D&D 5E Kung Fu Panda: How do wildshape and monk class abilities interact?

[juggerulez]

I'm still interested in the AC equation for wild shaped characters.

Opinions? Anyone know what the official word is?

the main issue about beasts is about their "natural armor". It's not an armor per say (it's not something it dons) but it is still a "protective item" which counts as armor.
technically you should be able to disregard your natural armor in order to benefit of better options, such as monk's and barbarian's unarmored defense, magic armor spell, and so forth. This means that you *override* your natural armor with the enhancement of your chosing, i.e. as monk bear, your ac would be 10+wis+dex instead of 11+dex (11 because your natural armor works as if it was a padded armor, mechanics wise, increasing your base ac from 10 to 11), even magic armor overrides your natural armor, bringing your ac to 13 (13+dex rather than 11+dex).

What you *can't* actually do is stacking "base armor modifiers", such as magic armor, with your unarmored defense. They won't stack. never.

I'm unable to point to the source of this ruling, but as I understand it you cannot have two equations for your AC, so there would be none of this combination natural armor and unarmored defense stuff from recent posts.

it's a bit confusing because there is no official errata, only tweets, but the AC formula is:

*base AC* (1) + *shield bonus* (2) + dexterity + circumstance bonus(es) (3)

1. base AC is always 10, it "gets altered" by donning a suit of armor or gaining a "supernatural enhancement" (e.g. magic armor or unarmored defense or natural armor, which never stack between them).
   At this given moment in history, you can't get over 18 without fudging with the rules.
   No, magic suits of armor do NOT increase this value over 18: they have a base AC provided by the type of armor AND THEN add a magic enhancement value in the circumstance bonus slot.
2. shield bonus is the AC increment provided by using a board in your off-hand. You can only benefit from ONE source of shield bonus (i.e. you won't get it twice by using two shields, you Dark Souls Enthusiast ). The type of AC bonus is "Armor (Shield)" which is the only other source of "Armor()" type of AC other than any suit of armor.
   Suffice to say, this Armor bonus can't go beyond 2 (at the present days) and magically enhanced shields will still provide an armor bonus of 2: the magical enhancement is stored in the "circumstance bonus" section.
3. circumstance bonus(es) are all those bonuses that stack together and come from feats (e.g. duelist), magic enhancements (e.g. the magic component of a suit of armor), spells (e.g. Shield, Shield of Faith), etc.
   Several bonuses don't stack, that's why you put the magical enhancements of your armor and shield in this section.
   For instance:
   • if you have a magical suit of armor +2, casing "shield of faith" on yourself won't provide you any further ac bonus!
   • You have a plate +1 and a cloak of protection +1? the AC bonus effects won't stack but you will still get the +1 to saving throws!
   • You have a +2 shield and come by a floating shield? you will be able to use both? yes! will their AC bonus stack? nope! not even the armor(shield) component will!

This might not be 100% accurate because i'm not too much into combing the tweet feeds, but should still provide you a general idea of how things work.

Rule of thumb: if *by following the PH rules* you can easily reach 19-20 AC on a level 1 character, then you're probably doing something wrong
The only classes capable of doing so are the Human Fighters and Paladins (scale mail + shield + medium armor master and 16 DEX + defense fighting style) followed by Human Barbarians (19AC) who cannot benefit of the fighting style. The other classes shouldn't be able to top them (unless going to min-maxing lands) without spells.

Because the unarmed strike makes no mention of needing a free hand to use it

correct.

"unarmed attacks" are all those attacks you deliver without involving a weapon of any sort, not even an improvised one. a "non monk" nor a "non tavern brawler feat owner" will always deliver a damage of 1 + str or dex with an unarmed strike. This means you can dish damage with whatever you wish, being it a fist, an elbow, a knee, a head butt, a tail lash... literally whatever. A shapeshifted druid will deliver unarmed attacks as if it was a monk striking with his elbows, but instead he will use the form's features (paws, hooves, etc,) to implement the same mechanics.

 

[Shasarak]

It'd probably depend on the tone I want at the table for that game.

More gonzo/comedic? Sure, kung fu panda away!

More serious/realistic/grim? Nope.

Does a realistic game only have Fighters and Rogues?

 

[juggerulez]

Fretting over the armor class is therefore pointless for the Monk Bear.

The point of a monk bear has never been *only* about boosting your AC. You could gain 3 extra AC with a WIS of 18 thus dropping barkskin to cast a more useful concentration spell becomes more viable! (i.e. choose between 16AC and nothing else or 14AC and get some more control over the field).
The monk bear is due mostly to better your performance output, which is overall sub par compared to other first liners. For instance, in most cases the druid never uses the bonus action because she often won't heal over her temporary hp (unless it's her last shapeshift and the encounter is becoming more and more consuming) and there are very few other things that can make her spend it (spells, mostly) thus in those occasions when she have nothing to do with her BA, dealing that extra d4+str damage is a wise way to keep up the pace with the other classes.

this from a mechanics point of view, of course. this has nothing to do with the role-playing aspect, which someone finds way more appealing than the theorycrafting we're doing... if someone wants to portray kung fu brown bear, why shouldn't he do it? at least now he knows it's not only cool but effective too!

