Homebrew Monk Class Fix Concept: Batman Arkham Asylum

[Pleh]

Title will get you most of the way there. I had the idea this morning that I would ideally want Monks in 3.5 to play and feel like you're batman in the Arkham games (at least when rolling dice).

I only just had this idea a few minutes ago, so no set draft for crunch rules. Mostly got a few conceptual ideas that would be fun to play around with and see what I can make out of it.

So here we go!

Skirmish
To help account for the batman punching combo, we could give them Skirmish. You'll see the synergistic relations following....

Unlimited Flurry of Blows
There were two places I saw Batman using what could be described as a Flurry of Blows type ability. One was in his regular combo attacks, where he basically flies across the battlefield, smashing opponents the moment they start to get back up as if he was playing Whack A Mole. For him to do this effectively in a 3.5 game, he basically needs an ability that lets him break up his move and attack freely (I toyed with the idea of giving Monks Whirlwind Attack as a bonus feat at some point in their progression; I'm still not sure how early they need it for the shtick to work).

I could see a monk ability that lets him Whirlwind Attack as a full attack action, using up to his Flurry of Blows number of attacks and up to his normal move speed. There's the concept. (Remember, concepts are all I got at this point). Remember that taking away his daily limit on Flurry of Blows and letting him do this all day is a key concept here. I'm also thinking another way to make this function like the Batman games is that his Whirlwind Flurry of Blows provokes attacks of opportunity, so he's gotta be ready to tumble... A LOT. (This also fits the Batman game style as double tapping the dodge button effectively tumbles out of danger).

Unlimited Stunning Fist
The second place I see Flurry of Blows is just after the Cape Stun attack (which happily looks and functions a lot like the Monk's Stunning Fist). We could say that Flurry of Blows forces you to switch targets between hits, unless the target is Stunned, in which case you can wail on them with any or all of your Flurry attacks. Whirlwind Flurry of Blows still provokes attacks of opportunity, though, even while standing still and flurrying on one guy. There should really be no limit to how many times per day a monk can try to stun somebody, but they still can only stun one person per round (unless they buy a cape...)

Unarmed Parry
If we want to keep the Oriental Adventures flavor, we can bring back Iaijutsu and incorporate an unarmed Parry action. Any melee attack now provokes a special type of attack of opportunity that can only be used to parry incoming attacks. Maybe the monk can only do this a number of times according to level and wisdom/dexterity mod number of times per round (limiting it by encounter, or worse by day, effectively neuters the usefulness of this ability).

Martial Disciplines
We're trying to redeem a bad martial class. Tomb of Battle has had the best success with this (even if it only got to Tier 3, that's still a noble goal to strive towards). I haven't had time to do the research as to which disciplines the monk should have access to (I recall Tiger Claw had some good maneuvers for Monk style play), nor how many maneuvers/stances readied/known, but if we're rebuilding the Monk from scratch to fix the gameplay, giving them access to maneuvers is a spectacular place to start.

The Bat Belt
Special Monk Weapons need to be basically interchangeable with the monk's unarmed attacks. The Batarangs are just bat shaped Shuriken, the batclaw could be fluffed as a rope dart, some of the batman games let you play as Deathstroke and use a quarterstaff, you could even use Monk Qi attacks to let them deal some ranged touch attacks (although this would be much more straining for the monk to do, maybe limiting this kind of attack by day or encounter).

Monk Qi: Incarnum Lite
Very optional, but just occurred to me while typing this up. You could rule the Monk's Qi to be a form of Essentia that can either be used for the Monk Qi's standard uses OR it could be used to form a small set of soulmelds (I'm thinking simple things, like imitating the batsuit's resistance to damage to form soul-energy armor that doesn't inhibit the monk's movement).

But what do we do against ranged opponents and magic users?
Stealth. Tap into Ninja and get some sneak in with those epic movement abilities. Batman never took on a room full of gunmen without a strategy to pick them off one at a time and a back up plan to escape to the shadows if things went wrong. It's not perfect, but we aren't looking to make Monks Tier 1. Just Tier 3 would be good.

[Pleh]

I was in a hurry this morning and didn't do enough reading. Flurry of blows has no limit to the number of uses already.

Basically, all I have proposed changing is giving flurry of blows a free Spring Attack feat and Whirlwind Attack feat. So monk gets those feats for free IF he uses full attack to flurry.

Then he's allowed to make an exception for whirlwind attack so he can allocate more flurry attacks to stunned enemies and not just one attack per enemy in range.

