D&D MONKS, BUT GOOD, Part 3: WHY is the Pathfinder 2e monk more fun?

I think it's core to the fantasy of a monk this idea of not having clothes [Laughter] welcome to part three of my DND monks but good series in part one I gave an overview of the class and its basic features and built five very different builds of the Monk and then I put those builds through a combat demonstration and based off that combat demonstration I'm going to draw some conclusions about the class but first showing what these monks can do at higher levels I am Ronald at the rules lawyer I am a lawyer with many years experience teaching students in middle school and high school RPGs and I've gm'd for 13 years and my preferred system is Pathfinder 2E I had this video planned for six months actually but I pushed it to the front because of the recent play test for the next version edition of DnD and the controversy around it the monk is considered the weakest class in D and the new play test doesn't really address that and I thought it'd be good to highlight Pathfinder's take on the monk one to promote Pathfinder which I think more people should try out but also to inform game design generally in ttrpgs in part one I appointed people to Trent Monk's excellent video talking about how the monk is not a good class in D and uh went over the four problems that he pointed out about it I think the combat demonstration and this analysis I'm about to do will reveal that there are other issues uh to identify in the 5e Monk and I think there are specific things in Pathfinders Monk's design and also the overall design of Pathfinder that really will be interesting to other designers so first our five bills and what they can look forward to when they level up to level six at level six alone There are 16 Feats that they could choose from a number of them are tied to having already invested in learning a stance but even if you set those aside if you don't have that stance they can also take any of the monk Feats at level one two and four so there's plenty of options Duncan our Drunken Master can take stumbling faint when he takes an action to enter stumbling stance he already was able to get a bonus to his deception checks to try to faint and misdirect enemies to make them flat-footed or off guard to him and if an enemy missed him in melee then would also be off guard against his next attack with this feat however and if he trained up his deception to expert he can do a faint for free as part of Florida blow so three actions in one and if he succeeds on that faint the foe is flat-footed off guard to both of his strikes or because he also can enter tiger stance there is a feat called tiger slash which says he uses both hands to do a tiger claw strike it does extra damage and he has the option of pushing them five feet away which matters in Pathfinder because movement costs an action and it does more bleeding damage if you critically hit or because Duncan also likes to Grapple and trip people with his athletic skill he could take whirling throw if he is grappling an enemy he can spend an action to throw that enemy up to 30 feet away it simply is an Athletics check and it doesn't suffer from the multiple attack penalty and if you critically succeeds they land prone and remember standing up costs an action that really stymie an enemy that really wants to be in his face and of course he can throw them off a cliff or in a pool of lava Kane our crane monk who took the defensive jumping crane stance can take crane flutter as a six level feat it's a reaction when he comes under a melee attack that immediately increases his armor class and if they miss he can wax off and try to hit their limb so even if they are far away and using their extended reach against him he can try to hit them back with a minus two penalty P our key Monk and leshi didn't really feel like a key monk or Elemental monk in the combat because she was only level five at level 6 she gets key blast this will also increase her Focus pull to three and she can use a variable number of actions to blast increasingly large area and do more damage it can be up to a 60 foot cone if she can put three actions into it and she does force damage which is good against nearly all enemies and really good against incorporeal creatures and if they critically fail on their saving throw they get pushed back also or she can take another key spell called abundant step which lets her teleport as a single action up to her speed to any point that she can see and she has a very fast speed as a monk and that gets faster as she levels up Helen our weapon monk can take one inch punch if she wants to hit particularly hard with a blow it requires that she put more actions into it but very good against resistances and against foes that she probably will miss a second attack on Harper our monastic Archer who can enter a stance that lets her use a monk abilities including flurio blows with her bow and also even stunning fist can take return fire being in the back she might be targeted by ranged attacks she already has the deflect arrows feet together plus four to AC as a reaction now as part of that reaction she can instantly put it in her bow and fire giving her an opportunity to make an attack with her reaction it has to be an error though at higher levels they can look forward to more Feats there's a total of 110 monk Feats as of the day I'm making this video a lot of these