D&D 3E/3.5 Any good Homebrew Monk Variants? [3.5e]

[Sylrae]

Hey again, Celebrim, Wulf.
You both made some really good points. So here is what I have to say.


Wulf, your intent is to balance combat, and think out of combat should not be counterweighted against in-combat.
Trailblazer clearly supports that, and in fact, does so quite well. (I Have some issues I'd like to talk about in regards to the caster changes, but I'll start a separate thread to ask about those.)
You balance things much like they try to balance them in WoW, which is to say, the things that matter IN combat.


Celebrim, your intent is to say that out of combat abilities need to be checked against in-combat abilities. (which was my original stance, but now I can see both sides of the argument).
I think this was pretty clear that was WotC's intent with 3e/3.5e, otherwise the rogues and monks wouldnt be so much better out of combat than the fighter.


Wulf might disagree with me, but I'd say that if you run his type of games, where balance is all about combat, then the skills which are not combat centric should be dropped, and all classes should get the same number of skillpoints, then rebalance accordingly. In fact, I can see that working quite well in some games. Then, make proficiencies into skills, instead of feats. Add that to Trailblazer and you have a game that is balanced in combat, and out of combat things are dealt with either narratively or by simple ability checks.
As for the argument of Rogues getting full BAB, if we're just balancing combat utility, I can see rogues with full BAB progression as a a big checkmark. More than a fighter, a rogue as a combat character should be getting in more attacks. I'd argue they should have comparable hit rates and rogues get more attacks to compensate for being more frail, or rogues get equal/less attacks but for considerably more damage.
If out-of combat is a serious part of the game, then beefing up a rogue's combat abilities may not matter so much.


I'd say that while many games may be spent mostly in combat, or that out-of-combat is easy, D&D3.5 is built assuming a mix.


As to whether or not skill utility matter in combat, that really depends on your combat. If you run combats where feats of acrobatics are common or encouraged, where crazy stunts are attempted that can lead to your death if you fail (fighting on a rickety beam in mid combat over a spike pit), Swinging on ropes on a ship to get across the ship faster without being flung overboard, fighting while climbing, jumping over an opponent and attacking them in mid swing, Attacking people while sliding down a flight of stairs on the fighter's shield, or fighting on shifting terrain where balance failure means falling prone (or worse, falling to your death), then skills are directly balanceable against combat abilities because well, they matter IN combat.

I don't see a problem with making the rogue a frail heavy damage dealer. But if you do, you need to do somethign about the utility. At which point they're the damage fighters instead of the defense fighters. (which is perfectly ok).
I'd say that the "Damage Fighters" of D&D are Mages. And clerics, which are good at everything.

I'm guessing you play very different games than I do though in terms of skill utility because many of the skills are very highly usable in combat. One of the things that me & my players commented on in pathfinder was "With the skills they combined, we'll all have more out of combat utility, and still be as good in combat."

In our games it seems to be about 30-50% of the game is in combat, and combat still often uses skills, as explained above (Those sorts of situations are not uncommon in our games).

The types of combat in our games have led me to attempt things in other peoples games that everyone just looks at me shocked for. Yay for creative skill usage in combat/chases! One time in a White Wolf Aberrant(mutants/superheroes) game with a group I hadn't played in before, I used skills to bounce a motorcycle I was riding over cars and drive against traffic, towards the cops chasing me, and then of course, use my short-range teleportation to go through the cop cars by just teleporting myself to just on the other side of their cars. Everyone looked shocked that I was even trying things like that, and my response was "doesn't everyone play like this?"

I can admit to having some nonstandard playstyle things that I've grown accustomed to because of my first serious gaming group.

Things that don't happen in most games that happen enough to not be a rarity (which I accept, and often even LIKE) in ours are:

1. The group splits up temporarily either for some sort of exploring reason or because of conflicting goals/schedule planning.
Players miss encounters frequently enough that I stopped giving xp for combat, cause I was getting group spreads like 2, 3, 4, 6, on a regular basis.

2. Players design their characters' goals, and if they don't mesh, players will split up or even kill/rob eachother.
I just allow it, and smirk when someone passes me a note that says theyre going to poison another player or that theyre waiting for an opportunity to stab them etc.

