Monk 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Mystical Combat

 

The young monk clenched her fists, breathed in, and unclenched them as she exhaled. She broke form for just an instant to scratch an itch on the tip of her nose, then swiped her arm back into position, hoping no one would notice. Her sparring partner, a musclebound, bald-headed man in a simple training gi grinned at her. His gi hung open loosely, showing off his bulging, glistening muscles. She grimaced and took another breath.

“That’s good,” the master said, sitting cross-legged on a cushion across the room from the two hopefuls. “Connect with your breath. Before you fight, let rigid tension escape your body and allow free air to replace it. Stay relaxed, and your body will bend—not break.”

The monk’s opponent grinned again and cracked his neck loudly.

The master was a wizened woman whose silver hair sat in an immaculate bun atop her head, and she scrutinized her two apprentices through heavily lidded eyes. “For years, the two of you have trained in your home villages, struggling, meditating, bleeding… all for the opportunity to become my apprentice. You have both shown great spiritual and mental discipline. Now all that remains is for you to prove yourselves in combat. Stance!”

The monk locked eyes with her opponent.

“Prepare!”

He spit in the sand. She bent her knees and lowered her stance.

“Begin!”

The monk darted towards her opponent, who leapt into the air. A gust of wind burst from the soles of his bare feet, kicking a cloud of sand and dust into the air, engulfing the arena. She screwed her eyes shut and grinned in triumph as she was swallowed by the obscuring haze of dust and grit. The musclebound adept landed on the other side of the ring and immediately spun about with a low, sweeping kick—but his look of concentration soured into confusion. His strike hadn’t connected. His opponent wasn’t where he had thought she would be. In fact, she wasn’t anywhere at all.

Then he gasped. He lurched forward as all the air in his lungs was thrust from his body. A searing pain radiated throughout his back from a single point, and then everything went numb. Only the sound of a second strike—straight to the side of his head—registered in his senseless body, but the force of the blow brought him to the ground. Blood and mucus dribbled from his nose and mouth and mingled with the sand.

The dust cleared, and only one monk remained standing. She had darted through the cloud of dust and emerged, unseen, behind her opponent’s back. She straightened her posture and straightened her robe. She looked the master straight in the eye.

“I am ready,” she said.

"No," the master shook her head. She stood up, cast off her ceremonial cloak, and cracked her callused knuckles. "One test remains."

You are playing a monk, an ascetic warrior who fights using their own body and the primordial power within their own spirit. Your specialized training has granted you the power to manipulate ki, a fundamental force of life energy that dwells within all living things.

The monk’s abilities largely resemble media depictions of East Asian martial artists like Bruce Lee, Jet Li, and Jackie Chan (depending on whether your character is serious or comedic), and on wuxia fantasy ranging from The House of Flying Daggers to Avatar: The Last Airbender. But while the D&D monk is definitely inspired by the pop media idea of fighting monks, players seeking a more realistic look at ascetic warriors in Asian history would do well to research the Shaolin monks of Henan province, China, and the historical sohei warrior monks of feudal Japan, and the Naga Sadhu militant Hindu monks of northern India.

Real-life Europe had little in the way of warrior monks, save for orders of knights that also happened to be monastics, such as the Knights Hospitalier. Perhaps the most famous outlaw monk in European fiction is Friar Tuck, companion of Robin Hood. He's not much of a warrior, but he's a good place to start from if you're looking for a monk who doesn't see eye-to-eye with the law. If you don’t have the time to do further research and just want to get to playing, you could do worse than drawing upon the monastic pseudo-spirituality of the Jedi Order from Star Wars to inspire your monk character.

Quick Build Expanded: Building Your Monk

This isn’t a character optimization guide, but the first step in playing your class effectively is building it effectively. The Quick Start guidelines in the Player’s Handbook are a good start, but don’t go far enough for most new players. Here’s an expanded Quick Start guide. This guide assumes you’re using the D&D Beyond Character Builder, which includes helper text for new players.

