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PsyBomb
2014-10-05, 08:54 PM
SAGE OF THE OPEN HAND

For some monks, the path of meditation and focus leads to feats of unimaginable martial skill. Their katas become stances, their techniques become Maneuvers. They meditate and strike, showing their perfection and focus in every move they make on the battlefield.

Skills: Add Bluff, Heal, and Knowledge (Martial) to the list of class skills. Lose Perform, Knowledge (Religion), and Ride
-Accounting for schools known.

Maneuvers: The Sage of the Open Hand uses an Initiator chart like the Warder, subtracting one from the Maneuvers Known and Maneuvers Readied columns, and has full Initiator Level. Their schools are Broken Blade, Iron Tortoise, Steel Serpent, Thrashing Dragon, and Veiled Moon. Their initiation modifier is Wisdom. This replaces the Still Mind, Slow Fall, Maneuver Training, Quivering Palm, Abundant Step, Tongue of the Sun and Moon, and Empty Body abilities.
-Just took Veiled Moon, plus the ones that allowed Close and Monk weapon groups. Seemed appropriate, and though it's a wide variety they have relatively few known. This forces them to focus. Dropped most of their offensive abilities, plus some defenses.

Moment of No Thought: The Sage of the Open Hand can take a round to order his mind, while allowing his body to act on pure reflex and instinct. This has several effects. He loses the ability to utilize Boosts and Strikes for that round. Second, he makes an additional attack at his highest attack bonus whenever he makes an Attack or Full-attack action. At 8th and 15th level, this increases by one. Finally, at the end of the Moment, he recovers a number of maneuvers equal to his Wisdom Mod (minimum 2). The Sage of the Open Palm also gains the ability to recover one maneuver as a Standard action. This ability replaces Flurry of Blows.
-Flurry replacement tied to Recovery mechanics, since on a normal round an Initiator is going to have better things to do than a standing full-attack in most cases.

AC Bonus: Through training or specialized bracers, the Sage of the Open Hand's forearms have become greatly toughened and unable to feel pain. He adds his Wisdom bonus to his AC as a Shield bonus. This gains a +1 Enhancement bonus at 4th level, increasing by 1 every four levels (to a maximum of +5 at level 20). This counts in all ways as being proficient with and using a light shield (including the ability to make a Shield Bash attack), but does not interfere with their other class features and cannot be thrown or disarmed. This modifies the Monk's AC Bonus.
-Meant to enable Iron Tortoise, while keeping that critical AC boost in place. Making the bonus increases into Enhancement to his Shield enables a couple of feats, as well as boosting shield bashes.

Stunning Fist: Does not gain its alternate debuffs. Still has one use per level per day
-Losing the alternate uses is the last of the major trade-offs, if they want to inflict status effects they can get them through maneuvers known instead.

Bonus Feat: At 2nd level and every fourth level thereafter, the Sage of the Open Hand gains a bonus Combat or Style feat that they meet the prerequisites for. This modifies the Bonus Feat class ability.
-Simultaneously allows the new feats to be used, plus the plethora of Style feats out there, and ends the cherry-picking nature of their old version that encouraged not taking prerequisites. This just makes more sense to me.

(for reference, the remaining unmodified base abilities are Unarmed Strike, Fast Movement, Evasion/Improved, Ki Pool, High Jump, Purity of Body, Wholeness of Body, Diamond Body, Diamond Soul, Timeless Body, and Perfect Self)

CHANGELOG:
5 OCT 2014: Posted
6 OCT 2014: Reverted BAB change, gave Greater Unarmed the ability to count class level as BAB (like Flurry before it), removed first-turn recovery from the Kata and gave it the second-Immediate ability, and gave back the Standard-action recovery.
26 OCT 2014: Reverted Unarmed Strike. Replaced Kata with Moment of No Thought. Noted no throwing or disarming on AC Bonus.

