Making the Monk more Intuitive

[Skjaldbakka]

To break away from whether or not monk's can be made the equal of a fighter, I started a new thread.

It is clear to me that the monk, while it can be made a competent fighter, it requires a lot more work to do than it takes for any other class.

The monk is a class than can be played well, and fit into a party, and contribute to the party, however, it takes more work to do it.

The monk needs a re-vamp. How can we make it more intuitive? By which I mean, how can we make the monk stand up on its own, without jumping through hoops to make it as good as other classes?

First, the monk class need to have its own niche. Right now, it has some niche going on with land-based mobility, but this becomes obsolete with flight. Before we really start making suggested changes, we should first try to come up with an answer to this question.


What is the monk's role?

[Jasdoif]

Melee power.

Really, the monk's main abilities come together here. A monk has the speed bonus and Empty Body (and to a lesser extent, Abundant Step) to either get right into the middle of melee, or to get from smacking range of one opponent to smacking range of another. And Stunning Fist requires making an unarmed attack.

A monk has mediocre BAB, meaning using flurry whenever possible is more or less mandatory. Whereas a fighter can be specialized in the use of bows and the like, a monk is restricted to shuriken for ranged flurries. At best a 100 foot range (using Far Shot), so you're probably in melee range already.

[F.L.]

If the monk had a true role, it should be as the anti-party member. Anti-mage (with those saves and the spell resistance) or anti-fighter (various weapon breaking/stealing feats) or anti-rogue (rogue type feats). Unfortunately, the monk doesn't do this role well due to an accumulation of minuses to all its powers.

[de-trick]

verves form monk to monk you could have a half orc brute that kicks and punches every thing that gets in his way
or
a nimble halfling monk who uses stealth to his advantage
but i say stealth person/ back up fighter
but the best thing about monks is when everyone is striped of weapons and armor and have anti magic area
so only one who can do lots is the monk

[Indon]

As far as I'm concerned, the monk doesn't really have a role. It's a generalist, like the bard.

[EvilRoeSlade]

The monks role is that of a warrior, which is why people tend to compare them to fighters rather than comparing them to sorcerers.

[Saph]

What is the monk's role?

To be the class for players who want to play martial artists / Bruce Lees / guys from kung fu movies, I guess.

Remember that classes don't usually get invented with a game role in mind. Players supply that afterwards with arguments on message boards. :)

- Saph

[endersdouble]

Saph, that's not a good role. A fighter should (and really, can) fight unarmed (though it's suboptimal, that's just kinda the way the world works--guy with sword tends to beat guy with fists) and do so pretty well. With your role, the monk would be a fighter, except one who can't use weapons or armor. That's...not good.

[JaronK]

The monk was already revamped. They called the new version the Swordsage.

Works great.

JaronK

[greenknight]

What is the monk's role?

Sniper / Skirmisher, with a bit of anti-magic.

[Skyserpent]

But in fantasy literature the hobbit with the short sword beats the gigantic venmous spider. The flimsy and easily damaged guys learn to throw fireballs and lightning bolts. So why can't the guy who doesn't use swords fight just as well as a sword user? Because LOGIC dictates that he shouldn't? because PHYSICS doesn't quite go with his abilities? Preposterous!

[LordLocke]

The monk is supposed to be an agile melee warrior- relying on movement, disabling, and good saves in place AC or HP to protect itself while incapacitating enemies with quick, deadly strikes.

The monk is pretty ok at A.

It fails horribly at B.

I'd change Flurry to something where the monk can attack with full BAB with it's fists or a monk weapon as a standard action with a minor penalty. That would help.

Giving the monk full BAB would also help. The current, horrible version of Flurry is the reason they don't have it, and it's a stupid reason, since it's actually even WORSE of an ability with 3/4ths progression.

