Monk Flurry in Pathfinder

[ShadowcatX]

If you don't follow along over at Paizo, it has now been "clarified" that a monk can not flurry with a single weapon. They're saying "This is the way it has always been intended to work" and that it is not a rules change, it is just a clarification.

The fact that this utterly breaks (as in renders in-usable, not as in power) both the Zen Archer and the Sohei is apparently beside the point. (One would think, if this is how flurry has worked from the beginning, the developers wouldn't have waited until now to realize that an archetype in the APG required a different reading.)

Link

This is in immediate effect for Pathfinder Society on the honor system basis, and as of now, because this isn't a rule change you can't rebuild if you're screwed by it.

/sigh And it is stuff like this that makes me support 3pp far in excess of what I do for Pathfinder itself.

[Ange]

what

This thread makes me unhappy. Like seriously. Did the monk REALLY need to be nerfed despite how weak it is currently? What kind of bright idea brought this about? Did anyone ever consider this is how the rule worked apart from SKR (and Jason apparently)? I can't even begin to comprehend the circumstances in which it is seen as "unfair" or "unbalanced" for a monk to use a single weapon to flurry in comparison to any other class...

SKR also gets pissy later in the thread when someone complains (and rightfully so) about how stupid this ruling is. Normally I like the guy, but sometimes he and Buhlman come up with the most inane concepts of what is "balanced". James Jacobs has a better grasp on the rules and balance in Pathfinder a lot of the time, it seems. And don't even get me started on their newest developer (wait, 2nd newest, didn't they hire Daigle recently?) who I have been anything BUT impressed with...

Well, I'm just going to casually ignore this ruling (as I do many other of their various other silly ideas) - but wow does it suck to be a PFS Monk player now.

[loki_ragnarock]

That ruling is retarded.

I will ignore it in my game.

Of course, I don't PFS. Crap like this is largely the reason.

[Aosaw]

I've posted the following in that forum discussion. I'm interested to hear what people here have to say about my proposal.

Originally Posted by My Post

So, the consensus is that everyone was confused about the new rule (new meaning "not in 3.5e"), because the wording of Flurry of Blows is somewhat convoluted. So convoluted, in fact, that most players I've encountered simply read it as being the same as in 3.5e, rather than different.

So what we need is some clearer text. How about this:

The Zen Archer will need new text for its ability:

I'm not going to say how I feel about the clarification, but I do think the language could be clearer. My proposed text has the incidental effect of granting actual (virtual) bonus feats, which would then allow the monk to take TWF-related feats like Two Weapon Defense or Two Weapon Rend; but considering the intent of the ability, I don't think that would necessarily be a bad thing.

[ShadowcatX]

Your language still leaves the Sohei up a creek without a paddle, and leaves the rest of the monks in the same situation, unable to flurry with a single weapon.

[Aosaw]

My goal wasn't to change the rule - my goal was to better represent the rule that the developers intended to write.

I'll take a look at the Sohei, though, and see what I can do.

[Ange]

I like your idea of clarification, although I disagree with the result (i.e. the devs' apparent intentions), and think that your copy+paste of every line is a terrible way to word the rule. The absolute clearest way, perhaps, but one that is quite bland to read and a significant waste of space/words on the page.

The sohei is boned either way, as well as various other monks that use a single weapon (especially reach weapons). Monks with naginata? Nope, sorry. Sigh.

[Aosaw]

I just offered an additional solution, in the form of a custom feat:

Improved Weapon Finesse
Prerequisite: Weapon Finesse, Two Weapon Fighting
Benefit: You may treat any weapon that can be used with the Weapon Finesse feat as though it were a double weapon for the purposes of fighting with two weapons. You gain this benefit only while wielding no other weapons in your off-hand.

This doesn't immediately benefit the naginata-wielding Sohei, but a feat like this would open the door to specific notation, such as "Treat X weapon as a Finesse weapon for the purposes of Improved Weapon Finesse", and the like.

I also had an idea that monk weapons count as double weapons when wielded by a character with Two Weapon Fighting, justified by the fact that, as a rule, monk weapons tend to be subpar.

The balance issue that's been discussed ad nauseam in the linked thread is this: If this is the rule we're supposed to be using, then if you allow a character to ignore it, you're effectively giving that character two weapons for the price of one.

