Welcome back to the weekly Tabletop Games thread! This thread is where we can talk about all kinds of RPGs, card games, board games, etc. Whether you gather around a physical table in the real world, or use a virtual space to play with friends who may live far away from you, this is where you can discuss your favorites, ask for and/or receive recommendations, recap your recent adventures, or even find some people to play games with!

Discussion Prompt: This week I’m taking a look at the 5.5e Monk class.

The Monk is a dexterous unarmed combatant that hits fast and hits hard. Rather than standing toe-to-toe trading blows like a Fighter or Barbarian, Monks are designed to move in and out of melee range with enemies, making their strikes and then backing away out of reach. In 5.5e, those strikes hit a little bit harder–they’ve increased the Martial Arts damage die across the board, so you’ll start doing 1d6 damage with your unarmed strikes instead of 1d4, and eventually scale all the way to 1d12. Another subtle change is that Monk’s bonus action unarmed strike is no longer reliant on having taken the Attack action on your turn.

At level 2, Monk’s Focus (renamed from 2014’s Ki) gives the Monk the ability to use Focus points for various effects, powering many of the Monk’s abilities as they level up. They’ve reduced the point cost for many abilities across the board, and/or boosted the effectiveness of the ability. For instance, Patient Defense lets you take a bonus action to Disengage for free, but if you choose to spend a Focus point you can Disengage and Dodge at the same time. Step of the Wind, similarly, lets you use your bonus action to Dash at no cost, and spending the Focus point lets you both Dash and Disengage (as well as doubling your jump distance). You also now have more ways to regain spent Focus points–once per day, Uncanny Metabolism lets you fully regain all of your Focus points (as well as a small amount of hit points) at the start of a combat.

Monks can also Deflect Attacks starting at 3rd level, reducing in-coming physical damage (bludgeoning, slashing, or piercing) and potentially redirecting it to another creature. In the past, this only worked against ranged attacks, but now it it works against melee attacks as well. And at later levels, you can also redirect magical attacks (ie, attacks that deal any type of damage).

There was one major nerf made to the Monk class–Stunning Strike has been limited to one attempt per turn, so you can’t repeatedly attempt to stun an enemy until they fail or stun more than one creature at a time. As compensation, though, if an enemy succeeds on their save against being stunned, their speed is halved and the next attack you (or an ally) make against them has advantage.

Monk subclasses that have been updated include the Way of the Open Hand (which accentuates your martial arts techniques to add some control effects to your unarmed strikes), the Way of Shadow (which makes you a ninja, flitting from shadow to shadow), the Way of Mercy (which was largely unchanged from the version included in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything and lets you do some healing and some extra damage with your martial arts), and finally the Way of the Elements (which was redesigned from the ground up to better give you the feeling of playing the Avatar).

Share your thoughts about Monks in any edition of D&D, or similar characters from other games, in the comments!

If you would like to suggest a prompt or contribute a write-up or discussion topic of your own, let me know in the comments!