The Monk: Soul Knife subclass - The Mike Mearls Happy Fun Hour!

hey everyone after missing last week I was out sick I had a cold that’s one of the fun parts of having young kids is you get sick a lot more often than you might normally I’m back so welcome to the micros happy fun hour I am your host Mike Murrells I am the franchise creative director on Dungeons & Dragons and I have a little bit of a cough because I still have just a tiny little bit the remnants of that cold but I’m here and I’m ready to go and if you’re looking at the screen I don’t for my giant head is blocking it but this week we’re gonna take a look I thought about mmm we want to do next with Sonic’s the past couple weeks we’ve done the Scion for The Wizard essentially the line mage we did the psychic warrior for the fighter and so this week I thought it would be fun cuz we haven’t yet done a monk subclass why don’t we try taking a shot at doing some doing the soul knife and making it among some class I’m curious to see how this works out so they can be pretty fun to see how that concept of the soul life could intersect with flurry of blows and some other monk abilities to really make it come to life the so yeah thanks for welcoming back chat I appreciate all the excitement the defying Mars yes Simon exclamation point so let’s take a look at the monk since it’s a class we haven’t looked at before I want to talk a little bit about its how its design how it was put together to kind of give you some groundwork of when you’re building a subclass for the monk what you need to think of the monk is very interesting class to me in that I think is a it is one of those classes that sort of defines D&D just by the fact that it is really strange that in a very sort of classic European medieval fantasy game we have a martial artist that shows up and I think that actually says a lot about what makes D&D unique and this idea that D&D can be a lot of things it isn’t historical in the sense of we’re really gonna wear him a lot about mm-hmm when specific weapons were used versus different types of armor D&D in many ways is very a historical it just sort of sees the past our our past history as this giant cluttered closet that you can go into and pull out whatever you want throw it into your game and then of course even in some campaigns or an expedition the barrier Peaks we go into the future or what we think the future is going to be and pull stuff out of there and throw into our campaigns so I think that there are some people who would say the monk makes no sense in didi why do you have this martial artist running around alongside fighters and clerics to me it’s like that’s the most Dini thing imaginable is someone back in the 70s just thought I believe it was a series of novels called the destroyer that was like the the series name or the main character I haven’t read them myself but if you’re as old as I am you might remember in the 80s this movie came out like be further adventures or Remo Williams I think that was actually based on this series of novels and someone read those literally was just like I want to play this character and in the novel the character is this martial artist use these like semi mystical abilities and that’s just someone wanted to play that in D&D back in the 70s so now we have the monk so let’s dive in and see what we’ve got so the monk first thing we always do we look at a character class we’re thinking about it in terms of the subclass we always want to take a look at where does the subclass come in the way I saw a covenant that your European monks are not as cool and this is probably true I don’t know if you want to play someone who just translates or books or illuminates manuscripts that’s probably not as interesting as playing a essentially a martial art arts warrior the though I am certain that back in the 70s or 80s someone probably made a character class I’m actually put money on the table that there was a class called the scribe though as grobblefest points out European monks did make beers make beer so they’re kind of like the dwarves of their time so part of me I’m gonna try to clean or clear my throat again the as we cube move on so taking a peek at this character progression table we can see monastic tradition this comes in at third level so what that’s telling us we look at the structure of this character class is that subclass will define part of what your character does but the core of the monk is distinct enough and has enough identity that we expect all first and second level monks absent other choices you make outside of character class to be very similar if not the same there’s a desert core identity where we’re looking at here so let’s take a quick look at the class as a whole let’s take a look at these first and second level abilities so we kind of see what is it little monks share because what we’re saying is the doomed rake 13 I want to get drunk scribe character in D&D that describes probably like almost every dwarf wizard that’s ever been played maybe the don’t drink and fireball right know when to say when the so let’s take a quick look because what we’re saying here the Sun life if you’re not familiar with us soundings as it was presented in the past editions of D&D I think the first place the soul life showed up was third edition the and the idea by the soul life is it’s a character that can use these psionic constructs that are weapons this character makes and then uses those to fight and I like the idea of matching the monk with this because as I thought about it like this sounded like something that felt a little monastic it wasn’t it’s almost like a martial art where instead of just using unarmed strikes or using these these force weapons you’re creating and if I remember right the soul life back in the day wasn’t necessarily a spellcaster per se in terms of how psionics worked they didn’t get as many power points or maybe in chat throw if anyone remembers I don’t believe that the soul 9th and 3rd edition had power points to spend on abilities I think it was a class largely driven by class features yeah Archmage’s Derek they just stabbed good ok and that’s what we want we want to stab good so