Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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So I personally think that Tavern Brawler should add a 1d4 instead of its wording "When you hit with your Unarmed Strike and deal damage, you can deal 1d4 plus Strength Bludgeoning damage instead of the normal damage of an Unarmed Strike." or if you have a Species Trait that says "If you hit a target with an Unarmed Strike, you can deal bludgeoning damage equal to 1d4 plus Strength." should also be reworded to add 1d4. Like does 2d4 really do that much and break the game?
Like I made a level 20 monk, gave them a 20 in Dexterity, and gave them Wraps of Unarmed Power, +3 and the unarmed strike is 1d12 + 10 so its a low of 11 damage, a average of 16 damage and a max of 22 damage but if it was 1d12 + 2d4 (from Tavern Brawler and a Species Trait) + 10 it would be a low of 13 damage, a average of 20 damage and max of 30 damage.
To me this doesn't seem like to much especially with what you are facing at level 20 or am I wrong on this? or is it just to broken for the early game and because of that it got cut? Like could say "When you hit with your Unarmed Strike and deal damage, you can deal 1d4 plus Strength Bludgeoning damage instead of the normal damage of an Unarmed Strike" and starting at level 5 add a 1d4 to any unarmed strike you make.
So please tell me your thoughts on this. For me personally I feel like they used the wording in one place and then felt like they had to keep it going or redo some other stuff, so never thought of changing it.
I think if you're a monk, then you're specifically trained in unarmed combat. The fact that you got into drunken tavern fights before you became a trained monk probably wouldn't add anything that your training didn't already cover. If you were a wizard with no training whatsoever in hand to hand fighting, but you did partake in fisticuffs in the past, it would give you an advantage in using your fists. So the feat seems to handle those situations in a believable way. The same goes for species traits. When all else is equal, a species with harder fists should do more damage. But when you start talking about trained combatants, all else is no longer equal.
I don't think that origin feats should scale as you level up. As your character gets further away from their origins, they should matter less and less. Scaling up is what your regular class levels are for.
But if your campaign is very much dependent on the trope of drunken bar fighters or a specific species being a lot tougher than others, feel free to homebrew it in.
At level 20 your Monk should probably have at least a 24 in Dexterity due to Body and Mind (your Dex should have been at least 20 by level 19 due to ASIs and Magic Items, then you will raise it up to 4 points as long as that doesn't take you over 25).
That takes you to the 1d12+10 you were talking about before, however, so I'm guessing that you simply messed up the number and not the idea.
Now, an average of 16.5 points of damage per hit might not seem like a lot, but let's remember that you are making 5 of those attacks and the odds of them all landing are really ridiculously good (You have a +16 to your attacks. Throw in circumstances giving you Advantage such as a Prone opponent and you almost have to try to miss).
So, 82.5 points of average damage on a single round. That can be Force damage, one of the hardest damages to resist, or one of a number of other types depending on your subclass.
Now add in the DC 19 Constitution Save that they have to make against your Stunning Strike. If they fail the save they are really screwed because they don't get to attack back and all the attacks from your friends are made at Advantage.
Got the Grappler feat? You should, because on every attack that landed the opponent needed to make a DC 21 Strength save to avoid being Grappled. Ok, Grappling doesn't automatically do additional damage, but I suspect with your 60' of movement you can probably come up with some creative ways to increase the damage they take (e.g. using Acrobatic Movement to run up a 50' wall and drop them for an additional 17.5 (5d6) points of damage.
And, of course, since you are so focused on your damage numbers I am assuming you are a Way of the Open Hand monk. One of your Unarmed Attacks can also set up the deadly vibrations of the Quivering Palm. Sure, you won't do any additional damage this round and next round you will only get 4 attacks, but you are looking at 66 damage from attacks plus an additional 32 or 65 average points of damage depending on whether they succeed in DC 19 Constitution Save.
If that much damage seems too low, toss on a Potion of Pugilism. It's an Uncommon magic item worth about 200 gp. If your DM allows people to craft magic items it can be made for 100 and 5 days of work. An additional 17.5 points of Force damage.
All of this is without crits. Slap some Elven Accuracy on top of that and as soon as you get Advantage on your target you are rolling 3 d20's to hit with every attack. You have over a 50% chance of landing a crit with your 5 attacks at that point.
I really don't see such a character needing a damage bump.
let me start off by saying I see what you are saying but at the same time all the other origin feats never really lose their strength for anyone just purely that one is a issue if you play a monk you don't get the full use out of its the same as if you take unarmed fighting then you only get one thing from it and if you took Tavern Brawler at the beginning and then decide to take the fighting style Unarmed Fighting you are still losing a part of the feature, I want to know when a wizard would take Tavern Brawler lol
Yes I ment to put a default Dex 20 with the level 20 feat bring it up to 24 Dex.
I am actually playing a Warforge Shadow Monk in my current campaign but I was thinking of ideas for some one-shots that are coming up for the holidays. I don't want to overlap stuff and it not stack seems silly to under power myself when everyone else will be able to get full use out of everything. The thought for Christmas one-shot was to do a Tarandus Monk with Tavern Brawler but will probably go with something else so things don't stack and not work.