Feats will jack up the stances even more here's a preview of some of them and give more abilities associated with those stances a lot of them give more key spells and here's a list of all the key spells that are available in the game and I'll go over a few of them I'm going to highlight some of these higher level Feats now wall run is a great feat as one action you can run up to a wall and start running up it vertically and what's cool is you get to do an action at the end of that before you fall so you can do a Flurry of Blows against some flying dragon next to a wall especially good as your speed gets higher and higher and what's really cool is that you have the water step feet six level feet you can run up flimsy surfaces like a waterfall at level 10 there is wind jump and this lets you gain fly speed for one minute it is limited however at the end of your turn you fall to the ground but if you are 11th level or higher you can find purchase in the air with a dc30 acrobatics check which gets easier and easier as you level up I've seen this used to dramatic effect while a monk was under greater invisibility and they were literally a ghost that people couldn't see in the battlefield I could fly anywhere at level 12 there's Stan Savant that lets you enter a stance when you roll initiative you don't have to use an action to enter a stance at the start of combat so immediately you can run in do a Flurry of Blows and run away on turn one next is form lock this is a funny one when you are grappling an enemy you can try to squeeze them back into their original shape so if that wizard turns into a dragon you know bend a leg and try to put them back into original Caster form Helen who took one inch punch to do greater damage with a single strike can take one millimeter punch and lets her shove an enemy away while doing so at 16th level there is Medusa's wrath this is another key spell very powerful that when you strike an enemy it takes two actions they become slowed that's a continuous tax on their number of actions per turn and they make a saving throw at the end of each of their turns to avoid getting slowed further and if they lose all of their actions they become stone this has the incapacitation trait so it's less likely to turn a higher level creature into stone but still a very cool ability also available is the classic ability quivering Palm this is another key spell spends two actions just hit them with a strike and if you do that they have vibrations in their body and you can spend a single action saying a word of death if they fail their save they're stunned 3 basically lose a turn and you get to keep repeating it and this ability lasts for up to a month but you can only have one in effect at a time if they succeed on their save it's a smaller stun and you can't use it against them for another day and if they critically fail the target dies this importantly has the incapacitation traits so if they are higher level they treat their degree of success as one degree better this is a nice example of the four degrees of success in action now we get to the highest level feeds level 18 key form it's a key spell spend one action and you start to Glow your hair feather skin and scales and you get to fly your strikes do extra damage of a special type and you have a Corona that does that kind of damage it can counter Darkness effects and you can make it flare out in a 30-foot emanation a very dramatic ability and because it's a key spell if you can refocus you could do this every combat enduring quickness which makes you permanently quickened you get a fourth action per turn that can only be used to stride or to jump then there is a few stance this lets you combine two stances together so long as they're compatible you get to get the benefit of both stances and finally there is impossible technique as a reaction if you are not wearing armor and are not fatigued if you ever fail a saving throw or get hit by an enemy you force a re-roll and this is a reaction with no limit this is the ultimate defensive ability and that is only part of the picture as a monk in Pathfinder skills have defined uses and there are Feats that you can get one of every even numbered level called skills feeds that let you do amazing things with your skills so here's a few examples Kip up lets you when you're prone just stand up as a free action and you don't provoke reactions then there's wall jump you get to jump up and make a second jump off of that wall you can also treat this jump as a high jump or long jump which lets you go a really far distance when you become legendary which is possible at level 15 at Athletics you can do jumps off walls an infinite number of times you'll essentially be like Mario then there is quick climb that lets you climb much faster and when you become legendary you get to have an actual climb speed equal to your speed which is almost certainly going to be 50 or 60 feet at least by the time you get there for each climb action then there's Cloud jump a legendary skill feat which lets you long jump triple your role on certainly by this level you can long jab over 100 feet and you're normally limited by your speed how long you can long jump but you can spend additional actions to go your speed farther and remember monks have accelerated speeds so you can jump 150 feet and if you have the quick jump skill feat you can do this standing in place our crane one can