Unarmed disarm

[SnowleopardVK]

I thought this little bit of the combat rules that I stumbled across today was interesting:

If you successfully disarm your opponent without using a weapon, you may automatically pick up the item dropped.

Now, I'm currently doing something else with the character I'm creating, so I don't actually plan to do this, but I was just wondering out of curiosity how viable it would be to create a character meant for it. In other words probably a monk with improved disarm, maybe some other feats or bonuses upon him.

It seemed neat. The concept basically struck me as grabbing your opponent's weapon out of his/her hands, and that's just too cool to not try it at some point or another.

But I tend to just create characters who I think'll be interesting, and as a result I'm not great at focusing in on how optimal stuff is. Not that I really care, my play style suits me well enough, but when I want to know stuff like this I have to ask those who plan their builds more than I tend to.

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

Disarm is generally considered inferior to trip because a lot of enemies simply don't use weapons. And as a monk, you'll be using a lower CMB than a Fighter and will never be able to access Greater Disarm without tanking your important ability scores. You may not need Greater Disarm, but a disarm fighter will have it, so it's just another advantage. Did PF retain the penalty to disarm checks for doing it unarmed?

My friend DID have some luck with a disarm using Bard in 3E once. But he used a whip for it so he had sufficient reach to ready an action to do it and reasonably expect to catch someone. His favorite tactic was a readied action to disarm a spellcaster of his material component mid-cast...

 

[Volaran]

Your base CMB will be the same as the martial classes, so there is validity to doing a disarm-based monk.

If you are going for unarmed disarms, rather than using a monk weapon with the Disarm quality (like the nunchaku), you won't be able to add the base +2 and any enhancement bonuses to your CMB, which is unfortunate. Then again, nothing would be preventing you from alternating either option, depending on the situation.

StreamoftheSky's answer seems to assume that you will be using point buy, in which case, you would have to use some precious character creation points for a slight boost to intelligence (I would not call 2-3 points used for this purpose 'tanking' the other ability scores, but YMMV) in order to access Combat Expertise and Greater Trip. If you're rolling for ability scores, this may vary widely, of course.

To answer StreamoftheSky's question, there is a -4 penalty for attempting to disarm someone while you are unarmed, but this would not apply to characters with Improved Unarmed Strike, as they are considered to be armed.