But a level 20 party should be fighting huge and gargantuan monsters so how you are running up a wall with them or making them fail saves is impressive. I was just thinking it would be more interesting and better value for the player to get a full use of the Feats instead of being like oh I can get 3/4 use of this feat or get a whole value of this other one. Tavern brawler seems like such a good monk feat especially for me since I have rolled so many ones on damage and I mainly use unarmed strikes only exception is when I am using a crossbow to get range.
But thanks for your feedback looking at it that way, I wasn't looking at it with max hits because I don't always furry of blows, I try to jump around and help teammates, plus there is always a chance to miss the hit from bad luck of rolling ones or the dm giving the monsters a reaction to increase their ac like the players do, also I don't use stunning strike often either I recently received some items that improve the DC save but still don't know if I will use it often. But there are people that focus on maximizing everything, like I am on the small stuff, for the big stuff and we have to balance around that not what each person decides to do instead but on that most maximized way to play a class.
Remember that with Stunning Strike there are pretty decent benefits even when they succeed on their save (among them, your next attack has Advantage).
I did make an error; with the Grappler feat you can only do damage and Grapple once per turn. After that you have to decide between them.
However, with the Grappler feat you gain Advantage on any creature you Grapple, so it is definitely worth trying the 'free grapple'. In the case of Huge creatures, you can still Grapple them if you are large, which isn't that hard to achieve (Enlarge/Reduce, Potion of Growth, etc.). Unfortunately you are kind of out of luck with Gargantuan.
There were a few other things I left off for increasing your damage. You could spend a Feat for Weapon Master and then use mastery on daggers. Your attack with the dagger only does 1d12+7 instead of 1d12+10, but then you get a second one of those attacks for free. Also, if you are attacked and the attack does 28 points of damage or less you can automatically deflect it. If it is 37 points of damage or less then you still have a chance to deflect all of it. Use that deflect on a lower damage attack and now the target has to make a DC 21 Dexterity save or they are taking another 2d12 of damage (btw, the attack doesn't actually have to come from that target. It could come from another target).
You have 20 focus points. Flurry of Blows is like the bread and butter of most monks, along with Stunning Strike. 1 point for guaranteed Advantage on the next strike (and possible on all remaining strikes) is a great deal. So is 1 focus point for an average of 49.5 points of damage. Yes, there are some other subclass abilities that can do even more damage (like Quivering Palm), but they have much higher Focus point costs and typically don't prevent to use of Flurry of Blows. They just limit how many rounds you can be doing stuff like that.
Going absolutely nuts, throwing Stunning Strike every round, Flurry of Blows, and Quivering Palm you have 3 entire rounds of that and a 4th round of just Stunning Strike and Flurry of Blows. Most fights don't tend to last that long, especially with the kind of damage output you will be generating. However, I personally would probably only use 2 Quivering Palms so that I can then use Redirect and have a 5th round of Stunning Strike and Flurry of Blows.
After that, use your Uncanny Metabolism at the start of the next fight to get all your spent points back. If you burn through all those points and still have a major fight to get through, take a Short Rest. If someone casts Catnap on you it only takes 10 minutes. It is a Bard/Sorcerer/Wizard/Artificer spell and a scroll of it costs about 300 gp.
There are 2 big problems with your proposal.
The first is balance at low levels. This will drastically increase the effectiveness of the monk in tier 1 and 2. With your suggestion a monk at level 1 can make 2 attacks per round each doing 1d6 + 2d4 + 3. When you factor in a 60% hit chance that's 14.65 DPR at level 1. A great sword fighter with graze and GWF is 8.2 DPR. A dual wielder fighter with TWF does 8.15 DPR not factoring in vex. That's close to double the DPR of a fighter at level 1 and it gets worse at 2 when you get flurry of blows.
The second problem is that the monk's issue with damage at higher levels is from lack of magic items to support unarmed strikes not from lack of other features. There's only the wraps, the wyrmreaver gauntlets, the Eldritch claw tattoo, and the soul catching gloves. The wraps are fine, they're just like any basic magic weapon. The claw tattoo is only 1d6 for a minute per day and a +1 which is fine for an uncommon item. The big drawback is that it takes a bonus action which is where the majority of monk damage comes from. There is no rare magic item increasing damage and when you get to very rare with the wyrmreaver gauntlets it's a measly 1d6 and one damage type resistance with an ability to spend a bonus action and increase reach and knock things prone. Same issue with the bonus action but arguably worse since monks likely get 3 attacks from flurry of blows by the time they get them. More importantly a vicious weapon does an extra 2d6 no attunement at rare instead of very rare so this is just bad compared to what weapon users get. The gloves of soul catching are great though since they add 2d10 force damage. They also heal the force damage dealt and a DM may rule that you since you can make the entire unarmed strike be force through the 6th level monk feature you can heal all that damage. They also increase your con to 20.
People forget a lot of the time that monks can use weapons, often very effectively.
A monk can absolutely wield a Vicious Dagger for their regular attacks, doing their Martial Arts Die in damage +2d6 + Dex Mod, then make 3 Unarmed Attacks through Flurry of Blows.