literally be standing in a narrow confined space and spend two actions to jump 120 feet somewhere else cloudjump also lets you jump vertically the number of your Athletics check so our crane muck could fly and kick and jump 60 feet in the air while doing so you also don't have to take monk feeds you can also take archetypes as a pathfinder character and archetypes are like themes that let you put a splash of that theme onto your main class chassis a number of archetypes are based on other classes like Oracle or swashbuckler but a lot of them are not there is Archer and medic just to name a couple of examples for our Drunken Master The Stumbling stance monk who likes to make enemies flat-footed or off guard maybe he would want to take a couple of Feats and Rogue so that he can get the sneak attacker feet and get an extra D6 of damage when he hits a off guard Creature if any of our monks were interested in guns they could take the bullet dancer archetype and do flurry of shots if any of them want to get an animal companion they can take The Beastmaster archetype and what's cool about Animal Companions is that they're minions so because you have really good action economy as monk you can run in make two attacks and then spend one of your actions to command your animal and your animal then has two actions in your animal tracks its own multiple attack penalty and of course you can also take an archetype in a spell casting class many spells cost two actions but your flurry of lows lets you make two attacks with one action so you could cast a powerful magical spell that calls for a saving throw and then make your Flurry of Blows at full accuracy so that covers the gamut of options and now we're going to do an evaluation of the Pathfinder Monk class and talk about why it succeeds at what it does first there is an overall subject of dealing with the Marshall Caster disparity which I think is at play here a lot of the things Pathfinder does are not specific to the monk but affect all martial classes and so I don't want to cover that subject again I did cover that when I did my DND Fighters but good series and specifically in part three so I recommend people check out that video if you want to see how Pathfinder dealt with the Marshall Caster disparity so the first thing to point out about the Pathfinder monk is that it can fight monks and DNT 5e as was pointed out in the tree and monk video have load damage have some of the worst AC and a lot of their core features that make them monk-like require a limited resource their key points so the first thing to point out is that they don't need key for the many of their abilities their Flurry of Blows their key action does not require any resource for the monk to be be able to do more attacks with their action economy then they have great defense they have a hit die of 10 and in Pathfinder you get your full hit die every level so they get 200 hit points from their class by level 20. they also have expert armor class at level one they're the only one that has expert defense and they go up to Legendary by level 17. so they next to the champion slash Paladin have the best armor class in the game they also are expert in all saving throws at level one no other class gets this and Pathfinder only has three categories of saving throws like DND Third Edition fortitude for physical things reflex for dodging things and will for mental attacks so there are no holes in proficiencies that you'll find in DND 5th edition that creates a gap between proficient and non-proficient saves that gets exacerbated as you level up so we will not have monks getting Frozen in fear in the face of a dragon and this actually is in keeping with the tradition of monks from Third Edition they had the best saving throws in that Edition also they also hit hard we saw in the demo that they do two dice of damage per strike a number of them did a d8 damage die starting at level one and there's actually a stance you can take at level one called Dragon stance which lets you do a d10 with your unarmed strikes the reason they do two dice of damage is because the increase of DPR that Marshals have in Pathfinder is standardized and regulated through the Rune system and the proficiency system in Pathfinder you get to place runes on your weapons that make them more accurate and do more dice of damage and add special properties like flaming or crushing monks can put that on their hand wraps and mighty blows which apply and buff all of their unarmed strikes the monk may not do as much damage as the fighter in Pathfinder which is and Barbarian which are kind of the specialists in damage however they have their own Niche they're better against resistances because of their ability with fluria blows to combine their damage before subtracting the resistance amount of a foe so let's say if a animated statue has resistance 10 to all the physical damage or a monk can make two strikes with fluria blows and that resistance is only subtracted one time from their total damage also an important point that I think is worth making is that there's a reason to go into melee and Pathfinder in DND 5e you often want to stay away from the enemies um Range attacks do just as much damage as melee and you don't put yourself In Harm's Way by staying far away from the enemies in Pathfinder you can only add your strength to damage for 99 of characters and you can only add your full strength damage