| Geremy |
Hello everyone. I've DMed a lot of 3.5 in my time, but I don't have a lot of experience with Pathfinder. I just started a pretty casual game as a player, and was looking for a little friendly advice on Multiclassing. The campaign leans a lot more towards RP and story telling then it does combat, but when a fight does break out, the DM doesn't pull any punches. I've been on a Japanese mythology kick lately, so I decided to play a Samurai, and since my DM really dislikes Animal Companions and swords are cool, I decided to throw him a bone and went Sword Saint as well. As I said, we're more familiar with 3.5 as a group, so we decided to roll for stats instead of point buy, and I rolled stupid good for stats, which means among other things, I have more skill points then I really need as a Samurai, enough that I've taken ranks in "Profession Caligrophy" for simple flavor purposes, even though its almost certainly never going to come up.
Anyway, the game has been great so far, but its very much based in a city, and the PCs are basically cops. This means most of our foes thus far have been enemies we don't want to kill. In addition, due to Sword Saint's Iajutsu Strike requiring my character's sword to be sheathed, I havn't been pulling it out very often. Enemy NPCs have been doing a lot of things that would provoke attacks of opportunity from me, but without my sword drawn I havn't been able to make them, so I was considering taking Improved Unarmed Strike as my feat at third level. But then one of the other players who's a little more min-max oriented than me suggested I just take a level in Unchained Monk instead.
I don't normally like Multiclass characters, but it seems like a good idea. As far as I can tell, all I lose out on is a single hit point (Since Samurai is my favored class) and potentially the Samurai capstone ability. Last Stand is really really cool, but its not likely that this campaign is going to get to level 20 anyway. In exchange, I get Improved Unarmed Strike like I wanted, plus Stunning Fist which should help take down opponents our party doesn't want to kill, Perception as a class skill, a +2 bonus to reflex saves, Combat Reflexes, which should help even when I'm not using unarmed strikes, and improved damage while unarmed. Not to mention Flurry of Blows and the Monk's AC Bonus, neither of which our likely to come up a lot, but they aren't bad to have.
Is there some major downside to a one level dip in Monk that I'm just not seeing?