So overall, you lose 2 points of AC on average. Do you gain anything?

as a monk you boost your dpr while pushing a little extra AC (up to 15 @ 20WIS),
as a barbarian you boost your damage mitigation (implying you can rage), gain a little extra damage and stack an extra AC which is always useful. You can't concentrate on spells, so you'll loose effectiveness on the controlling aspect of the game, but if you have a wiz or another controller, this shouldn't be a problem at all

Well, a Bear's got multiattack. Does this impact the game? You get a Bite. how much damage? 1d6+2. In theory, you might use your monk power to attack with two paws instead of one. The paws do 2d4+2. What does a high level monk do? 1d4 +3 at first level, and 1d10+5 at high level.

Well, if you are a bear, and you still get a claw/claw/bite by virtue of using your bonus action to get a second claw, you end up with 1d6+2/2d4+2/2d4+2 (max 28).
Compare that with 1d10+5/1d10+5 (max 30). Throwing in the Flurry of blows, you get 1d6+2/2d4+2/2d4+2/2d4+2 (max 38) vs. 1d10+5/1d10+5/1d10+5 (max 45).
Adding in the 2nd attack you get
bear: 1d6+2/2d4+2/2d4+2/2d4+2/2d4+2 (max 48)
human: 1d10+5/1d10+5/1d10+5/1d10+5 (max 60)

So we can see, following a generic crunchy stat path, there is no advantage to be gained in Armor Class or Damage from a Bear form.

A level 1/4 monk/bear druid will have at best 1d6+2/2d4+2/2d4+2 (28 max)
A level 5 monk will have at best 1d6+4/1d6+4/1d6+4/1d6+4 (40 max)
(first attack, second attack, martial arts flurry of blows +2 attacks =4)

this is completely off.
you bite at 1d8+4 and you claw at 2d6+4, both hit with a +6 (levels 1-4) rather than a +5 (you retain your proficiency bonus as a shapeshifter, the bear has only +1).
as a monk you can spend a bonus action to dish an extra d4+4 as unarmed strike, double the fun if you spend a Chi point. You won't use your claws as unarmed strike!
as a barbarian you can rage, halving all incoming damage (bear totem) or all physical damage (standard rage) and dealing extra damage (+2), while stacking extra AC due to high CON. Downside is that you can't keep up casts, thus you will soak extra damage but without controlling the field as expected. It's still viable indeed, since you rarely need to control *and* soak damage in the same encounter (unless the DM is a heartless bastard, that is xD ) thus you can adapt to the two "styles", but it's still something you have to reckon with.

Sometime around the Brown Bear (8th level druid, and at least level 1 monk), you might see some damage advantages or at least similarities, but the bear wouldn't get the monk's extra attack until 8 druid/5 monk, which is level 13. By that time, the elemental Monks can cast fireball, windblast people for 6d10 damage, and fly.

The issue here is not that you're nerfing your monk by MC'ing druid: you're boosting your overall performances as a first liner by MC'ing monk as a druid.

You are a first liner that needs a little extra to stay on the edge. You can Multi Class to do so or simply stick to your temporary hit points with the slim chance the developers will show some extra love to druids and fix their thirst for extra shapeshift charges (all classes increase their class features' charges by gaining levels, druids start with two shapes and stick to that up to level 18th, implying they don't shape to elemental forms, which costs two charges for a single shift!) which is something really unreasonable, because forces you to choose between not shapeshift during certain encounters, which is something you will end up doing eventually, or increase the number of short rest taken per day, which is something not all DM allow (e.g. my DM allows 2 short rests per day, which is really frustrating sometimes!)

Also, in my humble opinion, there is nothing worthwile after level 10th to a moon druid - perhaps just the druid spells (which aren't your main focus anyways) - thus going MC could prove a wise solution to boost your performances. Someone say that is best to wait level 11th to MC, other say it's best to mix the two classes, beneficing from both classes early levels' features. I don't know what's best...i think it's mostly up to how your gaming sessions develop:
if you need mitigation, perhaps it's best to go barbarian at least a couple of levels, better 3 so you can get the bear totem's full resistance package, and then sticking to druid up to the 8th (you won't need elementals because you already halve the incoming damage and you really need to spread shapeshifts between short rests); if your sessions go smooth but you still think you need some extra bang, best thing to do is to go monk, or stack druid levels and get the higher level spells (conjure animals is awesome to control the field )

 

[juggerulez]

is true for moon druids. pretty much the 10th level "nature's ward" is the big loss for losing the Land druid option, and it pales in comparison the shapeshifting powers. The +1 appears to to be confused... it says "If the creature has the same proficiency as you and the bonus in its stat block is higher than yours, use the creature’s bonus instead of yours. "

You retain the best between yours and the animal's, exception made by STR, DEX and CON "strict" values (it means that if you have an higher STR saving throw than the animal's, you use your STR bonus in that regard, but hit and deal damage applying the animal's STR bonus instead).

