Trip Monk

[stewstew5]

I'm starting up a monk who flows and ducks gracefully through combat, using ribbons, whips and scarves to entangle opponents while weaving through their attacks, and I'm wondering how I can best do a trip/grapple (more heavily on the trip) build without being a STRonk

[Zaq]

Take Shape Soulmeld for the mauling gauntlets. Get essentia to fill ‘em out from feats, racial choice, etc. Net effect is a big bonus to STR checks all day every day. Works on most other combat maneuvers, too, so you have a little versatility.

It’s easier if you start with a few levels of incarnate, of course, just so you can get some essentia and maybe expanded capacity. Still gotta spend a feat for the gauntlets, but it’s worth the effort.

... or, you know, you could also just be a swordsage (unarmed variant, presumably) specializing in Setting Sun throws.

[stewstew5]

Take Shape Soulmeld for the mauling gauntlets. Get essentia to fill ‘em out from feats, racial choice, etc. Net effect is a big bonus to STR checks all day every day. Works on most other combat maneuvers, too, so you have a little versatility.

It’s easier if you start with a few levels of incarnate, of course, just so you can get some essentia and maybe expanded capacity. Still gotta spend a feat for the gauntlets, but it’s worth the effort.

... or, you know, you could also just be a swordsage (unarmed variant, presumably) specializing in Setting Sun throws.

My party doesn't like seeing complex builds that draw on 80 prestige classes and the such. I'm not looking to be an god, maybe just a bit more than the +4 granted by improved trip

[Zaq]

I’ll be honest: your response confuses me. I mentioned zero PrCs. While being an incarnate makes the build smoother, you can accomplish it as a single-classed monk. Are you just uncomfortable with Magic of Incarnum, or is there something else you found to be distasteful?

Overall, there are four main components to the typical tripper’s trip bonus (beyond Improved Trip, which I’m taking as granted). There’s BAB, which monks lose. There’s weapon (+4 for a two-handed tripping weapon), which monks don’t use. There’s STR, which you say you want to deemphasize. And then there’s size, which honestly is hard to reliably get much of without getting into tricks that are far beyond what I already suggested. You’re gonna be stuck without looking outside the box.

It’s fine to play against type and to accept the challenge of doing something in a nontraditional manner, but that means that you do have to avail yourself of the tricks that are left after you’ve rejected the common ones. (Trust me. I wrote the book on truenamers, so I know a thing or two about dumpster-diving for bonuses from unintuitive places. My incarnum suggestion just involves taking a couple of feats from a single book. If that’s “complex,” I think we have some very interesting definitional disconnects.)

[Rebel7284]

I have to second Unarmed Swordsage. If you want a simple build, Unarmed Swordsage 20 is perfectly playable at all levels and explicitly has class features (maneuvers) to trip/throw opponents. In addition, it FEELS like a monk with many of the class features being similar including Wisdom to AC and Evasion.

Edit: If you are 100% committed to the monk class, you can take Martial Study to get some of these maneuvers 1/encounter. Your initiator level would be half your class level, so they would come MUCH later, but it's an option.

[stewstew5]

I’ll be honest: your response confuses me. I mentioned zero PrCs. While being an incarnate makes the build smoother, you can accomplish it as a single-classed monk. Are you just uncomfortable with Magic of Incarnum, or is there something else you found to be distasteful?

Overall, there are four main components to the typical tripper’s trip bonus (beyond Improved Trip, which I’m taking as granted). There’s BAB, which monks lose. There’s weapon (+4 for a two-handed tripping weapon), which monks don’t use. There’s STR, which you say you want to deemphasize. And then there’s size, which honestly is hard to reliably get much of without getting into tricks that are far beyond what I already suggested. You’re gonna be stuck without looking outside the box.

It’s fine to play against type and to accept the challenge of doing something in a nontraditional manner, but that means that you do have to avail yourself of the tricks that are left after you’ve rejected the common ones.

I suppose it is an "all-that-remains" scenario.
Anyone looking outward in at me would see me as a power gamer. I like to create builds and see them as optimized as powerful. I also have an annoying tendency to talk the ears off of anyone who mentions D&D, and have gratuitous character ideas and used to regularly ask to switch them out, or ask for small, against-the-rules, caveats to see a character come to completion without being hopelessly useless.
Since the people who DM for me are mostly first-time and generally inexperienced, they are weary to say yes to these things for fear of me being Minmax the Unstoppable Warrior.
While I have kicked a few of these habits, or at least slowed them, I try to keep all of my builds/ideas across as few, as official, and as popular rulebooks as possible as to avoid annoying everyone else.
I'm also very wary to go far with this character, as the character she is replacing (they just didn't fit the tone of the campaign, unfortunately) did get overhauled once and they seem to think that I had swapped them out previously

[Psyren]

Pathfinder's Flowing Monk (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/core-classes/monk/archetypes/paizo-monk-archetypes/flowing-monk) archetype is basically what you want. Use one of your bonus feats to grab Agile Maneuvers, and combine it with Qiniggong to swap out some of the more useless features like Slow Fall and High Jump for more useful SLAs. I'd see if you could port that back if your goal is to stay straight monk.