Why not combine the Fighter and Monk Classes?

[Animal]

Who needs a Fighter when we can instead have a Knight and a Slayer?

Those are just names. Who cares about names?
Players want to play characters, concepts. And be viable.
Your DM wants to keep it simple? No backgrounds/themes? You roll a core fighter. And you can call him a knight if you want.
Want more mechanical variety? You roll a fighter with Rashemi background and berserker theme. Call him rashemi fighter or barbarian or wolf lodge berserker, whatever. As long as his charlist reflects what you want him to be, everyone's happy.

 

[TwoSix]

Those are just names. Who cares about names?
Players want to play characters, concepts. And be viable.

You'd be surprised how many people get attached to class names. Go tell people you want to rename the "fighter" to "warrior" and see how well that goes over.

 

[erleni]

I think that the issue is deeper. The fighter is not really a class. It's more an equivalent of the term martial in 4e. To me the fighter class should disappear and be replicad by more focused classes. Same for the wizard. Cleric could stay as long as spells follow deities and most other classes are narrow enough to work.
You can see that even WotC is unable to point out what the schtick of the fighter is. They started with improvisation, now they pulled out combat superiority but at the end the problem is that the concept is too broad.

 

[TwinBahamut]

Agreed 100%. Maybe not everyone likes this fact, but D&D thrives on crunch. Classes are some of the tastiest crunch around.

Indeed.

Remember that thread a few months back about the 100 classes? I don't think it's really too far off the mark.

I miss that thread. It was really sad to watch a thread with a goal I so strongly agreed with suffocate under a mass of arguments and get locked. A real shame...

Ideally, I'd like to see 3e multiclassing embraced, mixed with a combination of no 20 level classes at all. There are some generic 10 level classes like Fighter, Mage etc. But most of the powerful abilities are sequestered into progression of PrC like 5 to 10 level classes. After all, classes changing into other classes is a time-honored tradition, dating back to Final Fantasy I and the Rat Tail.

I certainly would support Final Fantasy 1 or Fire Emblem style class advancement, but I'm not sure if reviving d20 Modern's class system is the best way to do it. Unlimited multiclassing tends to break the game more than it helps. The Paragon Path system seems like it would work better, though they'd need to find a much better implementation than what was shown in 4E. Something totally new is needed, I think.

 

[mlund]

It all depends on the definition of "class." Originally Class was a straight-jacked, level 1 on, telling you everything you could ever have for gaining experience points. If you were one of the privileged classes that used the Spell Lists that ate up 40% of the PHB page-count you could actually enjoy flexibility and customization. If you weren't, well at least you could choose weapons, right?

As the game evolved and improved it added in more chances for customization outside of class and spell selection - sub-classes, non-weapon proficiency, multiclassing, then kits, feats, skills, and prestige classes. Finally we even started to see things like backgrounds, themes, and honest-to-goodness build options.

D&D has evolved to a point where the crunch can support archetypes without having to simply add another half-dozen straight-jackets to the rack with each splat-book. Having core Super-Classes with variant sub-classes / builds and combining them with Backgrounds and Themes allows players to build things that they used to have to wait for splat-books for (swashbucklers, knights, marshals, etc.) or perhaps never even get.

Old-school games can still be master archetype + improvisation.
Games using Build Options, Backgrounds, and Themes should allow us to create variants off of the Fighter, Cleric, Rogue, and Magic-User without having to have "new" classes spoon-fed to us with all the accompanying dysfunction of trying to carve a whole stand-alone class niche mechanically when we're really just looking for a few points of mechanic variation.

I want a D&DNext where my "Monk" is not a straight-jacket. I want to take a Fighter, have a "martial-artist" build that trades down armor for movement and enhanced unarmed attacks. Then I'm going to slap on whatever background I want, take a complementary theme (perhaps representing a martial-arts discipline), and beat people into submission with Combat Superiority mechanics for trips, throws, grapples and all the other martial-arts mayhem I like to associate with the monk.

I don't want a Monk were I have to use a list of Japanese peasant weapons, evolve immunity to disease, and automatically be a slave to "flurry of blows" mechanics because my attack-bonuses are lame otherwise.

