Hand

A hand is an extremity of the arm, usually used to hold items, tools, and weapons. It is required to use Missile Spells and (unless one has a staff) to use Melee Spells. As GURPS is a human-centered system, characters are assumed to have hands by default.

Use

Attacks delivered using hands include:

• Punch
• Spinning Punch
• Hammer Fist
• Grab
• Grappling (although MA introduced Using Your Legs as another option

Hit Locations

Hands are at -4 to hit. There is also an optional palm sublocation (at -6 to hit), used for precise strikes against armored foes--most armored gauntlets have soft leather palms, compared to the hard metal for the rest of the hand!

Digits

These are part of the hand, and can be used in additional attacks:

• Eye-Poke using finger
• Eye-Gouging using thumb
• Raking using multiple fingers

Protecting the Hand

Hands are already tricky to hit on purpose, but they can be protected with gloves, gauntlets, and other coverings. Likewise, holding a shield or cloak provides cover and DR to the hand holding it, and some weapons have basket hilts which give the hand an additional DR 4.

Striking through Shields?

From Basic Set: Campaigns, p.399:

"The penalty to hit a hand holding a shield is -8."

(this probably means an additional -4 to the usual penalty). The size of shield doesn't seem to matter.

Wielding other weapons (even ones with hilts) don't seem to have a similar effect, even though that should probably be at least -2 for partial cover in some cases.

See Also

• Wizard Hand