let’s take a look at these first and second level abilities I don’t think deflect missiles is really gonna be a game-changer but what i want to look at is specifically martial arts on armoured defense and unarmed in movement probably isn’t something I’m too worried about for my sole life but I’ll take a look at this key ability to make sure because remember I think I Keita’s but remember we always look things up we never assume we remember because that is the easiest way to make a mistake so let’s take a quick look at martial arts let’s see what this is giving us so with our martial arts ability your practice of martial arts gives you mastery of combat styles that use unarmed strikes and monk weapons which are short swords and any simple melee weapons that don’t have the two-handed or heavy property so the first thing I know here is just that full knives as monk weapons let’s just make that a note oops soul dives as monk they’re just your monk you are soul knife someone’s carrying your around roll for initiative okay so we just want to note that that’s something we might have to look at in our wording or how we want to build things let’s see you gain the following benefits while you are unarmed or wielding only monk weapons and you aren’t wearing armor or wielding a shield monks live a world of being told what not to do apparently so you can use dexterity instead of strength for your attacks sense or martial artists that fits into when we think of the soul life from back in the day this is really an agile character you could play a giant hulking huge like half Giants on life but that’s not really the how the character was typically depicted you can roll a d4 in place the normal damage of your own arm strike or monk weapon this is something that did attract me to this because back in the day is Archmage Derek pointed out soul knives are really good at stabbing stuff and this might be something where we want to be tying into that that increasing damage will be a good model for our soul knife when used the attack action with an underarm strike or a monk weapon on your turn you can make one knot arm strike as a bonus action so this is specifying this is an unarmed strike so we will have to remember that if we want to give you this additional attack we’ll have to specify that this can you know this is overriding this ability so for example take the attack action and attack with a quarter staff you can also make an unarmed strike as a bonus action this is essentially giving you two weapon fighting with your unarmed strikes without the normal drawbacks that come with with it all right so certain monasteries okay that is really apply to us oh say so it key let’s see we got it this is our key points so you get three features flora blows patient defense and step of the wind all right so let’s take a look this is just the general now essentially key is if I remember right a daily resource let’s take a look when you spend a key point and it’s unavailable until you photo it is a short rest okay short or long rest again this is why we read stuff because I don’t work in the monk every day so it’s easy for the stuff to fall away so key points come back on a short rest okay that’s useful to know but you know this is also a case where if we’re just following the design pattern that’s been put in front of us in terms of power we should just be naturally designing to that that short rest cool down the you must spend at least 30 minutes of the rest meditating and you regain your key points this is just really flavor I mean you’re resting it’s it’s just you’re hitting the button and getting your stuff back the okay yes you know I always have control of prancing so just good yes we are the monk and is a soul life yep that’s actually we’re doing we’re up sorry if it wasn’t clear anyone joining late we’re taking the monk and adding the soul life subclass to it all right so let’s see flubber blows muley after you take attack action on your turn spend a key point to make two unarmed strikes the bonus action so that’s another area where I’m gonna flag this just here just get shorthand because we probably since you are the soul life if you want you using those as often as possible that’s kind of in our picture of our head we want you flurrying with these whenever it’s saying an arm strike we probably want to be able to say no actually soul life whatever that ends up being spend a key point to take the dodge action is a bonus action so let’s entice the place of attack see there’s bonus actions again getting in our way we won’t go there at this time anyways but that’s fine that’s not it’s not messing with anything with the soul life how it might look and step of the way and spend one key point to disengage your – it’s a bonus action okay again that’s just the character being generally portrayed is agile and fast this is all just fitting into it an arm a movement falls in the same category as does deflect missiles okay so basically what we’re getting is the basic ability that lets you punch people fluently I guess I’d say you are fluent in fists there’s a language that unfortunately crosses all barriers of culture and language and species and planes I guess the we’ve got our martial art die here which is increasing it’s gonna be a d4 for a while but you’re getting a lot of attacks we really want to hit that soul life ability as often as possible so we kind of see it third level we want to when you manifest your soul lives are gonna start doing an arms you’re gonna basically replace or an arm strike with a soul knife now here’s one thing that I immediately see kind of trouble you know now trouble as something which I think we can solve but we’re gonna have uh solve this you defy it Mars but proficiency language fist I like well to add that to the the language list in D&D along with what’s the alphabet that fists use maybe it’s just a picture of a boxing glove or something so the main trouble we’re going to have this is a very lame way to design this and I’m actually at someone tell me this is actually good advice if you’re stumped for how to have to design something or to create something think of the worst thing you can do and in doing