  • Under “Character Preferences,” turn off “Playtest Content,” “Homebrew Content,” and “Eberron Content.”
  • Choose your Race. While characters of any race can be a good monk, you may want to choose a race that improves your Dexterity or Wisdom scores.
    • Humans are the quintessential monk, and their well-rounded ability scores suit the monk’s multifaceted skill set.
    • Elves make for superior monks thanks to their latent bonus to Dexterity, and wood elves’ minor bonus to Wisdom only further heightens their suitability.
    • Aarakocra are an unusual but excellent choice for a monk, thanks to their bonuses to both Dexterity and Wisdom, but also because their powerful flying movement synergizes perfectly with the monk class’s desire to move quickly and casually around the battlefield. Be careful, not all Dungeon Masters allow aarakocra at their table, and they are banned in D&D Adventurer’s League play.
  • Choose Monk as your class (obviously).
  • Choose skills that fit who you want your character to be. Skills that play to your strengths are useful, but also consider shoring up some of your weaknesses in order to make yourself a more balanced character. This part is up to you!
  • Think about what role you want to fill in the party—Offense, Defense, or Support. Let’s look at this in greater detail in a moment.
  • Choose where to put your ability scores. Generally, you will want to put your highest score in Dexterity, and place your second highest in Wisdom so that you can make full use of both your physical attacks and ki-empowered abilities. If you want to focus on ki and mysticism rather than physical force, place your highest score in Wisdom and your second highest in Dexterity.
  • Select a background that supports your character concept. Your choice of background can help you make strong roleplaying choices; a monk that served as a soldier but was disillusioned by jingoism and the horrors of war will approach both life and combat in a completely different way than a monk who grew up as a circus performer in Waterdeep.
  • Finally, choose your starting equipment by clicking on “EQUIPMENT” when promoted to “Choose EQUIPMENT or GOLD”. Choose:
    • A shortsword or any simple weapon of your choice
    • A dungeoneer’s pack or explorer’s pack, depending on whether you’ll be adventuring indoors or outdoors.
    • 10 darts

What Kind of Monk are You?

Monks are melee fighters not unlike a Dexterity-based fighter or a ranger, but they are light and agile combatants that use their incredible movement abilities to compensate for their low hit points and Armor Class. Monks are most suited to taking on the role of Offense within their party, using that high mobility to engage foes with a barrage of rapid blows, and then escape for safety before their enemies can retaliate. However, certain monks can even take on a role of Defense, using their unusual abilities to redirect attacks and even use their mastery of ki to cheat death. Finally, one sinister monk subclass allows those adept in its shadowy arts to take on a Support role within their party, becoming akin to a ninja striking from the shadows.

(And note, this guide uses Offense, Defense, and Support as shorthand. No part of D&D refers to characters in this way, but it’s an easy way to discuss the different roles characters serve in the party.)

Your role in your adventuring party probably won’t crystallize until at least 3rd level, when you choose your Monastic Tradition (hereafter referred to as a subclass). You may wish to decide on which subclass you’ll choose now, so that you can plan your character’s theme, aesthetic, or mechanical build in advance.

Offense

As an offensive monk, you’ll use your advance mobility to engage enemies and deal massive damage with limited risk of reprisal. You don’t have much in the way of defenses, so you’ll need to rely on abilities like Step of the Wind to get you out of trouble. Your Offense-focused subclasses are the Way of the Four Elements (Player’s Handbook), Way of the Kensei (Xanathar’s Guide to Everything), Way of the Open Hand (Player’s Handbook), and the Way of the Sun Soul (Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide). Monks of the Way of the Kensei and the Open Hand focus on close-quarters combat, while those who follow the Way Four Elements and the Sun Soul focus on using mystical arts to engage in ranged combat.

Defense

As a defensive monk, you will use your martial and mystical abilities to keep yourself alive in even the direst of circumstances by granting yourself temporary hit points, using erratic movements to make yourself hard to hit, or by manipulating the forces of death itself to keep yourself alive. Your Defense-focused subclasses are the Way of the Drunken Master (Xanathar’s Guide to Everything) and the Way of the Long Death (Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide).

