Monk's "Empowered Strikes"

So, I am having some difficulty with a monk in my party who can do damage with impunity. I have no issue with Flurry of Blows or any of the elemental damage he does. My issue is about the Empowered Strikes ability:

"Whenever you deal damage with your Unarmed Strike, it can deal your choice of Force damage or its normal damage type."

It just seems really overpowered to me since very few things are resistant to Force damage. Any of his elemental damage can be mitigated some of the time by various critter Resistances. But VERY few critters are resistant to Force damage.

I am curious as to what the community's viewpoint on this feature is.

That’s rather the point- 2014 made the attacks magical at about the same point, back when monsters would resist nonmagical PSB. They dropped that concept in 2024, so now features that made damage magical make it a type like force or radiant that is rarely resisted.

That's the point of the ability. Trying to change that would be a nerf for the monk class, since it's designed with the understanding that it'll be able to deal damage without being resisted most of the time. 

monks have less feats to buff their damage like great weapon mastery and lack fighting style feats ,they have to use ki to get use flurry.

its balanced ,in fact monk is still a bit underpowered they should be doing more damage on average then a fighter if they have to a consume a resource.

the force damage just makes the damage more reliable, but they have less burst and have to spend to keep up, with other martials free attacks..

got to look at the bigger when making balance assessments

It just seems really overpowered to me since very few things are resistant to Force damage. 

I don't understand how this is a problem.  I started with 5.5 Christmas of 24  and this above statement seems like a non starter on the table.  The advantage of actually choosing force is so rare it is probably not even measurable.  Sure you can go through and say what about monster x or y etc.  but not every monster is ever going to be on the table, so this hardly ever occurs.  So why is a 1 in a five hundred occurrence being called overpowered.

Quote from FossMaNo1 >>

So, I am having some difficulty with a monk in my party who can do damage with impunity. I have no issue with Flurry of Blows or any of the elemental damage he does. My issue is about the Empowered Strikes ability:

"Whenever you deal damage with your Unarmed Strike, it can deal your choice of Force damage or its normal damage type."

It just seems really overpowered to me since very few things are resistant to Force damage. Any of his elemental damage can be mitigated some of the time by various critter Resistances. But VERY few critters are resistant to Force damage.

I am curious as to what the community's viewpoint on this feature is.

The point is that few things are resistant to force damage.

Compare to a fighter who's dealing slashing damage with their sword. Again an enemy that's resistant to Bludgeoning, Piercing, and Slashing damage from non-magical weapons, both the fighter and the monk are dealing half damage. But then the fighter upgrades their sword to a +1 sword—they're now ignoring that resistance. But the monk, who doesn't use weapons, doesn't have that option. This is what that ability does, it reflects the ability of other martial classes to bypass mudange BPS damage resistance.

It's not overpowered in the slightest, it's perfectly in line with the expected efficacy curve

It's by design and can also even help change the narrative of how Unarmed Strikes are deployed like my players often like to shout hadouken !