A monk needs a way to deal with evasive opponents- bonus move speed doesn't help against flight- I'd give Monks some kind of vertical movement- an enhanced jump skill that allows a monk to jump their movement vertically on a jump check or even a /rounds duration air walk per encounter. It won't replace a boots of Flight or a Wizard sharing Overland Flight, but it's a start. I'd also add a ranged weapon besides the 1d2 plinkers into the monk's ranged category. It's not like D&D doesn't have a precedent in Zen Archery clerics.

Monk should get more free feats, if not class-specific manuvers. I'd probably give them an option to either take the trip and disarm lines, or the bull rush and sunder lines for free if I didn't sit down and give them a list of shiny new abilities.

I'd also give monks a variant of true seeing, usable X per day, activated as a standard action- to reflect their training and focus. Right now, the Monk's designed to be the anti-mage, but a LEVEL 2 SPELL stops that cold for the majority of the Monk's life if it doesn't have some form of True Seeing from items/fellow casters (Mirror Image), forget anything beyond it.

Lastly, I'd give it 2 more skill points a level- a Monk should remain a MAD class, but it's attention is already split four ways. There's no reason to add a fifth reason to the growing list.

[Theodoxus]

The question shouldn't be 'what is the monk's role' - which has been debated to death, and answered succintly in this very thread.

The question should be 'what SHOULD the monk's role be, and what can be done to get it there.'

To me, given the selection of abilities and class skill list, the monk should be the pointer/flanker. He doesn't get the nifty scouting tricks that rangers and scouts get, for free - but nothing is stopping him from spending his feats in that direction. Just because he doesn't get a ranged attack weapon proficiency doesn't stop him from picking one up along the way - but I digress.

Strip the goodies away from the monk, and you can start to rebuild him, Bionic Man style. Start with the horrid BAB for a fighting class, add the best saves in the game and an adequate HD. It's like a stock ranger, with lowered BAB to get a better save. In this way, the monk is balanced with the other classes. Next, we assign it a role - unarmed fighting specialist. In other words, the monk should be equal to or better than any other melee class when it comes to unarmed combat. That horrid BAB will quickly bite us in the butt, if something isn't done...

What does unarmed strike has as its primary disadvantages? Weak augmentation (PA with a punch is suboptimal to a greatsword, for instance) and difficulty increasing the magical ability of fists.

So, we add in flurry of blows, which in the beginning brings our iterative attacks higher than a fighter - but at the cost of a lower BAB and smaller HD. We allow a secondary form of protection to increase our AC to balance out the HD differance. As we progress in level, we'll increase the amount of damage the unarmed strike does, and decrease the disparity of the to hit penalty, to compensate for the limited number of attacks.

So, far, without touching the actual special abilities of monks, we've recreated the base class logically - demonstrating why they get what they do.

But now, we need to think outside of the monkey box and really look into the heart of the differences between the standard melee classes and our unarmed champion. The standard classes get weapons which can be enchanted. They get armor, which can be enchanted and can provide quite a bit of protection. They can use shields (again, able to be enchanted, and even get animated, so they can continue to deal massive amounts of damage with their honking big weapons.) They can use misc. magic items to increase their mobility, protection, detection, and resistances... So:

An unarmed champion needs to be able to hit as hard as a weapon weilder. Part of that is covered by the increase in natural damage, but a good fighter will have feats that increase his power exponentially. Without the best BAB, our monk will not be able to generate the same level of killer damage, so lets allow their unarmed strikes to deal 2x PA damage. Afterall, I think a kick could easily generate as much force as a two hander, if not more (legs typically being 3-5 times stronger than arms).

