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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MostlyHarmless42" data-source="post: 9169621" data-attributes="member: 6845520">The problem with this approach is twofold: 1) It is heavily based on eastern martial arts themes, or more accurately a western misinterpretation of them, which is exactly the sort of thing WoTC is trying to avoid by renaming Ki into Discipline points.2) Even if we are fine with the monk remaining pudgeonholed into being an Eastern Martial Arts user flavor-wise, it still would be difficult to get any two people to agree on which "animals" should be included. Sure, many might agree that Dragon should make the cut, but Cheetah? That's not a recognized martial arts form from pretty much any actual martial arts forms. And even other cats would be disputed. Do you use panther? Tiger? Why not mythical creatures like sabertooth? And why bear and not Owlbear? What about other animals that would logically make sense for some fantasy settings? I.e. should there be a "Hydra Style". If so, what would that entail? And would people consider that offensive because it isn't an "authentic or real" martial art? Etc. I'm not saying it couldn't be done, I'm just saying it isn't as cut and dry and simple an approach as one might think.I do all of these houserules as well. It's still not enough. For starters, it doesn't address the big Weapon Mastery elephant in the room. Additionally, it doesn't address the concerns over whether monks will be barred from martial feats (due to losing short swords in the last playtest). It also doesn't address that Stunning Strike is a badly designed feature as it incentivises the monk to blow all of their ki on locking down one creature and then complaining when they can't do anything else. Finally, it also doesn't give monks much in the way of out of combat class features, which the barbarian and fighter are both gaining in this playtest.For myself? I'm currently testing letting monks apply weapon masteries to unarmed Strikes using ki (basically they can pick ANY mastery with unarmed attacks) and have given them another feature that lets them spend a ki point to roll a martial arts die and add it to an ability check as a reaction. Just to give them a small perk out of combat and not encourage them to hoard all their points for stunning strike.</blockquote>

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