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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tyrion" data-source="post: 2898437" data-attributes="member: 1781">Thanks very much for the comments, everyone (and sorry for taking so long to reply; I was out of town).A common suggestion seems to be to implement a mechanic to force the monk to diversify his ability scores a bit, rather than dumping them all into one stat. This is a good suggestion.However, I actually deliberately wanted to give players the option of specializing completely in one stat, if they so choose. Why? For flavour, customizability, and power/game balance. Let me elaborate on each:Flavour: The devoted student, pouring everything into improving himself in one area, is quite a common trope. Sure, you can get strong fighters and supergenius wizards, but when you want to find the wisest master in all the land, or a hermit with inhumanly quick reflexes, or any exemplar of human physical/mental perfection, a monk should be the one you seek. The monk as written seems like a grab bag of lots of abilities without too many strong, unifying themes. My goal is to give the monk a very strong role without pigeonholing him...an ability score master (just like fighters are direct combat masters, clerics the healing masters, rogues the skill masters, and so on) seems like it would add definition and role-playing opportunities to the monk.Customizability: Forcing monks to spread their abilities around would arguably hurt customizability a little bit. Say four distributions of +2 each were allowed; I think you'd see an awful lot of monks with boosts to Str, Dex, Wis, and Con, and very few with Int or Cha. By contrast, allowing monks to pour their abilities into whatever stats they choose will yield a wide variety of different builds, IMO--I can easily see different concepts based around maxing Wisdom (for monk abilities like Stunning Fist), or Strength (for damage), or Dex/Wis (for AC), or whatever.Power/Game Balance: I made a conscious effort to keep the ability score low enough to prevent the monk from becoming overpowered in any area, even with dumping everything into one stat. For example, even if a monk puts all of his points into strength, he'll only get a +4 to hit and damage. Excellent, yes, but still inferior to a straight fighter, considering the monk's weaker BAB, armour usage, and so on. And of course, you'll be neglecting your other ability scores at the same time.That's my reasoning, anyways--what does everyone think? I do kind of like Imp's idea to at least split the score bonuses between "mental" and "physical" stats, simply because mental stats might be badly neglected...on the other hand, I can see 90% of monks simply putting all of their mental points into Wis anyways.</blockquote>

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