if you're in melee or using a throne weapon but those Throne weapons will tend to be inaccurate quickly the farther away you get from the foe but as you saw in the combat demonstrations they did much more damage while in an enemy's face even if you have a composite bow you can only add one half your strength bonus to your arrow damage this basically gives more consequence to distance in a system where movement costs an action and that further rewards the Monk's freedom to be able to move very fast with a single action because these same considerations apply to enemies also so the monk can choose the terms of Engagement next we talk about build variety whereas Pathfinder doesn't have subclasses you can build your style via class Feats there is a lot of choice and freedom in defining what your style is and you could have more than one style for your monk via the stanza system every stance that they could take with the class feed has its own unarmed attack so a fist is not a fist is not a fist there are many different strikes that you can get via stances and you can spend an action to switch between stances there's even a higher level feat that lets you switch stances in the middle of battle without spending an action so instead of having to take a weapon in order to due to more damage some of these strikes can like dragon tail can do one d10 and many of them do 1d8 they also have weapon traits that make them all feel different and make them useful in certain situations so it's kind of cool this idea of being a martial artist conversant with a variety of styles using them against different enemies from time from round to round in a battle if you're not on a railroad of being one thing only at level one they could take the gorilla stance and do the gorilla slam they walk around under Knuckles and they also get advantages in climbing but there's a level six feet called gorilla pound where they pound their chest before striking somebody which lets them try to demoralize intimidate a foe as a free action and do extra damage if they are frightened by the time they're hit an important stance to point out is a mountain stance because you can have a completely average dexterity but this lets you it's almost like armor you get to have by entering an implacable stance get a bonus to your armor class just from your stance it has a dexterity modifier cap to your AC of zero however so you would have to rely entirely on this stance it gives you the falling Stone strike which is strength dependent and does good damage at level 14 there is the mountain Quake feet which lets you hit the ground and do damage to everybody within 20 feet and if they fail they also fall to the ground there are also some higher level stances you can only take it higher level here's wild winds initiate which lets you cast a key spell to enter the wild wind stance which lets you do wind crash unarmed strikes which are ranged attacks with a range of 30 feet also finally it supports using monk weapons and your monk weapons can benefit from your monk abilities you can use Flurry of Blows we didn't see it in the combat demonstration but Helen with her bow stop with reach could have hit two creatures very far away from each other with her bow staff so it unlocks the variety of weapons with all of their various weapon traits and synergizes them with your monk abilities you can use stunning fists for example with your weapon strikes and here is where I'm going to point out a really cool high level stance you can get called whirling blade every monk melee weapon that you have even if it's not a thrown weapon becomes a thrown weapon in your hand this lets you throw such a weapon at a foe so let's say a temple sword and then from that foe it targets another creature its 10 foot range increment applies so let's say you're under the haste spell which gives you a fourth action which must be used on stride or strike you can throw your temple sword at an enemy it flies to another enemy and then you can do three more strikes with that sword on your turn and at the end of your turn it flies back to you that is just really cool next we have that Pathfinder monks are not mad which stands for multiple ability dependent this is jargon used among tabletop rb2 players in DND 5e and also Third Edition and Pathfinder first edition if you were a monk you often had pressure you needed to get a number of ability scores High you wanted High wisdom for your mystical abilities you went at a high Constitution especially since you were probably in melee and you had a low hit die of d8 and so on and so on but the way Pathfinder works is you can just get an 18 in either strength or dexterity and you don't need to do key abilities in the first place many of those key abilities don't call for a saving throw in Pathfinder wisdom is not required your armor class is not reliant on how high your wisdom is you just need a good dexterity over the mountain stance and the proficiency system takes care of the rest for you you are an expert so you get to add your level plus four to your AC starting at level one that catches you up with the armor wearing classes so while at level one every other class can if they invest into AC get a 17 or 18 you can get a 19 at level one also your abilities use what's called your class DC at least those abilities that are not key spells your class DC is based off of your key ability which is either strength