[Karl Aegis]

Please don't make anything use a full attack action. Ever. Not even a full attack uses a full attack action. It's a full round action with special restrictions. Making anything cost a full attack action is pretty much a guarantee of whatever it is attached to is going to be horrible. Make it a full round action with special restrictions. Please.

[Pleh]

Okay, sure. I didn't know full attack action was different than a full attack.

[Deadline]

So, have you seen the Dervish class in Complete Warrior? Because it's pretty close to what you are describing. It does require that you use a slashing weapon in a Dervish dance (which is a full attack while moving your speed), but you get around that with either a permissive DM, or the Versatile Unarmed Strike feat in the PHB2.

[Pleh]

Haven't looked at Dervish in a couple of months.

What do people think about that in terms of balance, though? How would monk tier be affected if they got unarmed Dervish at early levels?

[Deadline]

Haven't looked at Dervish in a couple of months.

What do people think about that in terms of balance, though? How would monk tier be affected if they got unarmed Dervish at early levels?

How early are you thinking? Because as it stands now, a Monk/Dervish could get the ability 1/day (and be fatigued afterward) at level 8 (or 6, if you give the Monk full BAB).

[Mato]

How would monk tier be affected if they got unarmed Dervish at early levels?The tier wouldn't change if monk got into dervish at level 1 because tiers don't work like that.

If what you are really asking is if a monk could enter dervish at level 2, or skip monk all together, would it be weaker or stronger? And the answer is weaker. The dervish's dances are limited to 5ft steps in between each attack and, without expressly using TWF, at level 1~5 the monk is the only class with two attacks and he can already take a 5ft step in between them so there is no movement benefit. The monk gains his third attack sooner than everyone else, level 8, but he uniquely has the option of training with a dummy to turn his 5ft step into a 10ft step anyway.

As far as the dance's attack and damage bonuses go, at level 1 it's +1 att/dmg at a 1/day rate only contributes an average of a +0.25/dpr gain per day which is pretty irrelevant. By level 2 invisible fist gives the monk an effective +2~+6 bonus to attack and his flurry of blows doubles his damage. By level 4 holy strike adds +1~+6 to damage for an average of +3.5 per hit while dervish is still only worth about +1 on a per-day scale.

The rest of the dervish's abilities are weaker than the monk's. AC bonus without the wisdom increase, fast movement without the ability to trade it away, the dervish can upgrade the size of his weapons but the monk gets six increases, the dervish gets the benefit of cleave but cannot make 5ft steps when using it or the dervish gets improved initiative but with only a +2 bonus instead of +1 or the dervish gets spring attack but it doesn't stack with dancing, the monk just plain gets three bonus feats and can take any of those at full benefit. Then finally when it comes to multiclassing, remember you cannot dance and rage at the same time. A monk can dip barbarian for whirling frenzy and use all his abilities at once for a stronger outcome, but a dervish is just trying to fill the his gaps.

Overall, the dervish has always been the weaker version of the monk for sword users. But back in the old days if all you had was the phb and the newly released complete warrior with no other supplement out of the library of third edition books and were totally obvious on how later printed books would out scale the dervish, the theoretical applications of the 1/day thousand cuts that a warblade would later be able to do every other round which highly fascinating but ultimately not worth mentioning these days.

[Pleh]

How early are you thinking? Because as it stands now, a Monk/Dervish could get the ability 1/day (and be fatigued afterward) at level 8 (or 6, if you give the Monk full BAB).

I don't have enough info on how I plan to construct the rules yet to put a firm number on it, but my heart says it wants this to be a mainstay for the Monk, so somewhere in the first three levels at least.

I'd rather penalize accuracy on the feature than how often they can use it. Should be something that they can use every round they want to.


Overall, the dervish has always been the weaker version of the monk for sword users. But back in the old days if all you had was the phb and the newly released complete warrior with no other supplement out of the library of third edition books and were totally obvious on how later printed books would out scale the dervish, the theoretical applications of the 1/day thousand cuts that a warblade would later be able to do every other round which highly fascinating but ultimately not worth mentioning these days.

Then we don't have to use actual published dervish abilities. We can write a similar class feature that works the way we want it to.

[Ywvbevlin]

What is tomb of battle

[Karl Aegis]

What is tomb of battle

The place where martials go to die aka core.

[Kelb_Panthera]

What is tomb of battle

Tome of Battle; it's a supplement from late in 3.5's run that sought to overhaul how one might build a melee character with no small success. Many have said it "fixed" melee in general and that its classes are, in effect, better replacements for the paladin, monk, and fighter (not that I, personally, agree with the former entirely or the latter at all).

Definitely worth a go if you haven't looked at it before.