Support

The only Support-focused monk subclass is the Way of Shadow (Player’s Handbook), which allows you to cloak yourself and your allies in shadow in order to ambush and elude your foes. While this subclass doesn’t allow you to heal your allies like many other Support subclasses, its stealth buffs can turn unwinnable deathtraps into cunning ambushes.

Fighting like a Monk

For the first three levels of being a monk, your style of gameplay will be roughly the same no matter what kind of role you want to play in the party. While certain choices can change this, like playing a human and picking a role-defining feat at 1st level, playing a monk is generally fairly simple at low levels. Your role is primarily offensive before you choose your subclass, but you need to take care to not get torn apart by enemies, since you lack the armor of a paladin or the damage resistances of a barbarian.

If you do play a human, you can choose a feat at 1st level. Some feats are more or less powerful depending on the types of challenges your DM sets before you, but some always-good options include:

  • Offensive monks can take the Grappler feat, if you’re in melee combat. This allows you to immerse yourself in the fantasy of a fist-fighter by tackling and pinning opponents in addition to simple kicks and punches. Sharpshooter is a good pick for ranged-focused monks, as it allows you to ignore cover and deal major damage at the cost of accuracy, if necessary.
  • Grappler is also a useful choice for defensive monks, as it helps you restrain enemies, both preventing them from moving and making it easier for your allies to gang up and defeat them.
  • Skulker. As a stealthy support monk, you want to remain out of sight for as long as possible. The Skulker feat allows you to make the most of your Dexterity (Stealth) checks and stay hidden even if you fail a stealthy attack.

All Monks

At 1st level, you gain the class-defining Unarmored Defense and Martial Arts features, which allow you to fight effectively as an unarmed and unarmored fighter. Unlike the barbarian’s often ignorable Unarmored Defense trait, both of these features are significant, since you have precious few armor and weapon proficiencies as a monk.

At 2nd level, you gain the equally class-defining Ki and Unarmored Movement features. The latter feature grants you a permanent, passive increase to your movement speed that scales with your monk level, capping out at a +30 ft. bonus at 18th level.

The Ki feature grants you three iconic abilities at 2nd level, but also interacts with many of your other monk traits, including those granted by your choice of subclass. Your ki pool starts small (at only 2 points), but you regain all of your ki points at the end of a short or long rest. Your starting ki-powered traits are a mix of offense, defense, and mobility, with Flurry of Blows allowing you to make two additional unarmed strikes in a turn, Patient Defense allowing you to impose disadvantage on all attack rolls against you until the start of your next turn, and Step of the Wind allowing you to disengage as a bonus action like a rogue.

At 3rd level, you get to choose your subclass, and gain a special feature dependent on which subclass you chose. See your party role’s section below for more information. Additionally, you gain the Deflect Missiles ability, which lets you use your reaction to pluck ranged weapons right out of the air, reducing your damage taken from ranged enemies, and possibly even increasing your offensive abilities by letting you catch and throw some missiles.

At 4th level, you gain an Ability Score Improvement or a feat. You should either increase your Dexterity or Wisdom by 2 points or choose a feat that suits your combat role. A few of these feats are listed at the top of the “Fighting like a Monk” section.

You also gain the Slow Fall feature, which is a situational but very cool ability that lets you reduce or negate falling damage.

At 5th level, you gain an Extra Attack whenever you take the Attack action, effectively doubling your damage output (though it doesn’t grant you any extra attacks through Flurry of Blows). You also gain the Stunning Strike trait, which allows you to spend ki to temporarily stun enemies that you hit with a melee weapon attack.

