Q: Can a monk wear a gauntlet and still use her flurry of blows? Does she gain any other special abilities of the gauntlets with her unarmed strikes?
A:Technically, a gauntlet isn’t an unarmed strike (it has a separate line on Table 7–5: Weapons in the Player’s Handbook), and thus can’t be used as part of a flurry of blows. A monk could wear gauntlets and still use flurry of blows, she just couldn’t attack with the gauntlets as part of the flurry (she’d be using her feet, elbows, knees, and so forth instead).
If that’s too much hairsplitting for you, treat a gauntlet attack as effectively identical to an unarmed strike, except that it always deals lethal damage (even when worn by a monk).
Many magic items called gauntlets aren’t necessarily using the same terminology. Gauntlets of ogre power, for example, aren’t always metal gloves. It’s conceivable that a monk might be wearing magic gauntlets that grant a special benefit on her unarmed strikes without those gauntlets also serving as weapons in their own right. In this case, the monk is making unarmed strike attacks, not gauntlet attacks.
Q: Can a monk treat an attack with a gauntlet as an unarmed strike?
A: A monk could wear such an item and treat it as an unarmed strike (since the Player’s Handbook says that “a strike with a gauntlet is . . . considered an unarmed attack”), although the damage dealt by the gauntlet would always be considered lethal damage (as noted in the gauntlet entry) and the monk would suffer a nonproficiency penalty (since the gauntlet is a simple weapon). The monk could even use gauntlet attacks as part of a flurry of blows.
