I started a new campaign recently, and one of my players is running a Monk of the empty hand/of the four winds. We looked through the rules concerning the archetype, and found that, based on RAW, it doesn't automatically get "proficiency" with improvised weapons, even though that's kind of the point of the class. This seems counter-intuitive to me.
Weapon and armor Proficiency
Monks of the empty hand are proficient with the shuriken only. A monk of the empty hand treats normal weapons as improvised weapons with the following equivalencies (substituting all of their statistics for the listed weapon): a light weapon functions as a light hammer, a one-handed weapon functions as a club, and a Two-handed weapon functions as a quarterstaff. This replaces the normal monk weapon proficiencies.
It even treats normal weapons as improvised weapons, but doesn't get to use them without the -4 penalty? Currently, I just treated him as having "Catch Off-Guard" as a bonus feat at level 1, since that's kind of the empty-hand monk's shtick and it sounds ridiculous that he requires a feat tax just to use it.
What's everyone else's thoughts on this? Both the implementation of the class and my decision to give him a free feat. And please, not another thread about the suckiness of the monk. I'm trying to mitigate that by giving him full BAB and Wis on HP instead of Con.