Give me the ability to build a Fighter into a Monk like that 1E or 3E monks if I so choose, but don't give me a straight-jacket labeled "monk" and tell me to love it or leave it like AD&D -> 4E have done to varying extents.

- Marty Lund

 

[TwinBahamut]

I think that the issue is deeper. The fighter is not really a class. It's more an equivalent of the term martial in 4e. To me the fighter class should disappear and be replicad by more focused classes. Same for the wizard. Cleric could stay as long as spells follow deities and most other classes are narrow enough to work.
You can see that even WotC is unable to point out what the schtick of the fighter is. They started with improvisation, now they pulled out combat superiority but at the end the problem is that the concept is too broad.

I think this is the right direction to approach things from.

Look at what was done with the Essentials classes I referenced earlier. In Essentials, "Fighter" isn't a class; it's a category of related classes. The two types of Fighter, the Knight and the Slayer, are really two entirely separate classes with almost no direct overlap. This isn't a bad approach at all. The broad categories like Fighter or Wizard point people in the right direction and preserve classic names and ideas, but the actual classes are free to be diverse and unique within that umbrella.

 

[mlund]

Look at what was done with the Essentials classes I referenced earlier. In Essentials, "Fighter" isn't a class; it's a category of related classes. The two types of Fighter, the Knight and the Slayer, are really two entirely separate classes with almost no direct overlap.

The broad category concept is good. I think you underestimate the overlap, though. The Fighter was a large chunk of core fundamentals and the Knight and Slayer were basically differentiated by what the added on level by level. They both had a core of high HP and healing surge values, weapon and armor proficiency, martial-power sources, power-strike, and stances. Some of the stances even overlapped.

Then the slayer had extra damage mechanics thrown on and the knight had Defender Aura and Platemail Proficiency.

That's getting two classes off the same good core super-class instead of running off to make two "real classes" and doing a ton reinventing the wheel - and often times trying to make square wheel just so people don't claim that your "new class" is just a retread.

I, for one, welcome our recycled super-class overlords.

- Marty Lund

 

[TwoSix]

Indeed.

I miss that thread. It was really sad to watch a thread with a goal I so strongly agreed with suffocate under a mass of arguments and get locked. A real shame...

I certainly would support Final Fantasy 1 or Fire Emblem style class advancement, but I'm not sure if reviving d20 Modern's class system is the best way to do it. Unlimited multiclassing tends to break the game more than it helps. The Paragon Path system seems like it would work better, though they'd need to find a much better implementation than what was shown in 4E. Something totally new is needed, I think.

Actually, if there was any video game class system I'd like to model (cue the "5th edition is a video game WAAAmbulance"), it would be Final Fantasy Tactics. With Fighter, Cleric, Mage, and Rogue filling in for Squire and Chemist.

Although ideally, high level classes wouldn't require Fighter 3, Mage 4, Abjurer 5, Necromancer 3, unlike say a Calculator.

 

[Umbran]

It's a bad analogy, largely because the Rogue and Wizard archetypes are so distinct

Yes, but the Fighter and Monk archetypes are also pretty clearly distinct. One is a pseudo-European dude with weapons and armor, the other a pseudo-Asian master of mostly unarmed and unarmored combat and mysticism.

The Monk is a 'fighting man' in the purest sense, while the notion of combat styles and 'martial arts' is the raisin d'être of a Fighter Class.

"Fighitng Man" is not just "a man who fights". Go back and look at your Early D&D rule sets, where the "Fighting Man" comes from - what you see there doesn't look much like a Monk.

 

[Stormonu]

Funny, I've always seen the monk as a fusion of cleric and rogue, not fighter. Back in 2E, they even shuffled the monk into the complete Priest's handbook (though bereft of his signature abilities).

A fighter-monk to me would be more of a general martial artist, like from a jackie chan or bruce lee movie, and less of Cain, the shoulin monk of Kung Fu. A quicker temper, less mystical abilities, but a meaner punch.

<EDIT> I'd much rather be for monk having its own class, but if it can be done with a theme and you can get at least one iteration that looks like a 1E/3E monk, I can live with that. I'd also enjoy seeing "Wizard Generalist go the way of the dodo in favor of school specialists, but I don't think full-on classes for each spell school is the way to go.