I'm not sure why you would even play the Monk in D&D 3rd edition or its forks, given how much do they suck in comparison to pretty much any other class in the game.
Yes, why would you ever want to play anything that isn't tier 1, or maybe a tier 2 if the DM bans all those T1 primary casters? They're called rollplaying games for a reason, and you're not having fun if you're not trivializing the rest of the party, right?
Though FWIW it's also something of a mistake to rate classes based on their ideal circumstances. In the 3.5 campaign Remuthra was running until he disappeared, I played a Monk, because I wanted to do a sort of abandoned orphan raised by ancient kung-fu master who dies before completing her training sort of character, who was lawful in spite of her natural proclivity towards violent conflict resolution and working to better herself and seek true enlightenment. I came up with the character concept, then build the crunch around that, starting out with a two-level dip of Monk and then crossing into PsyWar.
Yes, I optimized. Yes, we were using the traditional make-Monks-less-shit houserules re: Unarmed Strike + Gauntlets proficiency and Gauntlets doing Unarmed Strike damage if that's higher while letting you put weapon enhancements on it, full BAB, and then an allowance to make Tashalatora apply to all of the remaining numerically scaling things on the Monk ability list. However! That came after the character was a person, and happened because I wanted to play something that I could have fun with and be interesting with without dragging down the party.
The result? I made people laugh (I think/hope), and despite being in a party with the likes of a Cleric, Wizard, and Archivist, my Monk managed to contribute to the rollplay; both times we had a serious encounter that I was there for, I ran straight in and OHKO'd the boss mook, then ran around and kept punching people out (or trying to). Not that it saved us from the mass Burning Hands crossfires and flesh/skin/hair being counted as "flammable materials"... fuckin' cultists.
But that's not the point. Even if all I was doing in combat was running in and distracting the enemies, that's "good enough", because unless you've got a party full of powergamers and a killer DM, it's about the roleplay, not the rollplay at the end of the day. We spent more time mucking about with cursed weapons, going to the shady-as-fuck everything-dealer, and dragging each other out of burning buildings than we did killing cultists.
See, I fell into a similar trap before - that optimisation and roleplaying is a one-or-the-other situation.
Monk, is at the end of a day, a class. A bad one. You can build a unarmed fighter that works better than a monk and say "This guy is a monk of X temple," and play him as such. And you can't say that's wrong. If it talks like a monk, walks like a monk, and punches (better) than a monk, you can call it a monk even if it's not a Monk.
You played a Monk that had been significally buffed from it's original interpretation. Because if it's too weak that hinders roleplaying, too. A master of martial arts getting chumped by every fighter it comes across is probably antithesis to what you were intending.
There are silly things, like half-dragon half-minotaur half-ogre kobolds, yes. But aside from the really silly things like that an optimised character can provide opportunities. They have a weird combat style - who taught them it? How did they discover it? That sort of stuff still applies.
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Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14514202 times)