An adept in my game wants to have killing hands and a glove type weapon foci (or brass knuckles), what do people think of the idea?

Er ... what do they hope to gain?

Extra dice, for one.

Yeah, that's fine. Just another version of enchanted Hardliner Gloves.

Killing hands would be mostly redundant with that, though. Killing hands lets you deal physical damage, and affect enemies with an immunity to normal weapons. Hardliner glove weapon foci would do both of those things. The only advantage of killing hands would be that the adept would still be able to do those things when "disarmed".


It's effectiveness depends on the GM, though. Either he will let it do +1 DV and let it stack with critical strike, bone lacing, etc., or he will have the STR/2+1 damage code replace normal unarmed attack damage, which would actually make it a fairly weak option.

Having killing hands makes sense if you are planning on getting or have things like elemental strike that require it as a prerequisite.

Don't let Killing Hands' name deceive you. Fist-pack foci are great for boosting your face punching dice pool, but Killing Hands also covers head-butts, groin stomps, and other imaginative aggressions you'll never find foci for. Extra dice are nice, but too much of this kind of thing gets cheesy (Read: Maximization of the unarmed dice pool has been done before).

Say you have killing hands. Great. Physical damage, can hit spirits.
Say you have weapon foci 6. Great, physical damage, can hit spirits, and six extra dice for smacking people.

IMO, physical damage and hitting spirits is an extra bonus on top of six extra dice.

<ponders a head-butt Weapon Foci>


-karma

Nippon-style headband. Red raising sun on white.