Or: Monks have 3 stances: aggressive, defensive, and mobile. Switching stances costs a bonus action, and you can assume one stance freely when you roll initiative.
In aggressive stance Flurry of Blows is free.
In defensive stance Patient Defense is free.
In mobile stance Step of the Wind is free.
This way monks are not just a worse rogue, their basic abilities are now actual basic abilities.
That’s very cool but DND will never have that kind of tactical depth without tying it to per-rest.
The adventuring day is garbage and it strangles cool ideas like this.
It could be tied to per-rest. Similar to the fighters’ weapon mastery in OneDnD, switching stances could be tied to a long or short rest instead. Just call it something else, like katas. (Yeah, yeah, they are trying to move the monk away from the strictly Eastern roots, but they could give this as a flavor option.) You drill one of the katas in the morning and then you can use the basic ability associated with it for free:
- Kata of the Wildfire: aggressive stance,
- Kata of the Mountain: defensive stance,
- Kata of the Zephyr: mobile stance.
Not-thought-through 1 Minute Solution #2: Using the one higher die for Martial Arts from the class table (always d6 instead of d4, d8 instead of d6 etc.)
Ki points should be per-encounter.
But I really really want to kill the “adventuring day” dead. I think a lot of players would have significantly more fun if it wasn’t the core of DND.
The “adventuring day” is a relic of times when your entire campaign was exploring a megadungeon and you ran from one encounter to another, back to back, all night long. But barely anybody runs their game like that these days and the rules just never caught up with reality. Some people suggest having a constant time pressure on the party limiting long rests, and while it can work, it also puts a straitjacket on your story pacing where balance flies out the window if you ever let up on the pressure. “Guys, the apocalypse is merely hours away” quickly gets old when it’s been that way for months.
Well, that and 99% of the rules involve fighting or exploring. Anything the rulebooks have to say on social interaction boils down to “well, you just talk to the DM, and sometimes they might have you roll a d20, just figure something out”. D&D isn’t really so much a role-playing game as it is a weird dungeon-crawling boardgame with some role-play elements. Sadly, people are allergic to trying new systems so instead they’ll just try to bodge the one big-name king of TTRPGs, D&D, into doing things it was never built for, forever leaving them wondering why driving in screws with a hammer isn’t as fun as they expected.
I think the writers of Mage the Ascension got it best when referring to DnD as a wargame with role-playing tacked on top.
So much of DnD the dnd rulebook and printed material is focused around combat and getting from one combat encounter to the next one.
Because DnD did start as a wargame, right? Before the red box came the 50 figure armies. I think there used to be a little history written by Gygax about how they started.
Anyway, I don’t mind the focus on combat. I like that roll-playing and role-playing are separated. My favorite groups had no issue with playing their dumb fighter as a dumb fighter, and the smooth talking noble as a smooth talker. I like the approach others have taken, like the social combat in exalted, or powered-by-the-apocalypse system, but it has led to a few players in my groups just wanting to roll the dice every time and not talk at all.
Hear me out:
Double the number of Ki points. Double the cost of Stunning Strike.
I think ki points should be wisdom modifier + proficiency bonus.