3. There is no healer.
Healing potions get REALLY cheap because everyone has to be their own healer in these games.

4. The cleric doesn't heal unless it benefits him, charges other players for healing, or otherwise uses himself as a combat monkey instead of a healer (that IS what he's best at per RAW. Fight about as well as the fighter, or cast as well as a mage, with the assumption that youll be spending a good chunk of your time just holding up the group. If you don't meet that assumption youre just overpowered).
I've been rewriting the cleric as a divine caster, either more like a sorcerer or like a duskblade, and when I'm done will not use the cleric anymore.

I'm going to try to spread around the healing, since a primary healer is so rare in my games. Sometimes there is a bard who heals, or if theyre lucky, a druid.

So I have some nonstandard gaming practices. [Edit]Forgot to mention: While I have nonstandard gaming practices in many respects, there's no reason you can't use skills in combat like I just described. That's why you have balance, climb, tumble, jump, etc/acrobatics, climb, etc.[/Edit]

That being said, combat skills, are still incredibly useful. In fact, if I were you(wulf), where your games are so combat heavy I'd make the physical skills be separate like in 3.5, not combined like pathfinder.

I await your guys responses.

 

[Celebrim]

So, speaking just RAW, skills that are directly useful in combat:

1) Spot/Listen: High skill at this means less often surprised, which means you can act on the surprise round which means more attacks for you and less damage.
2) Hide/Move Silently: High skill means more often achieving surprise, which means you can act on the surprise round, etc.
3) Tumble: High skill at this means you can fight defensively to your advantage and that you take fewer AoO's.
4) Balance: High skill at this means you can charge, run, or double move across difficult or broken terrain without having to and/or fall down. You can also wear heavier armor while doing so, and generally can adventure more successfully in heavy armor. How often this matters depends on how often your DM makes you fight somewhere other than rooms with flat floors or outdoors with carefully manicured turf, and how often you encounter minor hazards that provoke balance checks (which might not be so minor if you are on a narrow path above a chasm).
5) Bluff: High skill at this allows you to feint in combat successfully, as well as pull a 'Batman' to distract your opponent to attempt to make a quick hidden get away (when you would otherwise be observed).
6) Escape Artist: High skill at this can be substituted for your grapple bonus to escape a grapple.
7) Sense Motive: Lets you resist Bluff, above.
8) Intimidate: High skill in this lets you pull off minor debuffs against some targets.
9) Use Magical Device: High skill in this gets you access to wands and other devices which can supplement your combat ability.
10) Ride: Skill in this is necessary when fighting from a mount, and opens up the option to use a mount in combat. How important this is depends on how much of your combat occurs underground in 20'x30' rooms.
11) Concentration: High skill in this is necessary to cast spells in combat.

And there are probably some really minor things I'm forgetting.

And I tend to play heavier skill usage in combat than that even. See for example the clinch rules I posted not that long ago, or the rules for the leadership and tactics skills posted before that.

But out of combat counts too. It matters if your character is a boorish thug with no diplomacy skills. It matters if you can't appraise anything to know what it is, or if you have no knowledge skills and you want a clue to solve a puzzle. It matters if you can't handle a boat on a stream, or survive a blizzard. It matters if you can tell who is lying to you. It matters if you find that trap, and if you can't evade whether you can disable it. It matters if you can jump the pit, or scale the cliff to let down a rope or for that matter climb the rope. It matters if you can swim when you fall in the water, or grab the ledge when the floor or ice or basalt crust crumbles beneath you. Sure, you can do all or most of this with magic and flying solves a world of difficulties, but if you are doing all of this with magic then its eating into your daily spell uses and guess what - you are less effective in combat.

 

[Sylrae]

*pout* you totally ignored my post celebrim. lol

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Wulf might disagree with me, but I'd say that if you run his type of games, where balance is all about combat, then the skills which are not combat centric should be dropped, and all classes should get the same number of skillpoints, then rebalance accordingly.

We didn't go quite that far but we did, in fact, greatly reduce the utility of skills in combat-- while at the same time giving almost everyone more skill points and making it easier to contribute in interesting ways out-of-combat. No class gets fewer than 4 skill points per level, there are no cross-class skills, and the skill list is consolidated so your skill points go farther.