or dexterity wisdom is not part of this so when you do a stunning fist against an enemy you can have a low wisdom but they are still being forced to save against a very high number there are some key spells that you want to have a good wisdom for like a key blast but you don't have to take those powers and finally Pathfinder is generous with ability boosting you get nine boosts at level one and every five levels starting at level five you get four boosts into four different ability scores the system forces you to spread them out but also removes the pressure of having to put everything into one single stat so you can easily get a high strength dexterity and wisdom by level five if you want to next they are not dependent on key if you watch the combat you probably noticed that they did very classic monk abilities but didn't have to spend a limited resource to do that there are key spells that use key but those are optional the core monk abilities like Flurry of Blows they can use every single turn without spending a resource and class feeds and skill Feats give them new abilities there was the class feet flying kick to LEAP up into the air and make a strike against an Airborne enemy or stand still our weapon fighter interrupting an enemy's turn to hit them while they move none of those required key points also entering stances that doesn't require a key Either these are all very monk-like things there are skill feeds that are actions or activities themselves or let you do unique things like quick jump or wall jump and then something that I think is important to underline the fact that fluria blows do not require key meant that you are not relying on key to do more damage to do more attacks your DPR let's use that term is not reliant on you using a limited resource your damage is consistent in a 10 round fight as compared to a five round fight also you can run out of key but you can recover them quickly with 10 minutes and your party is probably going to be using that 10 minutes anyway to patch up wounds and doing other things and so you won't be in the position of begging the party to rest while you recharge your key and also I just think frankly it's easier to track if your pool doesn't go above three and everything costs one point many players might find that they don't even need to write down their key total they'll just remember how many abilities they use this combat and I think special attention needs to be given to stunning fist in D and d5e the counterpart standing strike is considered perhaps the most important part of the Monk's power budget because it can be so powerful this is what it does starting at fifth level when you make an attack against a foe a melee attack you can spend one key point to force them to make a constitution saving throw and if they fail they are stunned until the end of your next turn being stunned sucks you become incapacitated which means you cannot take any actions or reactions you also cannot move and you automatically fail a number of saving throws and attack rolls against you all have Advantage the problem with that is that this was too swinging if you if the DM had built up a big villain and this were to succeed against the foe then it could be a very anticlimactic fight they perhaps do not a single thing during the entire battle if the monk won initiative and also because it was such a powerful potentially powerful ability it often sucks your key points from other flavorful monk key abilities that you would save up in order to do stunning strikes stunning strike stunning strike but also it might have no effect at all in the fight because the monk perhaps is a multiple ability dependent and couldn't invest into their wisdom and many foes have good Constitution saves so what does Pathfinder 2E do first it is automatic no key is required you don't have to make a decision every turn whether you're going to spend that key basically you just do a Flurry of Blows and they both targeted the same creature and you did damage with one of your strikes then they make a fortitude safe we also see that it employs four degrees of success system in Pathfinder if they fail to save they become stunned one and if they critically fail they become stunned three and importantly the stunned condition is weaker in Pathfinder there's a lot of text there but I'll explain it really quickly basically you are just going to tax on your actions first you cannot make any reactions yes but the number of the stun condition is the number of actions you lose on your next turn and you have three actions and importantly it does not give you any defensive penalties you were not easier to hit when you were stunned so it doesn't lead to a snowball effect so the end result is that you have a consistent stability that is not broken and you can do this until the cows come home and importantly this has the incapacitation effect that is the trait that if the enemy is higher level than you are they get to treat their saving throw as one degree of success better so stunt three will never happen against a higher level of foe this makes the level matter and also means that lower level foes who use incapacitation effects against the party will not shut them down so a final Point freedom I think it's core to the fantasy of a monk this idea of not having clothes uh being able to do many things on your turn being able to defy laws of physics through your physical self