Base Class: Monk
Monks that follow the Way of Violence forsake the ideals of peace and tranquility. They have instead found a way to reach heaven and enlightenment through a more direct means. These monks work to temper their violence against others in order to increase their own power. Wisdom is gained through subjugation. The Way of Violence allows monks to deal damage to both body and mind. Dominate your enemies through brutal strikes and strike fear into their hearts with your vicious nature.
Violence is the one true path to enlightenment. Reach the zenith of violence and strike down the Gods to prove your power. Those Gods have no freedom to protest, lest they display their hypocrisy; for each God that holds any power has won it through violence. This is the Way of Violence, and the God of Violence is your destination.
Abusive Aura
At 3rd level, through meditation and practice, your very aura has become hostile to those around you. Gain proficiency in Intimidation. If you are already proficient in the skill, you add double your proficiency bonus to checks you make with it. On successful intimidation you may roll a Martial Arts die for psychic damage.
Incite Violence
At 3rd level, your understanding of violence allows you to bring out such feelings in others, as well as yourself. As the creature focuses so heavily on wounding the target of your choice, they deal and receive more damage from all sources. Use an action to incite violence from a creature that can hear you, they must make a Wisdom saving throw or become aggressive towards a target of your choice; a creature can choose to fail this saving throw. They may not immediately attempt to fight the target unless they have a predisposition to do so. The recipient must either be within line of sight of the target, or know of the target. For the duration, the creature has disadvantage on attack rolls against anything other than the target. The creature now deals and takes a Martial Arts die of extra damage for all attacks. To cast Incite Violence on more than one target at a time it costs 1 ki per extra creature you are inciting. This lasts one hour, or until the target of the incite is killed. You may use a bonus action to end this effect early. If the recipient and target were allies, the recipient may make a Wisdom saving throw at the end of each of its turns. On a success the effect ends.
Overpower
At 6th level, your power now increases as you gain power over others. Your enemies are terrified of what your newfound strength will mean for them in their weakened condition. If a creature is carrying a debilitating condition that you placed on them, you may spend 1 ki point as a bonus action to gain 9 temporary hitpoints, as well as apply the frightened condition on them. If multiple creatures are susceptible to this ability then you may spend 1 ki point per creature you want to overpower. This ability can only be applied once per creature in the same fight. The creature can make a Wisdom saving throw at the end of each of its turns. On a successful save, the effect ends for that creature. This saving roll has disadvantage if the creature is still under the effects of the original debilitating condition.
The number of temporary hit points increases when you reach certain levels in this class, increasing to 13 at 10th level, 17 at 15th level, and 21 at 20th level. The temporary hit points gained are capable of stacking up to three times.
Tools of the Trade
At 11th level, you open yourself to the infinite ways in which you can enact violence on another; the use of these tools will aid you. You gain proficiency in improvised weapons as well as 2 weapons of your choice. These are now counted as your monk weapons.
Vicious Display
At 11th level, you have gained the ability to use tools to perform incredible violence; such graphic and violent display stuns all who hold hostility towards you. Once per fight on a successful attack from an improvised weapon you may choose a number of humanoids within line of sight of you who watched your action, up to a number equal to your Dexterity modifier(minimum of one). The targets must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw or be stunned until the end of your next turn. Use 3 ki points to use this feature again in the same fight.
Reach Heaven Through Violence
At 17th level, through devastating violence you bolster yourself and hinder your enemies. There is nary a limit to the physical violence you can inflict. Immediately after you take the Attack action on your turn, you can spend 1 ki point to make an unarmed strike as a bonus action. On hit, the creature takes 3d10 damage and you are able to spend another ki point to attack again for 3d10 damage. On each subsequent hit you may activate this ability again. This may continue until you miss, the creature drops to 0 hit points, or you drop to 0 ki. If a creature is killed with this ability then your Wisdom score and max Wisdom score is increased by 1 for 24 hours, and you may choose to activate Vicious Display(independent of all other Vicious Display uses).
Wisdom score bolstering can stack up to 6 times. Upon each activation the 24 hour time limit is reset.
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Posted May 8, 2018Just to start off I believe that this class is probably OP, and I've been thinking of splitting up the powers into options since submitting it. I believe it's better to start out OP and fun rather than useless and boring.
But let me go over the design process and the hows and whys I made them. I wanted an evil monk but not really given a lot of options to work with, so I made my own.
Abusive Aura:
This is mostly flavor. Most monks aren't going to be putting much into Charisma so this won't be going very high. And the psychic damage is going to be the same damage you can already do with an attack. Using intimidate during combat won't be super effective either as you'll be missing out on your second and bonus attacks. Not worth it unless you think you can intimidate 4+ people at once. Mostly I just thought the idea of verbally abusing someone to cause psychic damage was extremely interesting and fit the idea of a violence centric person.
Incite Violence:
I might be splitting this up, but in it's current state I think it's a very fun and versatile power. Out of combat you can start fights between people which can serve socially. In combat you can make the enemy focus on certain targets making them vulnerable. Such targets include their own teammates, yourself, or your own teammates. It was brought up that this might be allowing the PC to hurt other players too easily. But then I think there's a precedent for that if you count AoE spells and such. I would much rather blame the player for hurting teammates over the class.
Overpower:
This one was fun. It was at this point that I wanted this subclass to focus on debilitating effects. The more debilitating effects you place on enemies the more powerful you get and the weaker they become. Given that the base Monk stunning ability costs 1 ki I think it's fair this one would cost 1 ki as well. This ability is also obviously going to be tricky to pull off sometimes. I think this also opens up some decent multi-classing with other classes with more condition inducing spells or abilities.
Tools of the Trade:
This one as well is mostly flavor. It ties into the next power but mostly I just wanted a monk that can pick up a random object like a screwdriver and do something really violent with it, and be effective in doing so.
Vicious Display:
Basic idea here is that this is such a vicious act nobody can believe what they just saw happen. The higher your Dex and ability to make this more amazing stuns more people.
Reach Heaven Through Violence:
At this point not only does your character feel the need to commit violence, you do too. You as a player are driven to keep that wisdom modifier up, keep killing, looking for fights where you otherwise wouldn't have. This is in my opinion just as dangerous to the player as it is helpful. My advice, don't chase the dragon on this one. At other times it seems like there are easy ways to cheat this. If you find some hapless creature that can survive a single hit from you, you may use them as a sort of vampiric target for this ability. That is to say if your character is psychotic enough, and your teammates are on-board too.