Jek Quick-fist's page

"" wrote:

Alone, no character can do half as much as an adventuring party containing spellcasters.

See clarification above. A team of all casters (+ pets and summoned meat shields) will do nearly as well, as well, or better (depending on system mastery and sheer shenanigans) than a mixed team of casters and martials. A team of all martials will fail at everything past a certain level.

"What does each person bring to the team, vs. how much do they take from the other members" matters. If all you look at is "does the team do OK," it's easy to miss it if 3 of the members are carrying all the weight and are babysitting the 4th.

No need for clarification. A party is going to contain a number of different classes. But what kind of party goes without some kind of close combat capability? Not that there aren't any spells that can help a character in close combat, but every spell-caster has only so many spells per day. Sure, your character can have access to spells for almost every situation, but you would have to be prepared for every possible situation. At every possible time. Sure, divination helps, but a good DM is always going to have wrinkles that aren't apparent, even to different types of divination.

Sure, you can build a caster who can do everything a martial does and still cast spells, but that's expensive, time-consuming, and more than a little boring. Unless you like playing the villain, since Pathfinder and D&D villains tend to like doing everything all by themselves, off in a corner somewhere. With lackeys and slaves, of course, but without a group of peers. Which is what makes an adventuring party so effective.

A group of peers.

If you play a caster, you enjoy spells, spell-lists, and being able to do things no-one without magic can do. If you play martials, you enjoy having a character that has trained themselves to a high degree with weapons, being up close and in front of the danger. If you like both, you play a class or prestige class that can do both, with slightly less facility in each.

There's all this variety because no one player likes having to do everything, keep track of everything and everyone, all by themselves.

Unless you happen to be a DM. But that goes without saying.

And any character class, played poorly, is going to have to babysat. I think that's somewhat obvious.

Apples and Oranges. To my view, a 'flip' in power/damage is completely subjective. It's always been a matter of the right time, place, and skill set.

As is that tricky question of 'useful to the party'.

After all, although important, RPG's aren't there solely so everyone can go kill things. It's about getting through an invariably dangerous scenario, together.

Y'know. As a team. Or that's been my experience, at least. And it doesn't matter how powerful your spells are, or how strong or quick your character is. Alone, no character can do half as much as an adventuring party.

Adding spells to everything and sundry isn't an answer. I like the idea of using psion powers with the ki system, except that the list of powers is altogether too large.
This is mostly because psions are essentially an alternative spellcasting class with some fun kinks in the build.
Besides, I always found it more fun to find the right time and place to use the special abilities and feats rather than a straight up rock'em sock'em robots duke out with every monster or villain.
That doesn't mean I don't think the class needs some fixing, it's more a matter of perspective. Part of playing an unarmed character, at least in my book, is that part of the self-improvement of a martial art is tactics and strategies meant to complement the new abilities learned.
Which is why Wisdom was supposed to be an important stat for monks, but instead got treated as worthless.
I have to say, that sticks in my craw worse than the rest of the mistakes made about the core monk. Hell, it isn't even mentioned as an important ability score for monks in the Wisdom Ability Score description. It mentions three different spellcasters, though.
Ain't that screwy?

I've played a majority of my characters as monks since I started DnD, and I really don't get quite as much satisfaction out of role-playing the other classes, with the possible exception of 3.5's Gray Guard paladin prestige class. There's just something very appealing to me about all the different ways I can spin my characters background to explain why they chose the path they did.

That being said, the class isn't made well at all. Pathfinder is slightly better than 3.5 when it comes to this, but not by a whole lot. It becomes very difficult to play a halfway decent monk without relying on archetypes and other variations. Playing a pure monk is an exercise in frustration.

You can do decently, but only within a set of very particular builds and feat/bonus feat choices. The way I prefer to play my monks in combat essentially relies on making a moving target and only making a flurry of blows to hold an assailant in place long enough for another PC to do some major damage.

Occasionally, I actually manage to do a decent amount of damage with FoB, but I sure as heck don't count on it.

I guess if I had to describe the role I envision for my monks, I would describe it as creating openings for others and providing close-up combat support.

Of course, this requires exposing my monks to a lot of damage that my monks just don't have the hit dice for. It's a sacrifice, and besides one particularly masochistic monk character, I've given up on straight, base class monks for the majority of my monk characters.