Jacob.Tyr
2014-10-05, 09:09 PM
Greater Unarmed Strike doesn't list values below BAB +3. Probably be fine as a d3, but needs some sort of note in there regarding how much you'll actually deal before level three.

Maybe (Strong Maybe here) taking a note from Warder and grant a modified Combat Reflexes during the Kata, that only allows for non-strike attacks and counters? Probably based on wisdom, could be fluffed as some sort of hyper-awareness thing. Though I'm guessing these characters would take combat reflexes at level two probably anyway.

PsyBomb
2014-10-05, 09:36 PM
Thanks for the note, forgot to fix that in the version here, but I moved Greater to level 3. As for the Combat Reflexes thing, that's actually why I left the Counters there. The way it works out, you can use the same Counter every turn by restoring it with the Kata, and this is intentional. Some of the ones they gain get REALLY powerful when they are spammable, and especially if they focus Iron Tortoise they can become nearly untouchable if they are only facing one opponent.

Jacob.Tyr
2014-10-05, 09:40 PM
Thanks for the note, forgot to fix that in the version here, but I moved Greater to level 3. As for the Combat Reflexes thing, that's actually why I left the Counters there. The way it works out, you can use the same Counter every turn by restoring it with the Kata, and this is intentional. Some of the ones they gain get REALLY powerful when they are spammable, and especially if they focus Iron Tortoise they can become nearly untouchable if they are only facing one opponent.
Ahh, hadn't thought about that. Just sit still and use your Kata to refresh a pile of counters and unleash them every round... that's actually really awesome and thematically fantastic..

Now to figure out how to get Blade-Breaking Counter and just punch everyone's swords to oblivion....

PsyBomb
2014-10-05, 10:38 PM
I was considering adding verbage to the Kata to allow a second Immediate action each turn, though the second gives up your Standard for next turn since the Swift and Move are taken. Not sure if that would be OP, though, so I left it out as unneeded.

PsyBomb
2014-10-06, 11:40 AM
From comments over on DSP, the following changes have been applied:

BAB change reverted (considered a part of the Chassis, and cannot be changed by an Archetype), Unarmed Strike damage noted to treat Greater Unarmed Strike as though your BAB was equal to your class level

I'm changing the Kata to not recover the maneuver on the first turn, and giving it an ability I had originally considered but discarded when used in combination with Move-action recovery. This ability now allows a second Immediate to be used each turn, but that takes your Standard action from the next turn. Also regaining the Standard recovery.

PsyBomb
2014-10-26, 11:30 AM
After testing and more commentary, the following changes have been made. This will likely be the last revision of this Archetype, unless someone makes a REALLY good point somewhere.

Unarmed Strike: Reverted to the base class feature.

The Kata ability has been replaced by the following ability:

Moment of No Thought (EX): The Sage of the Open Hand can take a round to order his mind, while allowing his body to act on pure reflex and instinct. This has several effects. He loses the ability to utilize Boosts and Strikes for that round. Second, he makes an additional attack at his highest attack bonus whenever he makes an Attack or Full-attack action. At 8th and 15th level, this increases by one. Finally, at the end of the Moment, he recovers a number of maneuvers equal to his Wisdom Mod (minimum 2). The Sage of the Open Palm also gains the ability to recover one maneuver as a Standard action. This replaces Flurry of Blows.

AC Bonus: Added a note mentioning that it cannot be disarmed or thrown, because I forgot that common sense doesn't exist when writing RAW

Hanuman
2014-10-27, 09:02 PM
What's the archetype for this? Also Prisoner of War? Is it based on xing yi aka fighting style that came out of being shackled?

PsyBomb
2014-10-30, 08:33 PM
PoW, in this case, refers to Dreamscarred Press's "Path of War" series, based on the 3.5 Tome of Battle book.

Hanuman
2014-11-01, 03:25 PM
Gotcha, thanks!

Nyaa
2015-01-12, 04:11 PM
unless someone makes a REALLY good point somewhere
I guess "sob-sob, it doesn't stack with MoMS" doesn't qualify?