I'm not sure what that indicates. Do they mean if you also have a +1 proficiency bonus, or if you are proficient in bear paws?

Creatures have their own proficiency mechanics which share very little with playable classes'. I'm assuming this is due to challenge mitigation or stats balancing, can't say which one though.
Also, there is no such thing as "proficiency in bear paws"

2d6+4/2d6+4/1d8+4 is how i would set it up when you get the martial arts. Obviously that's horribly broken. The natural attack form of a human does 1 damage. With martial arts, that ranges from 1d4 to 1d10. Then attribute modifiers apply. With the bear, the base damage of the natural attack form is 2d6. This is probably because the writers wanted to integrate size and strength modifiers into the damage without giving creatures realistic strength scores. But no, a bear paw backed by human strength shouldn't do 2d6 base damage. I've spent enough time at Cabelas to know that.

if you would do so, you're fudging with the rules. Nothing wrong with it, mind you, but it's not how things are supposed to run.

Bears have 1 action called multi attack, which allows them to perform a claw attack and a bite attack. These attacks are portrayed as "armed" attacks, because "natural weapons" are, in fact, "weapons" by design. A bear's unarmed attack works exactly as any other classes' unarmed attacks, with the exception of monk bears and tavern brawler bears, which dish 1d4+STR rather than 1+STR damage.

The rule of thumb here is: Natural weapons are, in fact, weapons, thus they can't be used to *arm* an *unarmed* strike.
You can argue that your bear drops on his foe's stern and surely this will dish more than 1+str damage. Couldn't agree more, but IMHO this shouldn't be regarded as an unarmed strike, rather than a "squashing damage" (the same mechanics used to calculate the damage of a boulder falling on your character's head, which implies a conversion of your bear's weight in bludgeoning damage).

I'm not sure why the brown bear claw damage seems so much more silly to me than the black bear damage, but i think it has something to do with size modifiers being added into the calculations, like how Enlarge adds +1d4 instead of strength.

I can't really dip into that, but i'm quite sure it's not the correct way to reverse engineer creatures' stats itemization. Enlarge is a magical effect that could easily have been nerfed down the way, thus all the assumptions you could make could be fallacious

 

[juggerulez]

So what we are saying then, is ultimately, the debate of Kungfu Panda, is whether they have the Right to Bear arms.

 

[SuperZero]

I can't really dip into that, but i'm quite sure it's not the correct way to reverse engineer creatures' stats itemization. Enlarge is a magical effect that could easily have been nerfed down the way, thus all the assumptions you could make could be fallacious

It's also a simple way to reflect a size change without modifying stats too much. That's not the same as just being bigger, and having your stats reflect that from the outset.

 

[juggerulez]

It's also a simple way to reflect a size change without modifying stats too much. That's not the same as just being bigger, and having your stats reflect that from the outset.

Unfortunately it's not that simple: a variation in size rewires a monster significantly!

Standing on what the DMG suggests (p.275) size only matters when calculating the HP pool (by increasing or decreasing the HD) and the space a monster occupies.
Problem is that HP pool has a direct bearing on the monster's CR (p.276 DMG), thus we can arguably say that size impacts a monster's CR directly!

So as you can see, size doesn't increase damage by any d4 as previously suspected by reading the description of the 'enlarge' spell. As DM, you can overrule this behaviour, of course, but to keep things "fair" (i didn't like to write "balanced" in this sentence) you'd better sticking to HP tinkering rather than damage output!
(it's fair to the monster, not the party )

 

[SuperZero]

...yes, that's why the enlarge spell has a simple addition to reflect size change so you don't have to come up with an entirely new set of stats.

 

[juggerulez]

...yes, that's why the enlarge spell has a simple addition to reflect size change so you don't have to come up with an entirely new set of stats.

yes, of course, but it's a different thing
Enlarge is a control spell which serve the purpose of imposing advantage/disadvantage on STR checks, saving throws *and* provide a damage manipulation effect too (however small as a d4 is) it has little to do to with "efficiency manipulation", that's why I've advised against using it as a paragon ^^

 

[Zorku]

Another detail that I don't think has been brought up here: I think I ran into a tweet that explained that the multiattack move on various monsters is their special way of reflecting the multiple attacks class features that character classes get. As such you're not supposed to be able to use it multiple times on your turn.