In this case, the race in question is "cecaelia," which is an octopus-person along the lines of Ursula from The Little Mermaid. The tentacles are usable for climbing. Since I don't know where the race's stats originated (they're likely a homebrew), I wasn't going to go into detail on it. And it was interesting - it turns out - to see the speculation on it, because I wouldn't have thought of the other examples that were brought up that might fit the criteria.

Running up a waterfall isn't something I'd thought of. Niche uses, but I can't deny that they ARE uses.

A big part of why I'm asking about it is that the build I'm looking at is at least Shadow Monk 6, Gloomstalker 3, and Arcane Trickster 3, quite probably 4 in each of those for ASI access, and I'm debating whether (assuming the game goes high enough) running Monk up the rest of the way, or going for more Ranger and/or Rogue is the better idea. The core combat style is "highly-mobile grapple-monster." It is also a very stealthy build that likes to sneak up behind people and pull them into the shadows.

Ranger and Rogue mainly offer more spells after that point, while Rogue or Monk eventually give Evasion (and Monk gives a nice anti-debuff in Stillness of Mind at the same level as Evasion). It would take very strict limiting of non-Monk levels to get up to the all-saves-proficiency at level 14 of Monk. Tongue of Sun and Moon is a potentially fun feature. But other than ki, Monk feels a bit empty for this specific build between 6 and 13. Monk 9 is discussed here, and has the unfortunate coincidence of giving much less than usual due to already being highly mobile on walls and water. Shadow Monk 11 is interesting because it's at-will invisibility in dim light, but Gloomstalker gives even better invisibility in the dark (except against the extremely rare Devil Sighted individuals). Not useless, since it works in dim lighting and in that rare case, but less so than one might think.

Ranger 5 is sadly redundant with Monk 5, other than giving more Ranger spells. Gloomstalker 7 does give one more save proficiency.

Rogue gives more Arcane Trickster spells, another dose of Expertise, increased sneak attack, and (if you push it to 10) an ASI to make up for having probably stopped Monk at 6.

The extra ki and movement, and probably getting to a d8 in unarmed strike damage, is pretty attractive. So filling it out with monk may be worthwhile despite the redundancies in the more flavorful (sub)class features.


I suppose there's always dipping Twilight Cleric to make your own dim lighting, but that's quite a lot of multiclassing.

Oh. I should also consider Fighter. Action Surge could be kind-of nuts, and there's Rune Knight or Battlemaster to look at.


Anyway, thanks for letting me brainstorm and bounce thoughts off of you guys. The big reason for the question that started this thread is mainly trying to determine if I had missed anything major in my analysis of it. I had missed some things, so thanks for helping me find them.