is embodied in this word and under this banner I will talk about turn variety in Pathfinder you have the three action economy you are often not doing the same sequence of things every turn moving and attacking attacking attacking and moving away uh which would get punished by an opportunity attack from the foe with the three action economy and the combat demonstration we saw them strive two times and make a Flurry of Blows or stride and flurry it blows and stride away everything was exchangeable for each other this gave just more mechanical freedom to mix things up more there is no bonus Action System of things that are because of the label they have Are Walled off and you have to use your bonus action bucket to save that for those actions with that category that also included entering your stance and changing stances in the middle of battle and the way Pathfinder Works Flurry of Blows has the effect of freeing up actions for the monk instead of paying them in DND when you use your monk abilities to do more attacks that occupies your bonus action which especially if you have multi-classing you may want to use for other things instead if there is so far been a design choice to have your attack routine include your bonus action which has the effect of if you want to do as much damage as possible you have to write off everything else you could possibly do with your bonus action this ends up feeling more restrictive in play another important thing that's easy to miss is that there are no opportunity attacks in the combat demonstration a tactic was used of moving in attacking and then moving away because there are no opportunity attacks you're not punished for doing that and you can put in two strikes because you have Flurry of Blows this feels very monk-like to me especially when combined with your incredible speed you can move in with your 40-foot speed attack two times and move away and if they are a creature with even average speed they have to spend two actions just to get to you to make one attack finally a key ingredient is the multiple attack penalty this punishes you or more accurately makes it less effective to make a follow-up attack on your turn it gets increasingly less accurate this means that you have an incentive to try other things including movement during your turn and because movement costs an action this seems counterintuitive because movement costs an action movement is more powerful because you force enemies to have to move to you especially consider the fact that you have incredible movement and so many classes already in Pathfinder by the multiple attack penalty earns and are incentivized to try to find a third action to do battle medicine to heal up an ally or demoralize an enemy because a Flurry of Blows you effectively have third and fourth actions if you consider attacking twice as two actions you get to pull off fluria blows and do two other things while standing next to a foe if you want to and finally you likely are not fighting with weapons and so you have two free hands that you can do things with you could do battle medicine while having a hand to hold up a potion or important magic item for some other purpose this gives you opportunities to vary your turns even more so those are the things I wanted to highlight in the Pathfinder Monk's design I hope to have shown uh through this explanation how mechanically it expresses the feeling and flow that I think people are looking for in the Monk so if you enjoyed the video please like And subscribe ring the bell for my upcoming analyzes and I want to point you to a few other videos you may be interested in that I've done I did a similar series on the fighter class of Pathfinder that also goes into the Marshall Caster disparity and how I think Pathfinder solved that problem then I did a series of critiques of the play test uh by Wizards of the Coast that they're still going through for the next Edition I have a lot of thoughts on the design positive and negative as well as critiques of this not really being a play test about them needing to call it a new addition about having clear design goals etc etc I see a lot of things in this series you might be interested in that there are going to be Links at the end of this video and also in the video description also I've done a lot of combat demonstrations on this channel and I'm going to include a link to those if you're interested in those also join my Discord community me I personally am active and interact with people there all the time and also there's just a great Community there that will help you learn Pathfinder also enter a Pathfinder game we have people there who volunteer to run the beginner spots which is the best way to learn the game and also we have a drop in organized play System called endless tale Tavern where you get to take your character from Adventure to Adventure and have them earn XP and loot lastly support my patreon which has exclusive content including the two campaigns I've been running showing Pathfinder 2E to DND YouTubers and other exclusive content so I hope you enjoyed the video please like And subscribe this was a labor of love and that's it I have been Ronald the rules lawyer and I'll see you next time [Music] thank you

Channel: The Rules Lawyer

Views: 9,265

Keywords: rules lawyer, rpg, dnd, d&d

Id: U8uz6MrDsws

Length: 34min 23sec (2063 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 20 2023