so I mean usually I find that’s pretty easy to think of but it also gives you some insight into like well if that’s bad then that’s helping you define good so what I would defined is boring or bad for the soul life is hey I pick the subclass I’m all excited I’m just making money on my unarmed strikes as normal I’m just calling them soul knives nothing new is happening that would be a real letdown it also starts to come into shape for me that what this subclass is going to give you it’s probably abilities that are more constant rather than things that let you spend your ki in new ways because I’m going to have a lot of pressure that if I am playing it on an hour monk a monk who’s just using fists or staff or whatever and instead I’m using my soul knives I need to feel make those feel different all the time I’m not doing you any favors as a player if I’m giving you a new thing and it’s just the same thing with a different name it’s not really interesting no you could argue if we’re doing a fighter who was unarmed that’s a completely different issue because fighters don’t normally punch they’re not usually using there are knife attacks that’s very different but we’re talk about a class right here that all can make effective unarmed strikes so we don’t want to just essentially reef Laver the sole life so that it just feels like I’m making an unwritten something different so that starts to point to a design path we’re gonna go down so let’s take a look at the monastic traditions here I am kind of I’m tempted to walk through the entire classlist but I’m not gonna I’m willing to level we’re about levels 1 to 10 because what I’m seeing here in the rest of the core class if we do a quick look at the Edit let’s see I’ll just through until we get up to about your 11th level tradition features that’s a good break point so we can see where you’re gonna oh you’re only gonna get well it looks like two tradition features before tenth most these other class features look but look like they focus on mobility and defense so we’ll just we’ll do a quick look through what I’m looking for here is any other features that I might want to tap into in building the subclass so I’ve deflect missiles purely defensive when you’re hit by a ranged attack there’s nothing is there anything here that says I have to be unarmed no but just said you just reduce the damage so I’m just using a reaction producing on fringed attack damage let’s see it does say after one hand free but might as worried about that ability score improvements those are fine slow fall you can use your reaction not nothing in here but the armed weapon sorry if it’s not clear I’m looking for anything that refers to the unarmed strike specifically saying you have to make an unarmed strike because then I’ll know I have to remember to allow the soul life monk to use the soul life in some way to interact with that ability so the super bro I hope I’m pronouncing that right what is the endgame here this is actually a great question to ask in terms of what I’m doing here right now the these are all sanic characters and if we’re doing mental magic flavor like what are we trying to accomplish here so what we’re looking to do is create a middle ground between the mystic or maybe the side I said cyan or but bear with me where we’re sort of building this as we go our terms might change on one hand on one X dream you can picture an entire new character class with an entire new set of spell like abilities that represents one expression of psionics in the middle this okay let’s say the other end is the player’s handbook as printed there there are no sign of characters in there this is creating a middle ground what it’s saying is if it is a dungeon master and in your world building you like the idea of Sonics but you don’t want to have to learn an entire new system or learn an entire new set of abilities that’s similar in bulk to say the wizard spell list maybe smaller this is a middle path you can go down take the existing magic system and look at it through the lens of psionics and see how much of that flavor can you capture the other thing is that as I thought about it the nice thing about this exercise is it’s bringing into clear focus in my mind what’s unique about psionics because when you say for instance we did a I’ll scroll back up to it so you can see when we did the mind age one of the things that came to mind was we have this idea that the mind mage can do like energy control can do pyrokinesis cryo Kinesis a lot of those things are covered already by spells like fireball cone of cold and so on if that low hanging fruit can just be captured by the existing character classes that means but I might end up doing that the mystic and I’m gonna say night so before everyone goes on reddit and has a riot but the this might actually point to things like and I’ll just give an example because it’s something I’ve noticed as we’ve gone through what about that transformational character that character who really excels at body control you know you imagine this character someone swings a sword at them and they turn their skin to steel for a second and the sword shatters on it they come to a wall they need to go through the transfer so they transfer transform themselves into like liquid or slime and creeks through the crack in the wall they’re in a shadowy area you wanna hide so they actually become shadow and merge with it that metamorphic character that might be something where we’re getting something that right now the game doesn’t really support but if you put it over in that character class you’ve got something very distinctive so you’re saying I’m playing a sonic I’m playing a scion or mistake whatever you know calling the class you have a much clearer vision of what that could be it might be that it’s a shapeshifter it might be if you play Dan third edition the the Scion had basically the one of the abilities you could take was the ability to create psionic constructs maybe this is something we’re a really fun summoner style character could sit where instead of working for the list and going okay if you’re summoning you were just taking monsters for the Monster Manual this might be