Offense

If you chose the Way of the Four Elements at 3rd level, you have some choices in your future. When you gain the Disciple of the Elements feature at 3rd level, you gain two elemental disciplines that mimic the effects of elemental wizard spells when you spend ki to cast them. First, you must gain the Elemental Attunement discipline, which lets you perform minor elemental effects. Second, you can choose from:

  • Fangs of the Fire Snake (increase your melee attack reach and deal fire damage with melee attacks for 1 turn)
  • Fist of Four Thunders (you cast thunderwave)
  • Fist of Unbroken Air (you push a creature up to 20 feet and deal some damage)
  • Rush of the Gale Spirits (you cast gust of wind)
  • Shape of the Flowing River (you can shape water and ice, but can’t use it to injure or trap a creature)
  • Sweeping Cinder Strike (you cast burning hands
  • Water Whip (you knock a creature prone or pull it towards you, and deal some damage)

You learn additional elemental disciplines as you gain monk levels, and even gain access to more powerful ones. Your spellcasting progression is essentially the same as a “1/3 caster” like an Eldritch Knight fighter or Arcane Trickster rogue.

If you chose the Way of the Kensei at 3rd level, you get to choose two weapons to be special kensei weapons. These weapons gain all the same benefits as your monk weapons, and they also allow you to perform the following special moves: Agile Parry, which lets you increase your AC while fighting with a melee kensei weapon in one hand and making an unarmed strike with the other, and Kensei’s Shot, which lets you deal more damage with ranged kensei weapons.

If you chose the Way of the Open Hand at 3rd level, you gain several extra effects which you can add to your Flurry of Blows attacks, allowing you to debilitate your enemies while fighting.

If you chose the Way of the Sun Soul at 3rd level, you can hurl radiant magic at creatures within 30 feet of you in place of any one of your attacks (except Flurry of Blows). This attack is as powerful as your melee attacks, but is ranged and deals hard-to-resist radiant damage.  

Defense

If you chose the Way of the Drunken Master at 3rd level, you gain a handful of bonus proficiencies which help heighten the class fantasy of being a drink-loving monk. You also gain the the mobility-enhancing Drunken Technique, which allows you to Disengage with no action required whenever you use the Flurry of Blows attack—which is essentially a 2-for-1 ki deal, since it gives you a free Step of the Wind on turns that you Flurry!

If you chose the Way of the Long Death at 3rd level, you gain the Touch of Death feature. Whenever you reduce a creature within 5 feet of you to 0 hit points, you gain a small number of temporary hit points, which scales with your monk level and Wisdom modifier. Even though temporary hit points don’t stack, being able to consistently replenish your hit points while in combat is a major boon, especially if you’re fighting a horde of weak enemies.

Support

The Way of Shadow is the only Support subclass available to monks. If you chose this subclass at 3rd level, you gain access to a number of spells which you can cast using your ki. These spells can buff both you and your allies, specifically pass without trace, and hinder your enemies with effects like darkness and silence.

Making Your Monk Your Own

Monks are one of D&D’s least conventional classes, and they are packed to bursting with exciting abilities that you can base a character around. You may find that one of your monk class features consistently saves your life, like Deflect Missiles or Slow Fall, or that your Flurry of Blows always seems to strike lethal blows. Lean into these random twists of fate and try bending your character concept to incorporate your favorite traits.

As always, this guide is not an optimization guide. Its goal is not to create a superpowered monk, but to show you a simple, effective, and fun way to create a character that will help you play a monk for the very first time and enjoy it. Choose abilities that speak to you, optimization be damned, and play the character you want to play. This guide will help you create a balance between having fun playing your own unique concept, and having fun because you’re kicking ass in combat.

Now go punch some orcs square in the face!


James Haeck is the lead writer for D&D Beyond, the co-author of  Waterdeep: Dragon Heist and the Critical Role Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting, and is also a freelance writer for Wizards of the Coast, the D&D Adventurers League, and Kobold Press. He lives in Seattle, Washington with his partner Hannah, their Way of Shadows kitty-monk Marzipan, and their Way of the Sun Soul kitty-monk Mei. You can usually find him wasting time on Twitter at @jamesjhaeck.

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