Ater initiating a pin by maintaining the grapple, on the following turns can you continue to attack after maintaining the now pin or must you continue to use the pin action.
I was pinned by a monster today and since it had a pretty decent CMD I couldn't break it for the longest time and even when I did he just redid it.
The monk also does a lot of pinning.
To be specific it was a cloaker using engulf, and I know there were plenty of problems with that altogether since I was told that I was pinned from the very first roll that beat my CMD. Alot of messed up calls were made that night though like I shouldn't suffocate from it too.
If you do not release the grapple, you must continue to make a check each round, as a standard action, to maintain the hold. If your target does not break the grapple, you get a +5 circumstance bonus on grapple checks made against the same target in subsequent rounds. Once you are grappling an opponent, a successful check allows you to continue grappling the foe, and also allows you to perform one of the following actions (as part of the standard action spent to maintain the grapple).
Damage
You can inflict damage to your target equal to your unarmed strike, a natural attack, or an attack made with armor spikes or a light or one-handed weapon. This damage can be either lethal or nonlethal.Pin
You can give your opponent the pinned condition (see Conditions). Despite pinning your opponent, you still only have the grappled condition, but you lose your Dexterity bonus to AC.
Unless the monk has the feat Greater Grapple he is not doing it correctly. If you grapple someone you have a selection of options, all of which are standard actions, so you may only do one of them. ie. pin or damage. Greater Grapple allows you to do two of these in one round.
Creatures with the Grab (Ex) ability automatically deal damage with each grapple check during successive rounds after having made the initial grapple. (Yes, this means they might pin and deal damage, or deal damage twice in one round.)
The cloakers Engulf (Ex) ability only allows them to initiate a grapple and make a bite attack. It is not an automatic pin. The cloaker must still make a pin check on the following round, and it may not deal damage while pinning as it does not have Greater Grapple, or Grab (Ex).
Unless a creature has a special ability that specifically allows them to pin when they initiate a grapple they cannot do so with a standard grapple. Even with Greater Grapple, as this only allows you to make two grapple checks once you have grappled a creature.
Thank you for the insight. I'm sure rules were just not understood correctly at the table. That's how I thought things worked but I wanted to get a second opinion since the book isn't precisely clear or rather clear enough.
Weirdly my edit got changed back to the original messed up post since I changed the title to reflect the question correctly and the content to be a little more nice since I was steamed.