Enchantments:
Monks, since we're basing them off of Honk Kong martial artists anyway, should receive a number of natual enchantments...
Hardened Skin (+1 Natural Armor every 4 levels)
+1 enhancement bonus to hit and damage to their unarmed strikes every 4 levels (with the flurry of blows, the monk would then have the same basic attack bonus and iterative attacks as a similarly leveled fighter, though without quite as much PA potential).
+1 enchantment bonus to their unarmed strikes every 5 levels (total of +4 enchantment bonus, which may be chosen from the melee weapon enchantment listed in the DMG - much like the Soulknife ability)
Damage Reduction 1/chaos starting at 7th, +1 every three levels thereafter - like a barbarian.
Energy Resistance: All, 5 at 9th, +5 at 15th level
Air walk 1 round / (level + wisdom modifier) / day, at 9th
Etherealness 1 round / (level + wisdom modifier) / day
Dimension Door wisdom modifier (minimum 1) / day
Last thing the monk needs is to retain its movement enhancement, but allow it to make a full unarmed attack action after a single move action. This does a number of things: 1) replicates the fluff of those Hong Kong movies where the hero runs up to the badguy and wtfpwns him in the head with an amazing flourish of open handed strikes; 2) allows the monk to retain mastery of the unarmed way while still having the horrid BAB; 3) removes the argument about the counterintuitive ability of the monk to move fast, get many attacks, but unable to do both in the same round.

Couple things of note - going this route, players would be crazy to use 'monk type weapons', and thus I think monks should only be proficient with unarmed strikes. No other weapons or armor. This really limits their ranged attacks, but once they gain their supernatural abilities to move around, it becomes much less dire.


The other option, of course, is to simply use the Swordsage as monk and be done with it.

[Alleine]

Well, I've gone through the psionics books quite a bit recently and realized that a monk wouldn't need a super BAB to hit an opponent if he was a human, 1st feat is Wild Talent which unlocks psionic feats like psionic fist, greater psionic fist, and unavoidable strike.

At this point you'll be doing +4d6 on top of the normal damage, and all your unarmed strikes are touch attacks.

So this would have to be at around 12th level, dealing 6d6 plus whatever else you have, say improved natural attack(though I don't know prerequisites) and a Monks belt. That solves your melee problems, and throw in some of what the other people have been saying, open up their bonus feats to something a bit more useful. Give them more bonus feats, I mean seriously, they're supposed to be that versatile dude in the back who can do all sorts of crazy semi-useful stuff, but they only get three extra feats?

Bah, my thoughts are probably full of holes, but now I want to try the psionics thing.....

[Damionte]

Despite teasing the monk a lot, the only thing I really feels the class needs is 6 skill points instead of 4. That's abou it.

I don't feel they need full BAB as flurry of blows covers the extra attack very well at late levels.

For me the skill points woul dbe enough. As the rest of the class, (just like the fighter, sorc, and in some casses cleric isn't worth taking very far up it's own tree without taking a PRC.

Currently the best couple of monks I can make require me to take as few lvl's in the actual Monk class as possible. Between 2-6 lvl's of Monk is all you can really afford.

[PirateMonk]

I think the monk's role should be overcoming special enemies. The fighter should be the king of sheer damage output, but the monk should be able to overcome all those nasty special abilities. I'm not really sure how one would go about doing this, though.

[Dr. Weasel]

Well, I've gone through the psionics books quite a bit recently and realized that a monk wouldn't need a super BAB to hit an opponent if he was a human, 1st feat is Wild Talent which unlocks psionic feats like psionic fist, greater psionic fist, and unavoidable strike.

At this point you'll be doing +4d6 on top of the normal damage, and all your unarmed strikes are touch attacks.

Psionic Fist doesn't work like that. You can get +4d6 damage to one attack OR make a single unarmed strike as a touch attack. Also, you have to spend an AoO-provoking full round action to regain psionic focus, which you need to do in order to have more than one 4d6 burst per encounter.

The feats are actually quite underpowered and were probably only inserted to give an action-point-like means of producing an extra 14 points of damage at a critical moment

[goat]

I think monks should be the tripping/grappling/disarming/other fighting move specialists. Though I'd be inclined to give them spell resistance to reflect their internal control and "one-ness with the universe", and probably some specialist skills depending on which "path" they choose to follow, be it mobile, aggressive, defensive or mystic.

[Ever Phasm]

The thing with the monk is that he seems to be too spread out.

"Like butter spread over too much toast"

Sorry with the LOTR quote.

The monk has speed, martial defense, spell defense and to a certain extent martial attack benefits. Because he has so many of these, the game designers made them all really weak. This is why a fighter owns at martial attack and defense, etc.

