I am not afraid of changes.
My Homebrew Monk with extensive changes.
My Editor's Notes for this:
The elephant in the room for monks is the lack of ki points. This version solves the problem by renewing the ki pool with the dodge action. This naturally creates other problems, that had to be solved with things like limited uses per day.
The other major issue with the monk is lack of defenses, the monk has mediocre hot points an a poor armor class, yet is supposed to be a front-line combatant. My solution is that a monk can dodge (without regaining ki) simply by spending a point of ki. This should give the monk defenses on par with other melee combatants and with a flavor of its own.
There is also a major change in that none of the abilities covered under the Ki ability now require an action. This includes the dodge mentioned above, but also flurry of blows - which now gives one additional attack, which combined with martial arts gives the same number of attack with the same cost as before.
Inspired by Treantmonk, I gave monks the ability to use light and medium armor. I also gave them access to martial weapons, but the ability to use weapons with Dex remains mostly as it was. This allowed me to add monk weapons to the weapon table that certainly are not simple weapons. It also opens the possibility of Strength based monks. I made a table that clearly shows which abilities work with which types of armor, you give up quite a lot in order to use medium armor.
I also increased the martial arts die up to an alarming d20. This also matches Treeantmonk's damage calculation, I bow to his experience there. The idea is to increase the die average by about 50% with each improvement, and going from d12 to d20 does that. The biggest issue here is really that the step from d6 to d8 is too small, ideally a 1st-level monk should have a d5 martial arts die, but lets not go into new dice.
Minor changes include:
- Unarmored movement now gives a jump bonus
- Deflect missiles is greatly simplified and normally does not use a reaction
- Quickened healing is once per rest because ki is no longer a limit outside of combat.
- Stillness of mind now actually works.
- Timeless body gained some actual utility,
- Perfect self now recovers ki points every turn. Astral Projection now works on others. A single-target astral projection is next to useless, these are things you do as a team.