leons1701's page

Magic weapons for a monk are almost always a pure and simple waste of money. Past level 4, his strikes are already magic for beating DR. Aligned weapons are occasionally worthwhile, but only if you fight a great number of foes with DR 10/good or the like.

At level 8, you need a +2 weapon to match your unarmed damage output. If you spend that money on a belt of giant strength +2, you get more damage than you would from the weapon and still have 4000gp left to buy something else.

Maneuver bonuses might be worthwhile, but why not just buy a non-magic version of the weapon (silver or cold iron) to use on the occasions when you want that bonus? The main problem is that monks really have less and less reason to use any weapons as they level. A monk 20 should never be hitting someone with a weapon outside of certain rather rare and deliberately contrived circumstances. His unarmed strike is simply too much better. As built under existing rules, the high level monk must logically be an unarmed combatant. I've played around with some solutions to this, but none of them seemed satisfactory, they were either too weak or made unarmed fighting as pointless as using weapons is now. I think some sort of class feature substitution is the route to go to allow people to build armed monks, but the exact mechanics have eluded me so far.

The playtest is a bit bigger than he let on, looks like it will be multiple groups. I'm running a Half-Orc monk, Brother Valmor. Going to try to see if there's any point to using maneuvers at all, particularly grappling. I suspect there is not.

Agreed. Half the time, players making 1st level rogues forget that Prereq anyhow. And almost as often as not, the GM lets them get away with it, either because he forgot it too or just doesn't care. I find the proposed rules mod interesting, though I'm not sure about it, for now I'd just go with removing the Prerequisite.

That one struck me as being poorly titled as well. Stunning Defense sounds better, but Stunning Display seems to get to the heart of the ability even better.