So, speaking just RAW, skills that are directly useful in combat:

I like Celebrim's list. No major quibbles-- though again, we changed quite a few, and the list of really useful skill uses in combat is a bit shorter.

But out of combat counts too. It matters if your character is a boorish thug with no diplomacy skills. It matters if...

Agreed that all of these things matter; my point isn't that they don't matter, just that they don't matter nearly as much as combat. If you are running the kind of game where four or five "catastrophically bad" skill checks are as bad as those four or five rounds of combat-- as in, you'll be rolling up a new character-- then I think you're playing outside the norm.

And that's a sliding scale. Which is fine.

I'm just saying that if you're playing in such a game, then the value of skill points is greatly amplified compared to the typical campaign, and therefore skill points have a different set of balance considerations.

It's not just the amount of out of combat stuff that your DM throws at you, but also the relative consequences of those skill checks. You may very well find yourself in a campaign where the term "Save or Die" is meaningless and instead the players sit around dreading "Sense Motive or Die."

And if you're playing a campaign where the ability to speak with burrowing mammals is absolutely crucial to your survival, the gnome is king.

 

[Sylrae]

So Wulf, if you remove most of the combat utility of skills, I'm guessing the crazy stunts in mid combat basically go out the window?

 

[Celebrim]

We didn't go quite that far but we did, in fact, greatly reduce the utility of skills in combat-- while at the same time giving almost everyone more skill points and making it easier to contribute in interesting ways out-of-combat. No class gets fewer than 4 skill points per level, there are no cross-class skills, and the skill list is consolidated so your skill points go farther.

That would be one way to go. As I've argued before though, if you go that way you run the risk of reducing the value of skills (fewer skills matter to your build and you have better access to them), and if you do that Intelligence becomes a dump stat for most classes. That's not at all where I wanted to go. So, I've done almost the opposite of that in most ways.

Cross-class skills are still in and one of the major features of a class is which skills it allows easy access to - fighters for get tactics and leadership (the only class with both) and a large range of strength based skills. A minor sacrifice of combat power though gives you large customibility though (I use an advantage/disadvantage system, and all characters start with one free advantage.). The skill list is actually considerably broadened. To compensate, most classes get considerably more skill points but not so much that you can have mastery in everything you might want (without exceptional intelligence).

Additionally skills get considerably more powerful. Heal can actually be used to recover minor amounts of hit points by binding recent wounds, and with enough Heal you can actually bring the recently dead back to life. Concentration does useful things outside of spell casting. Intimidates debuffing power gets more powerful, especially when it interacts with combat feats that let you do it as a free action. You can do interesting things with the Dreaming skill like see your surroundings while fully asleep, and with sufficient Planeswalking you can plane shift without the need for a spell. You can cast minor divinations with sufficient time and Astrology. Tactics lets you improve your cover, improve your initiative, avoid some circumstance modifiers, and even give minor buffs to your allies. Leadership lets you counter debuffs on your allies like moral penalties, shaken, paniced, cowering, or flatfooted. Empathy lets you communicate with things that aren't normally intelligent (ever wanted to have a pet ooze?), and train creatures (as per animal handling) practically instantly. Runing lets you increase your movement rate. Porter increases the weight you can bear before encumberance penalties effect you. Sense motive can be used to resist several manuevers in combat. Basically, I don't think you should have to wait for epic levels before lots of skill lets you start doing epic things. Granted, most of the above are class exclusive skills that are limited to certain classes, but if you really want a fighter that can jaunt to the ethereal plane or the elemental plane of fire at high levels its not that hard to do it and no magic item required. In a fighter's case, the color would be you just cut a hole in the fabric of reality and step through.

Agreed that all of these things matter; my point isn't that they don't matter, just that they don't matter nearly as much as combat. If you are running the kind of game where four or five "catastrophically bad" skill checks are as bad as those four or five rounds of combat-- as in, you'll be rolling up a new character-- then I think you're playing outside the norm.

