I agree. His changes are thoughtful, but feel for me more extensive than I'd like.
The kind of rules I feel drawn to are similar to yours, with the following slight tweaks
- Monks gain 1 extra skill at 1st level.
Do you feel monks are lacking in the skill department ? Between background, class and maybe race I've always found I could get the ones I wanted. Do you mean an extra choice from the existing monk list, or something outside that list ? Either way I'm keen to keep it to only the bare essentials and an extra skill doesn't feel super important to me. Keen to understand your thoughts on it though.
- Monks gain 2 extra ki at 2nd level. I feel that is better than tying it to Wis, which just worsens their MADness.
Monks already have Wis as their second-most important stat so this wouldn't increase their MAD-ness to my way of thinking. I'm also a sucker for the thematic side of having a wise monk, so it seems fitting to me. Also other things in the game use level+stat such as number of prepared spells etc, so I figured it was an established precedent.
But if other people didn't want that and preferred a flat bonus then that would be fine with me too. I'd probably suggest more than +2 though as I just don't think that is enough to fix the basic issue that nearly everything they want to do uses ki and they get so little of it. Maybe +proficiency bonus ?
- Monks gain +1-2 damage per attack in whatever way takes your fancy. A simple approach is to increase their martial die as you suggest, although I have a fondness for a d12 over 2d6. TCoE's Dedicated Weapon is another approach, and also gives access to better ranged weapons.
Agreed a small boost is probably all they need. Bumping up one die seemed easiest to me, and harked back to previous editions (I made up my first monk in 1983 ...) where they got higher dice, but d12 would be fine with me too. Again, if people preferred a flat bonus then that would be fine with me as well, or like Treantmonk's suggestion of +1 with versatile weapons. Anything like that would be ok.
Yeah, Tasha's dedicated weapon helps a lot, although I suspect it's going to just mean we see lots more elven monks with flame tongue longswords, but, oh well, can't have everything.
I tend not to worry about house-ruling tier 4 abilities, seeing as the game is so hairy by that point anyway. Even so, your suggestions relating to Empty Body and Perfect Self look good.
I play & GM T4 games so it's definitely something that comes up for me.
I wish I could take credit but those are straight copies of Treant's suggestions. But yeah, they seem excellent to me.
What is motivating your thoughts for the 11th level Ki Mastery? Why do you see that as necessary?
They just don't seem to me to do enough damage in Tier 3 and 4. I was thinking about how most classes get significant bumps to dmg output in these levels, but monks just don't.
Then I found this thread (before it devolved into pages of arguing about shields), scroll down to the second graph of coloured lines and have a look at what happens to the green line - it essentially plateaus. In fact, unless you count the stat bump at L8, and very slight incremental bumps of MA dice increasing, there is no change to the dmg output of the base class from L5 when they get Extra Attack all the way to L20 .....
And that really sealed the deal for me.
They need something. They don't need to be DPR king of the mountain, but they can't just stay almost flat from L5 or L8 either, that's just wrong to me.
That got me thinking .... they get 3 core class abilities at L2: FoB, PD & SotW and they never ever improve, which just seems odd. So, I figured, what if they got an improvement half way through their career, to just make them a bit more efficient, a bit more streamlined.
Nothing over the top, just make them a bit nicer for their "grown up" part of their career.
Anyway, that was my thought process.
What do you think ?