Quote Originally Posted by GreatWyrmGold View Post
rechecks the Multitasking feat
Huh. I feel like making separate attacks with all your arms should have been forbidden by the feat, and the feat text seems to imply that you need to take different actions, but nothing in the rules actually forbids repeating the same action 20 times. Huh.
I blame how the odopi tries to specifically prevent the obvious cheese you could do with a zillion arms. It doesn't do a very thorough job of it, but it can be hard to notice. And the only reason this works at all (unless you count throwing four weapons at different targets) is a specific 3.0 feat that I'd never heard of before you mentioned it.
Yeah, Multitasking is the obviously broken one, but by the rules, Multiweapon Fighting is enough to allow you to use all your arms, since the odopi only says it can only throw four rocks. As I said, you ca just throw 50 shurikens, or 50 knives with Quick Draw (you might want to get a gantlet of Infinite Blades). I mean, theoretically you don't even need MWF, but you'd take heavy penalties. Alternatively, since we're playing with the LA-assignment thread, why not become a skeleton? One claw per hand, available at your local dollar store! And who could forget about Fuse Arms, for a truly staggering +100 Str!!! Even Thor would shake in his boots before that... thing. (Here represented with the Girallon Arms soulmeld and a coat. Because you can be a freak of nature and still be stylish.) Or that one rule in Sword&Fist saying you can grapple with more than two arms to get a +4 bonus each time? Give me one monster that wouldn't get grappled by that!

There has to be more, it's 3.5 after all. The point is, they didn't think that players could transform into an odopi, and that's honestly great! Not only for us freaks that assign LAs to the weirdest things, but because it makes for such original monsters. Most monsters have to take into account that the wizard could cast polymorph and take their shape, or that the druid may take Aberration Wild Shape, or even that the cleric could Planar Ally them. That is such a weight on game design that it shaped all of 3.5. There are so very few monsters with low HD and very high CR because of that. And when you ignore that, you get things like the odopi, or the ethergaunt, or the living spells, or the ravid. They are broken when full casters abuse them, but make for great puzzle or surprise encounters. The ability to change into and otherwise use monsters as allies is both the thing I hate most and love most in 3.5. It gives the system so much personality, and makes high-level characters so unique, but they inflict such a stranglehold on game design that I've come to wish they would have implemented the Polymorph ban way earlier during the edition.