With this rule, you'd need two +5 Vorpal Kamas in order to flurry with all attacks being made with your super-chopping kama. Without it, you only need one - which throws off the required wealth by 200,000gp. That's no mean sum, I think you'll agree!

So the question we now face is, how do we still create the character we want - the one who single-wields a butterfly sword in a flurry - while maintaining some semblance of balance within the system as it exists now?

It's not a simple question; and the issue seems to be rather polarizing, with some groups saying that it absolutely should be the way that SKR just clarified, and others saying that it absolutely should not.

I'm of the mind that, whatever it ends up being, the language of the class feature needs to be clarified.

EDIT: Something else that was mentioned in the thread as a possible "quick-fix": Quick Draw.

It's a free action to pass a held object from one hand to the other; so supposedly, you could turn your primary weapon into an off-hand weapon as a free action in the middle of your attack sequence and thus behave as though fighting with two weapons. I dislike the idea that you can do this for free; but I like better the idea that I had a while back, where you "draw" the weapon from one hand to the other, and use the Quick Draw feat to turn that into a free action.

I'm currently doing this trick with a rogue/swashbuckler, to great effect. I don't know that you could convince your DM to allow it, but in the rules as written there's nothing against it - you can take free actions at any time, even during an attack - so if your DM wants to follow the ruling, but doesn't mind your character being able to do this, taking the Quick Draw feat will get the job done. Is it a little bit "twinky"? Sure. But I haven't noticed any glaring balance issues - none that didn't already exist with the single-flurry monk, anyway.

[ShadowcatX]

Originally Posted by Aosaw

With this rule, you'd need two +5 Vorpal Kamas in order to flurry with all attacks being made with your super-chopping kama. Without it, you only need one - which throws off the required wealth by 200,000gp. That's no mean sum, I think you'll agree!

You're right, but also let me point out that they're using one of their main class features to do it. And let's face it, even saving 200,000 gp on a weapon, monks aren't the most powerful class. Hell, they're not the most powerful melee class. Hell, they're probably not even top 5 for powerful melee classes. (Barbarian, Paladin, Ranger, Fighter, and then maybe, just maybe, monk? Or would ninja fit in before monk?)

It's a free action to pass a held object from one hand to the other; so supposedly, you could turn your primary weapon into an off-hand weapon as a free action in the middle of your attack sequence and thus behave as though fighting with two weapons. I dislike the idea that you can do this for free; but I like better the idea that I had a while back, where you "draw" the weapon from one hand to the other, and use the Quick Draw feat to turn that into a free action.

When something this metagamy is looked at as a viable way to circumvent the rules while still accomplishing the goal, is that rule and that goal worth it? Frankly, I have no problem with the monk using a single weapon, but if someone tried this in one of my games, once I could breathe again from my attack of laughter, I'd have a dragon come by and eat them and tell them to draw up a character who wasn't based around a stupid rules exploit.

[Ange]

I dislike that feat because Strength based Monks can't take it. And Dex based monks struggle enough as it is without needing another feat expenditure to do what they could do before without a problem...

On the cost thing, I don't think it's a big deal. Monks may only spend 200,000gp on a single weapon, but they can't wear armor (and bracers of armor only go to +8), have overall lower damage output due to needing to spread their stat points/rolls between Str, Dex, Con, and Wis--which means more overall expenditure in the belts and headbands department to keep up, have generally lower defenses (especially if they want to be respectable damage-wise)--which means more overall expenditure in secondary defenses like amulets of natural armor (if they aren't picking up something to boost their unarmed strikes... and if they aren't they are literally ignoring a class feature!) and rings of deflection...

And I guess the overall point is that even with this "free 200,000gp"... Fighters, Barbarians, and the like still out-damage Monks.

Aosaw, I saw some of your posts in the thread over on Paizo and disagree with the tact you're taking there. Bringing realism into the discussion is completely pointless. This is a fantasy game. Why can wizards get a free ticket to do whatever the hell they want, but super-powerful wuxia/superhero-level warriors have to be bound by the rules of our known reality? Seriously one of my biggest pet peeves when people argue about martial characters here...

[Aosaw]

Tact? I'm assuming you mean "tactic". I didn't think I was being overly rude...

I hope that you also read the post where I explained why I was bringing the real-world logic into it, because there was some misinterpretation about that over there as well.

I was attempting to illustrate that there was a difference between what was easy and what was difficult - not to say that it was impossible, but that it was more difficult than something easy.