Possibly. I don't really argue that. What I want to know is how you know that they failed at their primary design goal of making rogues high damage dealers and that is what needs to be fixed, as opposed to the alternative theory that they failed at making skills matter enough and that's the basic problem with any skillful class.

It's not just the amount of out of combat stuff that your DM throws at you, but also the relative consequences of those skill checks. You may very well find yourself in a campaign where the term "Save or Die" is meaningless and instead the players sit around dreading "Sense Motive or Die."

I don't think I've ever used 'Sense Motive or Die', but I have on a couple of occasions used, in essence, 'Balance Check or Die'. When you're 5th level, and you are on a crumbling ledge 400' up, chance are if you really fumble that DC 7 balance check (result of 2 or less) and go over the brink, unless you roll a tremendous climb check result ("He didn't fall, inconceivable!") you are going to be dead. Although, conceivable, if you got in a fight with some bugbears shock troops on a narrow mountain pass or in a room with some particularly nasty traps, I could imagine some situations that would in essense amount to 'Sense Motive or Die'. Although, technically, even 'Fort save or Die' in my campaign usually involves at least one second chance.

And if you're playing a campaign where the ability to speak with burrowing mammals is absolutely crucial to your survival, the gnome is king.

Yes, but if you play in a campaign where some race has the ability to speak to burrowing animals and it never comes up, it makes me really question why they have the ability in the first place.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

So Wulf, if you remove most of the combat utility of skills, I'm guessing the crazy stunts in mid combat basically go out the window?

When were they ever in the window?

 

[Sylrae]

When it never said you couldn't use movement skills in your move action. Plus a little line on PHB3.5 142 "With the exception of movement-related skills, most move actions don't require a check." Add to that: PHB3.5 138 "A move action allows you to move your speed or perform an action that takes a similar amount of time."

Combine those together, and that says that you can Make move actions that take a similar amount of time as your move, and make applicable skill checks to do so, including those listed in the entry as well as Balance, Escape Artist (depending on context, it might count as a standard action), Jump, Ride, Swim, and Tumble.

If you want to fight a spider while balancing on two immovable rods, the rules let you.

Same if you want to duel, jumping back and forth between bamboo shoots and balancing on top of them in between.

So if you want to swing on a rope to attack someone, fight while balancing on a rickety beam (or even on top of like, a rope net), fight on horseback, leap over the enemy, slide down the stairs on a shield, or any other number of crazy stunts, you can do them via raw.

You can't do them in a charge however, unless you have the swashbuckler class ability.

I'm getting the feeling nobody else does interesting things in combat without magic...

 

[Ilja]

This turned into an extremely interesting topic.

Celebrim, have you posted your skills somewhere here? I'm still not used to the interface, so couldn't find them, but would be interesting to read about. Especially things such as "running" and "porter" as it's quite a new take on skills.

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

When it never said you couldn't use movement skills in your move action.

If you want to fight a spider while balancing on two immovable rods, the rules let you.

Only insofar as the rules provide details on how to avoid the negative consequences arising from such actions. The rules provide little guidance with respect to "stunting" as the term is generally understood-- that is, doing something crazy in combat to gain an advantage.

In other words, given the choice between fighting the spider while balancing on two immovable rods or while standing on terra firma, there's no reason to stand on the immovable rods. If you have no choice but to stand on those rods in order to attack the spider, then the best the rules can do for you is tell you how not to fall and break your neck.

It's a system, not of interesting options, but rather ways to avoid unpleasant consequences. I don't consider that a stunt system.

The closest the rules come to "stunts"-- that is, using a skill to gain a combat advantage-- is Bluff/Feint or Intimidate; both of which have too high an opportunity cost (spend an action for a little benefit). It's worth noting that we expanded the utility of both of these a bit.

We also added "stunt-like" or "feat-like" analogs for power attack, cleave, combat expertise, etc.

I'm getting the feeling nobody else does interesting things in combat without magic...

That's because the rules don't adequately encourage such behavior.

But I agree with you that they should, and will further expand such options in a later work.

My approach, however, isn't to focus on any particular skill (which would leave some classes out of the action), but rather on the creativity of the player and what he's willing to risk to gain a reward. (If you search around here on ENworld and elsewhere, you'll find other such "wagering" systems.)