nat die +PP bonus (if any). This would be different than the character trainign for WP paired, this is them still using only one weapon. They have trained on how it feels, its weight, and how being on the "wrong" side affects their usage.

Damian Magecraft wrote:nor are there rules covering using a weapon with a characters "off" hand.

I believe they are in RUE, under the WP Paired Weapons skill? It's -6 for the off hand and -2 for the other IIRC.

Modern psychological research shows that the structure of a creature's body dictates its perceptive and conscious abilities. A creature's sense receptors (i.e.; eyes, ears, tongue, sinuses, and skin) enable it to effectively use its body in the world. Said creature would be helpless, however, with just the senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell, or touch (actually four senses -- pressure, warmth, cold, and pain) alone. It could not put food in its mouth, stand up, or reach out to touch something. To know how to move its arms to grasp an object, that creature would first need to know the current position of its arm(s) and hand(s) and then be aware of their changing positions as it moves them. (In humans, just to take one step requires feedback from and instructions to some 200 muscles.)

Humans (and presumably all of the humanoid beings that tend to act so human-like in so many Role Playing Games) come equipped with millions of such position and motion sensors. They are all over our bodies -- in the muscles, tendons, and joints -- and they are continually providing our brains with information. If the wrist is twisted 1 degree, the sensors immediately report it. This sense is called Kinesthesis (kin-ehs-THEE-sehs).

All creatures of this sort, would have learned the lay-out of their body-design during the "sensorimotor" stage of development. During this time the infant experiences the world through its senses and actions (looking, touching, mouthing, etc.).

This would say that as humans have two arms, we can direct our focus between those two arms. By this logic, any creature with four arms would be able to direct its focus between its four arms in a similar manner. Just as you can type without looking at the keyboard, walk in a darkened room, or perform repair work in an enclosed space where you cannot see the space, so could a four-, six-, or eight-armed or more creature.

As for off-hands, about 10% (somewhat more among males, somewhat less among females) of the human population is left-handed. This does not seem to be cultural as ultrasound observations of fetal thumb-sucking reveal that more than 9 in 10 fetuses suck the right hand's thumb. However, this right-hand bias is uniquely human; other primates, for example, are more ambidextrous.

Left-handers are more numerous among people with reading disabilities, allergies, and migraine headaches; but it is also more common among musicians, mathematicians, professional baseball and cricket players, architects, and artists, including such luminaries as Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Picasso.

So, any character can be "off-handed" with which ever hand the player wishes. Also, I would say that if a creature has two arms, it has one "off-hand;" four arms, two "off-hands;" six arms, three, and so on.