Moving a stick is easy. Moving two sticks is (relatively) easy. Moving one stick fast enough to compare with moving two sticks is (relatively) difficult. That was the point that I was making, and using a real-world example seemed the best way to illustrate that point.

Why can wizards get a free ticket to do whatever the hell they want, but super-powerful wuxia/superhero-level warriors have to be bound by the rules of our known reality?

To put it simply? Because this is D&D, not Exalted. The mundane characters are impressive and exciting because they're mundane and still manage to hold their own; not because they break the laws of physics without the use of spells. The monk gets abilities that augment its natural abilities, like fast movement and a ki pool and immunity to poisons and diseases and spell resistance and agelessness, and those make the monk impressive. The fact that the monk falls behind when it comes to melee combat is unfortunate, but the solution isn't to abandon logic "just because". Maybe monks need a Weapon Training ability by default to use with their unarmed strikes, to reflect their actual training and experience with their chosen weapons. But giving them a reality-bending ability starting at level 1 is a little bit odd to me.

Bringing realism into the discussion is completely pointless.

I respectfully disagree. If we ignore reality completely when discussing the physics of gameplay, then there's no point in playing the game at all. D&D is a game about people doing extraordinary things; but those things don't mean a thing if the world in which they happen completely ignores reality and physics.

Why can't my level 1 fighter say this:

"I throw a dagger and automatically hit my target."

Without my DM saying this:

"No, you roll your attack roll just like everybody else."

The wizard can cast Magic Missile and never miss. Why does my fighter have to be bound by the mundane rules of reality?

The whole concept of iterative attacks is based on the idea that as you make more attacks, it becomes more difficult to predict your opponent's movements, because you're focusing half your attention on what your arm is already doing and half on what your arm is about to do, which doesn't leave much attention left for what your target is doing. That's why your second attack takes a -5 penalty. It's not arbitrary; it makes real-world sense, as well as mechanical sense.

Seriously one of my biggest pet peeves when people argue about martial characters here...

That's so ironic. Because you want to know what one of mine is?

This is a fantasy game.

I don't mean to sound snippy, but when somebody says, "This is a world with dragons and wizards in it, why are you talking about reality?" it bugs me, on a deep level.

Because the reason I enjoy D&D so much is that the rules represent a reality. Some of it might not make sense, like the fact that a fireball creates flames in a burst but only for an instant, or the fact that a wizard can cast Rope Trick and climb a rope into...nowhere?

But these things are all explicable, and have been explained in various sources - or if they haven't, it's not a big leap for me to figure out an explanation that makes sense.

I use real-world logic because I live in the real world, and that's where I enter the game from. If I entered the game from a virtual world with no awareness of what the real world is like, I imagine it would be very different. But I also would be a crap roleplayer.

Re: The feat

The feat needs work, I'll admit. I was worried that allowing anyone to take it would cause problems with Power Attacking fighters wanting to two-weapon fight with a Greatsword. But you're right, requiring TWF and Weapon Finesse - even if the monk qualifies for TWF through the use of virtual feats - does limit the monk's choices more than a feat that could be taken regardless of ability scores.

I do think that it should require at least a feat, though, unless you're house-ruling that Flurry of Blows works the same as it did in 3.5e (which is legitimate). But at the same time, making it a feat would allow you to say, "All monks get Improved Weapon Finesse as a bonus feat" rather than "Monks can use any combination of weapon attacks during a flurry of blows, just like they could in 3.5e."

In fact, I would even say regardless of whether you awarded it as a bonus, that this feat should probably be an optional bonus feat for the monk's bonus feats gained from levels.

[Ange]

Holy wow, you're pulling out a tonne of strawman arguments there, Aosaw.

Because this is D&D, not Exalted.

You're making quite the leap here. Where did I say "reality defying at level 1"? Where did I say they should be as super-powered as Exalted characters? At higher levels, far outside of the gritty fantasy 1-5 barrier, we're talking 12+ here, yes, I think they should break the best we have here on Earth, because they are better than the best at that point. Did I say that they had to be removed from the mundane? Nope. I just see no problem with a Fighter or a Monk pulling out some impossibly quick moves because damn, he's level 15 or even higher, he should be damned powerful! He's basically a demigod at that stage.

Stuff about basing things in reality.

