Monks, Two-Weapon Fighting & other Silliness

[godfear]

Okay,

Old friend, new player character joined our game last night. He brought in a monk character @ 9th level. Among his feats were Ambidexterity, TWF, and Lightning Fists. Now I'm not terribly familiar with monks, and he was trying to explain to me how he would get attacks: two regular monk iterative attacks, two from lightning fists, and one from his 'off-hand' weapon. He was fighting with nunchucks. No problem, except that I didn't think it was possible to 'Two-weapon' fight using your monk attack bonus since your entire body is your weapon. I tried to explain this to him, but he wasn't following me at all, and he pointed out that his attacks would be @ +2/+2/+2/+2/-1 (still not sure how the math works on that), and I told him that if he wanted to take that many negatives to hit, then go for it.

You cannot both attack using your monk attack pattern & TWF, can you? I mean, it's pretty obvious why you shouldn't if you can given the above scenario, but you should just use flurry of blows and spend your feats more wisely, right?

 

[Caliban]

Ambidexterity/TWF and the monk Flurry of Blows overlap, they do not stack.

You can use one or the other, but not both. Lightning Fists replaces Flurry of Blows when you use it.

 

[godfear]

Thank you for the succinct reply, sir.

 

[Jeremy]

It's funny, we had this exact problem trying to convert a 1e/2e player to our 3e game.

He wanted to play a monk, looked over the feats, picked double nunchuks as his weapons and tried to flurry for 3 attacks at first level.

We tried to explain how flurry of blows (and by extension, the upgraded lightning fists) is basically a monk's two-weapon fighting and how the monk already has an accellerated attacks per round progression and why allowing two weapon fighting, improved two weapon fighting, lightning fists, and a monks favorable attack progression would be bad but this came at about the same time that his wife informed us that she had been doing the damage for her spells wrong.

They should have been doing 1.5x damage because she had the empower spell feat.

When we tried to explain to her that you have to prepare metamgicked spells before hand and that they affected the spell slot they are prepared in up by two...

Well, it was bad timing. She made up her mind then that 3e sucked and her husband was already well on his way to that decision without his wife pushing him the rest of the way.

It's really sad too, because he was the most evocative and exciting DM I've ever played under with Sepulcrave'esqe versimilitude and depth. But he won't play 3e and I can't bring myself back to the days of Dual Classing and THAC0.

 

[Storm Raven]

We tried to explain how flurry of blows (and by extension, the upgraded lightning fists) is basically a monk's two-weapon fighting and how the monk already has an accellerated attacks per round progression and why allowing two weapon fighting, improved two weapon fighting, lightning fists, and a monks favorable attack progression would be bad but this came at about the same time that his wife informed us that she had been doing the damage for her spells wrong.

They should have been doing 1.5x damage because she had the empower spell feat.

When we tried to explain to her that you have to prepare metamgicked spells before hand and that they affected the spell slot they are prepared in up by two...

Well, it was bad timing. She made up her mind then that 3e sucked and her husband was already well on his way to that decision without his wife pushing him the rest of the way.

My assessment: they are both idiots and you are better off without them.

The rules concerning the interaction between the monk's flurry of blows and ambidexterity are put forth quite plainly in the description of the monk class.

The rules concerning the Empower Spell feat are contained quite clearly in the description of that feat.

That they didn't know this tells me that they didn't bother to read the rules at all, not even the specific rules that applied to their own characters. This, to me, is the mark of someone not worth bothering with.

When they quit in a huff, I'd have said 'Good riddance, and don't let the door hit you two in the butt on the way out."

 

[kreynolds]

She made up her mind then that 3e sucked and her husband was already well on his way to that decision without his wife pushing him the rest of the way.

Tell those two to look into this feat...

It’s Not Over Yet [General]
You have more options than you think, so cheer up.
Benefit: By selecting this feat, you no longer must shoot yourself in the head, as this feat gives you access to other feats that may improve upon your personality and wits.
Normal: Without this feat, a character is such an idiot that he must simply kick his own bucket and put himself out of the rest of the world’s misery. Characters like this can often be easily identified by their stupid as hell DM rulings, or their constant crying because they suck so bad.
Special: This feat can only be taken upon character creation. If you do not take this feat at that time…well…it was nice knowin’ ya’.

...though they better hope they picked it up already.

 

[Jeremy]

Heh.

It was a sad loss. They are both incredibly talented in the area my group lacks. While we are very strong in our rules grasp (largely from our time spent here) they are very strong in their ability to think outside the box and create enthralling situations that only occur to us after we've seen the movie we stole it from.

It was just a matter of those few people that were so close minded when 3e came out that they hated it before they had read a single word of it.

When these two made their characters I'm sure they looked at nothing but charts to do so and read as little of anything else as possible.

They were itching for a reason to shoot it down.

Oh well...

 

[AGGEMAM]

The D&D FAQ has a very informative chapter on what a monk can and cannot do, just read that and be sure your player reads it too.

 

[Forrester]

What's the "Lightning Fists" feat?

 

[RogueJK]

What's the "Lightning Fists" feat?

It's a feat from Sword & Fist which allows a monk to make 2 extra attacks per round, with a -5 penalty to all attacks.

It was later clarified in the errata that you can't use Lightning Fists and Flurry of Blows at the same time.