Martial artist without monk "spirituality"?

[Phaedrus]

How would you go about building a martial artist (hand to hand combatant) without using the Monk class? Specifically, doing away with Lawful alignment requirement and the mystical/spiritual aspects, and just having a fighter that uses his hands and feet?

My first thought is to make it a Fighter, and create feats that give the Monk's martial art abilities.

But then I thought use the Monk, but swap out some of the abilities.

And then I thought, I bet someone has already done this....
....anyone?

 

[dedicated]

refer to this

Giving the monk more choices: the Mystic, version 1.6 -- post #41 thread

It has the right feats

 

[Cheiromancer]

You could use the the CRGreathouse Mystic, but traces of "spirituality" would show up here and there. Good Will saves for instance. And the flavor text of a few abilities. Still, it could be what Phaedrus wants. He could take the mystic and eliminate many abilities, while making others required. The result would be a martial artist who has no particular allegiance to an alignment.

 

[Arbiter of Wyrms]

dedicated, that blue is really hard to read.

 

[Phaedrus]

I really like the Mystic class... I think that's the way I will go.
Thanks!

 

[Felon]

You want a non-spiritual monk, and you're going with a class called mystic? Odd.

The DMG II has a couple of different multi-classed monks. One is a Monk 5/Fighter 5 that's they actually call a Martial Artist. A monk at low levels doesn't really have a lot of spiritual abilities--it's mostly about bonus feats, flurrying, and other physical abilities (slow fall, evasion, etc).

Note that even if you can change your alignment to non-lawful, you still retain your monk abilities. And since you can't ever return to the path of the monk after you leave it, you really have no inherent incentive to maintain that lawful alignment.

 

[CRGreathouse]

I really like the Mystic class... I think that's the way I will go.
Thanks!

If you have any comments or suggestions on this class, I'd love to hear them.

 

[Starman]

The defender in Midnight is a great non-mystical martial artist.

Starman

 

[Enkhidu]

A while back, hong created a Martial Artist 20 level class that might fit the bill:

http://www.zipworld.com.au/~hong/dnd/martialartist.htm

 

[PJ-Mason]

The defender in Midnight is a great non-mystical martial artist.

Starman

I'll second that. The Defender was a very nice class. Customizable as well. Thats the best bet for non-mystical monks.