Again, not what I said. AT HIGH LEVELS, why shouldn't someone defy what we percieve as "the best"? This is what I mean about talking about realism. Yes, it makes sense that the fighter can't put all his energy into later iteratives, or whatever justification you want to give it, and that is fine with me (although honestly the iterative attacks thing is more a gamist decision than anything as far as I'm concerned). But y'know what? That level 15 fighter is someone like Beowulf or Hercules at this point. He's a liiiiittle beyond Bruce Lee or a super-highly-trained SWAT Team captain or whatever else you want to point at by then. He's in the realm of the fantastical, not in our world of realism.

And on your completely bizarre note about the Fighter's attacks. You know why the Fighter doesn't just automatically hit? Because this is a game. And because that would be lame and remove all tension from the scene. And it's just not fun. (Well, it could be if we were playing a diceless game, but again... not relevant.) Magic missile is a spell that - yes - breaks reality. But that's what wizards do. And at low levels he can do that a handfull of times a day, and probably deal far less damage than the fighter. By the time the Wizard can cast magic missile without breaking a sweat, as he will be at level 1, the Fighter should be doing equally crazy mundane(ish) things himself! But he should be fantastical, as the wizard would be.

Stuff about logic

Again, I never said that a game should not have internal logic. Having something be fantastical does not mean it is not logical. Pick up a fable like Beowulf or Hercules. Or maybe look at Kratos in God of War. Do these things ever not make sense within their fantastical contexts? Nope! They make perfect logical sense. These are just super high power Fighters performing pretty damned fantastical feats.

I didn't really want to argue about this, but honestly, you basically misrepresented just about everything I said. :|


Also, this is pretty irrelevant to this thread about monks, being that monks are fantastical in and of themselves. 10 attacks in one round? That's his mystical ki powers at work! He's so attuned to his spiritual powers and the world around him that he can bend time with sheer force of will! That sounds pretty cool and a character I'd like to play, actually!


In my opinion the only viable "fix" to the monk is scrapping this nonsense about him needing two weapons to flurry with and just going with the assumption 99% of people made. Even if the devs intended it otherwise, it's undeniably clear that monks are by no means overpowered (hahahahah!) with this "incorrect" reading of the rule, so why change what isn't broken? As someone in that thread said, this is a solution looking for a problem.

[Aosaw]

I didn't mean to misrepresent what you were saying; I think I spent too much time reading the polarized discussion in that other thread, and my cognitive reasoning has suffered as a result .

But it sounds like we have a fundamental disagreement about what a level 15 fighter is. You think the "best of the best" in the real world is equivalent to a level 10 character in D&D - whereas I think of him as level 20.

It's mostly because when I play a fighter, I prefer to think of my actions as being plausible, because my class doesn't grant me "whoa" abilities. So I look to real-world scenarios for comparison, and how would a swordfighter behave in combat under these circumstances. Yes, I realize that this is a flawed stance because at that level, the wizard can destroy planets, so what we're really talking about is a Batman and Superman group. But that's how I prefer to think of it.

But I need to take a break from this topic. I'm clearly not explaining myself in a way that makes sense, and my frustration at that is coming off as hostile, which isn't my intention at all.

I'll sleep on it, and maybe tomorrow I'll think of something more sensible to contribute.

[Ange]

I suspected the argument was based on an underlying disagreement on power level across the level spectrum, and I tried to keep my tone civil for that, and I apologise for what comes off as a harsh tone of voice(?). It WAS 1.30AM and I was already frustrated at other unrelated things.

The "Superman vs Batman" thing is what I understand a lot of people seem to think about/accept in D&D...but I hate that view, because it leads to so many of the numerous problems we have in higher level play, quadratic wizards/linear fighters and all that. On the other hand, the Pathfinder games I play at home very much rip this concept apart with all my houserules, so I'm not really interested in trying to convince you or anyone else that I'm 'right'. It just makes me sad when I see devs and other players trying to bring down the already hard-done-by martial classes because it's "not realistic".


In any case, apparently PFS is now wholly adopting the rules (including the fact that Zen Archer does not work), and a remake of your character is an option on the table. Poor monk players...

I'm a big fan of Master Arminas' re-write of the monk class, personally. I think it does a great job of keeping the monk at the baseline Pathfinder power level while buffing it up to an acceptable level.

[Aosaw]

Ooh, I agree.

And I like the fact that he doesn't penalize the flurry of blows, but just grants bonus attacks.