Essence at [unixtime wrote:1084471325[/unixtime]]Because:
A) The Monk doesn't stand much of a chance of finding a better weapon in a horde than he's already got. Monk weapons are a pretty rare thing in hordes.
But, more importantly:
If the Monk does, he can use it without hesitation, because he hasn't invested anything into his Unarmed Strike that he has not also invested into the use of Monk weapons. The Monk weapons work with every ability that the Unarmed Strike does.
Weapon Focus wouldn't suck if you didn't have to invest any variables into it, and it automatically worked with every weapon you could wield. In fact, it would kick ass. Like the Monk.
Um... this doesn't make any sense at all, and it isn't true. The Monk has a specialist list of weapons, all of which are "Fists, Nunchaku, etc.". He
can use any of them without penalty, but as you pointed out they are rare. They are also interchangeable. However, the Monk gains damage bonuses with his Fist weapons which do not apply to his kama weapons.
The Monk is +4 to hit with monk weapons because he isn't proficient with anything else. And those weapons
almost never happen. He's basically got a really crappy chasis and quadruple wepaon focus on a small number of rare and crappy weapons, and weapon specialization on an even smaller list of weapons (which are furthermore, generally not transferable).
Your basic problem with weapon focus was that the character sacrificed his hard earned bonuses every time he used a random weapon he found in a pile, which sucked for the player and sucked for the DM. Well, the Monk is out 2 points of bonus damage every time he finds a keen ruin kama, and out 2 points of damage and 4 points of attack bonus and his flurry ability every time he picks up a keen ruin falchion. That's the same damn thing.
The reasons why the monk sucks are legion, but here's the basic run down:
The monk is not a class. It is several classes multiclassed in a half-assed way, none of whom are afforded enough abilities even to compete at the relatively small number of levels the monk's fixed multiclassed system affords them in 20 - and several of which are probably a bad idea to include in the game in the first place.
Here they are:
The Whirlwind: Here's a class which specializes in taking a great many attack rolls at the cost of making attacks at a lower bonus. It's a shot-gun approach to combat where you roll a lot of dice. While there are circumstances when this is simply better or worse than "normal" combat - it's always more time consuming. This combat schtick is therefore probably a bad idea for inclusion as it increases the time it takes to resolve combat without actually changing anything in how combat actually occurs. The Monk in particular does not get enough of this to even balance himself out, and ends up having attacks which don't add up to as much as the standard array of attacks. This would be balanceable by introducing scaling bonus attacks and conditional bonus attacks so that you could keep up with cleave. But it probably isn't a good idea.
The Dodger: Here's a class where you get defensive bonuses instead of offensive bonuses. Idea being that if it takes you twice as long to go down, this means that over the long run you are doing twice as much damage. It's a perfectly valid combat style. The Monk's bonuses, however, replace normal defensive bonuses and as a rule are not as large. Meaning that you end up paying class features to suck ass. This class component is salvageable by just making it suck less. Make it stack with other forms of defense, and scale with level, and make it good enough that it is competitive as a total damage source with Rage or Phantasmal Killer.
The Gimmic Fighter: Here is a class which performs battlefield specialist activity in melee. Such a character hampers opponents and gives allies bonuses. Like a wizard who specializes in conjurations or illusions, this character class doesn't add a whole lot of survivability or offensive capability to himself, but adds a notable amount of survivability and offensive capability to the rest of the party. The Monk gets this only in the form of stunning fists and trips and such, and generally doesn't do this nearly well enough to matter much. This could be balanced by making these abilities scale to level and be generally a lot more useful (stunning fists should never run out, for example).
The Weapon Specialist: Here is a character who trades getting bigger bonuses for only getting the bonuses when fighting with a certain class of weapons. It doesn't really matter if this is an archer specialist, an unarmed specialist, or a spear specialist, or whatever, the class dynamics are identical. This is very problematic game mechanically. It's of course too powerful if you get any noticable benefit at all from using a weapon style that you can literally
always use - but it really sucks as soon as you start finding +3 Keen Ruin Weapons that aren't your thing. The bonuses are balanced if and only if you get bigger bonuses inversely proportional to the amount those bonuses come into play. And since you don't know when designing the class how often they are going to end up with a really good Fist weapon when they are a Bow specialist or vice versa - it makes designing a balanced class intractable. I can't even imagine a way to design such a class so that it wasn't over or under powered in different games. The Monk sucks, of course, because his weapon specialist bonuses are so small that he isn't even as good as normal characters when he is using his specialist weapons - and of course his bonuses don't apply the rest of the time so he sucks even more. If you could figure out a way to balance the Weapon Specialist character at all, the Monk might be able to be balanced. Unfortunately, since he's supposed to specialize in the Fist - the one weapon you actually could reasonably expect to always use in every single combat of your entire life - I'm not sure that's really possible.
As has been said earlier, most people who want stuff off the monk list don't want the whole thing. That's unsurprising, because it's four separate combat schticks which are in no way related. Some people want to put some dodging action into a swordsman build. Some people want to run around Juggernaut Style in heavy armor soaking damage and punching people. Some people want to throw down hails of arrows or otherwise throw out huge numbers of attacks without being a naked pugilist. Some people want to do battlefield control stuff by blinding, stunning, tripping, and flanking in combat - a desire which often as not doesn't involve wanting to be able to break bricks with your head.
The monk needs to be carved up into multiple classes so that people who want the aspects they want can have them without buying into a very contrived and nonsensical archetype. Further, we need to take a good long hard look at some of the classes which are included in the Monk - because quite probably some of those pieces simply shouldn't be in D&D at all.
-Username17
