Geugon's page

I have done a bit of this myself in 3.5, although mainly as a mechanism to get my fiancee involved in the game.

If you have a one-character party there is a huge problem with a string of two or three bad rolls dooming them. Also, anything even close to save-or-die becomes unworkable as a challege. Others may have work-arounds for such issues, but I think it is better to avoid them altogether.

I found it works fairly well to have the player run two characters and to run a semi-permanent NPC yourself. This make setting up CR-appropriate encounters straight-forward. My xp rewards were mainly plot-based (e.g. you just level up when I say), so I cannot comment on that. Allowing the leadership feat would probably be a good alternative to just having the NPC as well.

From a role-playing perspective, it is also helpful to have the NPC because it gives the player at least some little time for party interaction. This is important to give their character's a foil to develop their personality with as well as give you a reasonable way as DM of helping the character if they get stuck in a riddle or plot decision. I can comment on the one-player role-playing aspect more if you are interested...

Also, only when Rapid Maneuvers applied to those "attack action" maneuvers would I ever call it balanced. If it applied to the standard action attacks as well, it's broken (it just steps on too many toes of other feats and classes).

Granted it is too strong as written, but I would like to see a balanced version (additional penalties, maybe only grants one extra attempt, etc) of something like this. I like the visual of a monk trying to furiously close into an opponent's personal space and interfere with them more aggresively than other classes would.

Some combat maneuvers are already "attack" actions, and thus perfectly viable to substitute for an attack in a flurry of blows.

My mistake. I was only really thinking of grapple when I wrote this, but I wrote it to work more broadly. In retrospect, applying this to the other standard-action-combat-maneauvers (overrun or bullrush) would be thematically weird. I should have just written it as "Rapid Grapple"

Rapid Maneuvers
You find more opportunities to apply non-standard combat techniques.

Prerequisite: Flurry of Blows Class Feature, Dex 17

Benefit: When using a flurry of blows as part of a full attack action, you may make use a combat maneuver attempt in place of normal attack. When doing this your CMB uses the flurry of blows bonus for the subsitituted attack instead of your base attack bonus (or monk level).

Normal: You can only peform combat maneuvers as a standard action.

Basically, more attempts to grapple/trip/etc. than normal at the cost of a lower chance of each one working. It seems a bit strong as currently written, but I think this would be a good option for allowing maneuver-based monks to be more viable. As has been noted in Treantmonk's wonderful guide, strength is really the important monk stat. By creating a strong monk-based feat with a high dex requirement, I think you could make a dex focused monk more viable.