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Thank you! Please let me know how it goes 👊

As a lifelong fan of martial arts media, I've always been a big fan of the Monk class ever since I first encountered it when playing Final Fantasy Tactics. But, historically, it has been a class which has consistently been underserved in tabletop RPGs; many don't include it (I also had to write my own homebrew monk for Old School Essentials and Dungeon Crawl Classics), or the monk which they present is completely imbalanced and broken. D&D is no exception, with most editions presenting a monk which is poorly designed and underpowered, with the occasional potentially game-breaking feature sprinkled in (I'm looking at you here, Stunning Strike). It seems like many designers are afraid of making the Monk too powerful, and as a result, produce a class which is ultimately disappointing.

Game balance is not a core design conceit of Shadowdark - classes are primarily defined by "being the best there is at what they do", i.e. having a particular gameplay niche, and excelling at it. The Monk may appear to be an odd fit for this design paradigm, as it traditionally is defined by a hodge podge of features - but my goal was to create a class that fulfilled the genre fantasy of a martial arts master, but without necessarily overshadowing any of the other classes. Yes, the Monk can hit both accurately and powerfully, but neither its to-hit or damage can reach the heights of the Fighter. If anything, a high level Monk, with high physical stats and the right combination of qigong techniques, could be said to be the class which is best at damage evasion/negation - but that is different than the Pit Fighter, which is straight up the best class at not dying.

Let the Monk be awesome! (But, hopefully, not game-breaking)

As always, playtest feedback is greatly appreciated, and will help to inform future revisions of the class. Look forward to seeing it in its (hopefully) final form in my upcoming supplement, Fatal Folklore: Kunlun.

Actually, no - and keeping the Monk's unarmed strikes Strength-based is intentional. Granted, this makes the class a little MAD - historically, a challenge the class has consistently faced - but it was import to my class fantasy that the Monk, more so than any other class, should be defined by a kind of physical perfectionism. 

While making their unarmed strikes function like finesse weapons (as 5E does) is effective, the idea of a monk who can fight well, but is otherwise physically weak, doesn't sit well with me.

I changed the wording a bit on Iron Palm to clarify that the scaling bonus only applies to attack rolls, not damage rolls. Thanks again for bringing that to my attention. Cheers!

Thanks! I see that you've made several homebrewed classes; do you have any advice for avoiding power creep? I know Shadowdark isn't, strictly speaking, a balanced system - but I always strive to make my classes, ancestries, etc balanced.

Thanks! I feel like the Monk is often underserved in most systems, so I wanted to do it justice. Hope you have fun playing it!

Thank you very much! As someone who used to run an Eldar army way back in the day, I'll take as high praise! lol

Honestly, I was also unsure whether or not to include the Gentle Fist technique - or whether to include something like a Stunning Strike instead. Lately, I've seen some arguments - specifically in the context of the 5E Monk - that Stunning Strikes are just kind of bad design, because it sucks when they don't work (especially if they have a resource cost), and it also kinda sucks if they do work, because now there's a creature that just can't do anything, which is boring. In the end, I figured that the Gentle Fist is ultimately more iconic to the class fantasy of the Monk than Stunning Strike is.

Gentle Fist is potentially too powerful, but like you said, the Monk's design is such that they have a need for good Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution - so that helps to limit its power. I was also intentionally in my design of making all the physical stats a priority, rather than give them something like a finesse feature for their unarmed strikes, so that they would be able to dump Strength. Part of my conception of the class fantasy of the Monk, is that they should forge their bodies to perfection, achieving maximum in all their physical stats if possible (ideally, they should also be very wise, to fit the archetype, but I figured that was a more tertiary concern).

And yes, Iron Palm is intended to only give a bonus to attack rolls, as the 7-9 talent serves to boost their damage by increasing the number of dice they roll for damage. My original design gave the Monk an increasing number of attacks, but after watching the Ranger Design livestream, I came to appreciate Kelsey's intent in avoiding multiple attacks to preserve the action economy. I was still attached to the idea of increasing the number of dice rolled, rather than increasing the size of the damage die (to d6, d8, etc) because I thought that it could still reinforce the image of a "flurry of blows" - but it could also just as easily be interpreted as one really powerful punch or kick. One of my more recent drafts accomplished this by giving the Iron Palm an exploding dice mechanic that scaled with level - but I ultimately settled on having it expand through the 7-9 talent instead.

This gives the Monk basically the same level of accuracy as a Fighter, with a lower cap to damage (3d4 vs the Fighter's 1d12 + 6), but a higher minimum on their dice rolls (3 on 3d4, vs 1 on the d12). So the Fighter is still the King/Queen of melee damage, but the Monk competes with reliable damage, accomplished through a unique dice mechanic. 

Hope that clarifies things. Thank you for your thoughtful comments & questions!

Thank you very much! I definitely had more ideas that I wanted to explore with regards to the astral plane, but restrictions of time and page length limited what I could do this time around. I may rerelease this later - after I've gotten playtest feedback on the Psychonaut - with an expanded section on the astral plane, possibly with a bestiary of astral monsters and some random tables.

"The Ashen Boots of the Keeper. 3/day the wearer may step into a large tree and out of another within close. "
Is the range on this item supposed to be near, or maybe far? Because, isn't "close range" basically like 5 feet?

Thank you very much!

Thank you! The Jana are basically my copyright-safe interpretation of the Gith from D&D, and the art for them was drawn by my good friend and DM, David Coppoletti. He writes an awesome zine for Mutant Crawl Classics called Moon Mutants, and drew a lot of the art for Gavin Norman's Theorems & Thaumaturgy.

Thank you!

Thanks! Yeah, my intent was to design the Monk so that, more so than probably any other class, its power and potential was not dependent on equipment or magic items (although I did of course add some magic items to enable different iconic class fantasies). I haven't had the opportunity to playtest it though, so the design is pretty much just theoretical at this point - if you try it out and have any feedback, I'd love to hear it :)