So one way to make the monk better would be to specialize him. At 1st level give him an option of disciplines (or something else that doesn't sound like a psion) that he chooses from. From then on he still gets some of the general class abilities like wis armour class and unarmed strike damage, but at a different progression based on his specialty choice. That way the monk has the option of being the most mobile character ever, the hardest to hit character ever, the most number of attacks ever, the most magically resilient character ever, etc.

Also give him some bonus feats/class abilities based on his specialty.

Any objections?

[endersdouble]

The thing with the monk is that he seems to be too spread out.

"Like butter spread over too much toast"

Sorry with the LOTR quote.

The monk has speed, martial defense, spell defense and to a certain extent martial attack benefits. Because he has so many of these, the game designers made them all really weak. This is why a fighter owns at martial attack and defense, etc.

So one way to make the monk better would be to specialize him. At 1st level give him an option of disciplines (or something else that doesn't sound like a psion) that he chooses from. From then on he still gets some of the general class abilities like wis armour class and unarmed strike damage, but at a different progression based on his specialty choice. That way the monk has the option of being the most mobile character ever, the hardest to hit character ever, the most number of attacks ever, the most magically resilient character ever, etc.

Also give him some bonus feats/class abilities based on his specialty.

Any objections?

Give him some disciplines with special abilities along a theme that scale with his level, huh?. Maybe we could let him choose abilities--let's call them "maneuvers"--from these disciplines, pick new ones as he levels, and let him choose which ones he wants to have handy in any encounter...
...hey, wait, that sounds familiar...

Seriously guys. Play an [unarmed variant if you really like unarmed combat] Swordsage. No more work needs doing.

[ZeroNumerous]

The feats are actually quite underpowered and were probably only inserted to give an action-point-like means of producing an extra 14 points of damage at a critical moment

Psionic Meditation: Move action.

Personally, I make monk more intuitive by replacing him with Swordsage and using the unarmed strike variant. But thats me. So far, it's done nothing but wonders if the usefulness of monks.

[Skjaldbakka]

Please cease and desist from bringing up swordsage, which is in no way productive to this discussion. If you want to use swordsage go right ahead, but this is a discussion about re-building monk, not a discussion about what is better than monk.


Also, I have a few ideas, which I will post as soon as I find my notes from work.

[Aquillion]

As far as I'm concerned, the monk doesn't really have a role. It's a generalist, like the bard.

That is unfair to the bard. Bards really are generalists; they can contribute at least somewhat usefully to any of the game's core roles. They also have at least some special abilities to support a role as party face; it's not really their fault that the rules for diplomacy are horribly broken and leave that role questionable.

Monks... can't. They have almost no ability to substitute for a caster role and are extremely poor skill-wise (second-to-lowest skill points, almost certainly low int, no UMD, missing other key skill-monkey skills). That practically crosses three of the four main roles off of their list right from the get-go... With the class as written, a monk's contribution to the party is limited almost entirely to their ability in combat.

And, Skjaldbakka, you asked how to re-vamp the monk. WoTC has already given you an answer: Turn them into the swordsage. I have no doubt that in 4.0, Swordsage (or something very similar) will replace monk completely in core. Their advantages are more than just mechanical. Swordsages have a broader, more inclusive fluff that lets people adapt them for a far wider range of character concepts than monks; they encompass every iota of the monk's concept, and have the potental to be adapted for far more. They have a framework of actual, functioning mechanics behind them instead of the monk's smorgasbord of cross-purpose abilities. They are not simply better than the monk; they supersede the monk on all levels, much how the older Assassin class was superseded by 3.0's rogue.

There is absolutely no reason why anyone would want to play a monk with swordsage available beyond from an irrational attachment to writing the word "monk" on their character sheet.

[greenknight]

this is a discussion about re-building monk

I've already posted what I consider to be a pretty decent fix for a Monk here. I think it overcomes nearly all the problems of the class, although I haven't playtested it.