Making changes to Monks

[Man in the Funny Hat]

Looking for some mild alternatives to monks for my game. I LIKE monks as a class. Perhaps a bit too much because I have always wanted them to be better. Not a combat monster, just better. For a character that in large part IS oriented to being a front-line combatant, not a sneaky rogue-ish type) they don't seem to hold their own nearly as well as they ought without the armor, strength bonii, and high-damage weapons of fighters at lower levels. Certainly I think there are a few things about the 3E monk that are just stupidly complicated when they don't need to be.

Like Flurrying. Why all the math for flurries? Why not just make it an extra attack at the highest BAB when using monk weapons or unarmed attacks. End of story. It isn't as if this is The -2 to all attacks goes away eventually ANYWAY, so why make it more complicated at lower levels. If the design intent is to encourage monks to use monk weapons and unarmed attacks over other weapons it doesn't help to make it complicated with additional math, rules, exceptions, and so forth.

Fishing for opinions, links, etc. (My google-fu is weak today...)

 

[No Name]

Martial arts styles.

I let the monk in my campaign use styles in UA, various Dragon magazines, Oriental Adventures, etc. But not just one style, I let him have any style he can qualify for (via feats, skill minimums, and so on). Doing this hasn't caused any problems thus far, actually I can't even tell there is a difference.

 

[Arkhandus]

You can check Nyaricus' recent thread What DO you DO for....Monks? for some ideas and comments about tweaking the monk. Monks get a lot of benefits normally, but they're still pretty weak, especially at low levels. Only at high levels do monks find a niche as caster-killers, and they're still not that good at fighting other melee-types, nor are they as good with skills as bards, rangers, or rogues.... So yeah, me and a lot of other people do find the monk somewhat underpowered. I've played several core rules with no success, and seen a core-rules-and-Oriental-Adventures monk played in my own campaign before that didn't do very well.

 

[Ranger REG]

Like Flurrying. Why all the math for flurries? Why not just make it an extra attack at the highest BAB when using monk weapons or unarmed attacks. End of story.

Then they have to change the Two-Weapon Fighting and Rapid Shot feats for the non-monk classes. Trust me, it's way better than using 3.0e UBAB which is confusing and restricting when multiclassing (like it is already a flaw for multiclassed spellcasters).