something where you’re actually like tapping into other people’s minds and pulling out things they’re afraid of and making a creature on the fly so you can imagine you’re fighting the orc King and he’s he’s afraid of fire so I use an ability lets me create a sign a construct that is like this his fear of fire turned into a creature and you could imagine that ability he might just have a generic stat block and then I layer on like okay I want this thing to evoke fear and I want it to be specialized to this character so and I’m building this is I don’t know how this would work but you could imagine that where as a Sion I tap into your mind I create a creature everyone else sees this creature appear they’re fighting it maybe it has a minor fear effect but that one creature is terrified of it because I’ve pulled it out of that person’s mind it made it real and now I’m talking about abilities are a little more focused and more flavorful but are then genuinely much more different than what you’ve seen in other characters and I think that would be something interesting because the main problem we had the mystic as designed is it’s kind of doing everything and in the past the Sion did sort of hit a lot of the same notes as a wizard by design because the there’s this idea that you could essentially replace the wizard with a Sion but also just the idea you’d think well a Sion it being able to control fire that makes sense right we have the control energy so that’s kind of the endgame we have here because I think to me that gets really excited the yeah and I see it looking through chat it seems like a lot of people go that’s pretty cool because I think that it feels very distinct right you just don’t feel like I’m casting fireball you think Oh like even at first level right like a bunch of kobolds come round the corner and I make the sanic construct that’s like oh it’s that the taskmaster they’re afraid of or even like oh it’s the creature they think it’s their friend like you know I make sign a construct that’s like the dragon they worship so they all you know this thing could charm them right or it’s like they could you know I’m controlling this thing and it’s telling them what to do because I made something that really appeals to them and then it might be a lot more focused maybe that becomes separate character classes you know like maybe it’s a bundle of three or four classes maybe it’s one class with some classes are a bit more defined maybe it is that’s a sign I can do that and I can transform myself you know maybe it’s about changing and creating things anyways that’s the point of this kind of thing is to give Dungeon Master’s that middle setting and then maybe for a full extreme full psionics setting come up with something that’s a bit more distinct and has a bit more of a real identity so so as that concludes my my lecture on the role of Sonic’s in D&D the terms I think about this a lot but so anyways let’s get back here to the soul knife the so we have in the first ten levels we have evasion know the defensive abilities stillness of mind defensive this is great this is easy what we’ve really done we’ve said the core of the monk is all about how you avoid getting hurt and your subclasses your traditions are all about how you hurt others it’s which accent do you have on your language of fists so chat help me out here what I’d like to do is anyone out there who is a big Sonic’s fan or just wants to sound off an opinion throw out some of your things that you think of soul life should be able to do with their ability what we’ve got is this is a character they can focus their psionic ability their key and make these blades emerge from their hands and then they fight with them what why is that cooler than just fighting with your fists why is that more fun and interesting so throw out some ideas for me and I’m just gonna throw a soul knife category over here and I’m just gonna just I know for myself I’m gonna throw a few things I’ll chat while you guys load up our magazine of cool ideas with with fresh rounds I’m gonna throw in just some things like you know throne throwing psychic damage and disruption straight out of comics I think was it Psylocke a good heard psychic blades would like mess up people’s nervous systems will that mess up your nervous system chat is blown up or I can see it at the corner my so you got here so three knives it should be returned to them that’s correct bypass armor oh that’s cool wouldn’t be throwing some attacks are actually for saving throws change weapons on the fly oh I like that you can change your damage types yeah adaptive so game phantom DM I like that let’s see which we got out here invoke disadvantage yeah conditions it’s a fear blindness Sonic’s lightsaber yes JP for the win I agree ignore shields armor yep we’ve got some of that although the shadow blade soul – oh I like that like the idea but you could so many drain energy from others telling you throw them got it higher crit yeah I mean that might be something to look at higher crits tricky and fifth but let’s put it down there um let’s see Oh maneuvers yeah maybe there’s like a list of maneuvers I’ll put a question mark there we talked last week I’ll touch on that we go through and some some of the stuff we talked about a couple weeks ago throwing stab real good artery – Derek yes but there’s a damage boost you know like we just need I can power them up and really hit your heart I don’t know what we’ll see we’ll do that yeah make it stronger when you concentrate on it astral punch you know what that’s actually gonna put that down because I’m picturing like you punching through walls or slicing through objects read mine or charm also yeah its charm effects you know that might be something which you know I’m gonna talk about these in a sec because there’s the sign an idea like a mind spike ability yeah let’s do that okay so this idea that we can we can mess with your brain with these yeah my not going to weapon attack invocations yet customer Astra ponch cool elemental damage better surprise attacks yeah if someone’s mind is down okay let’s let’s call it there because there’s a lot this is great we got a lot of stuff coming in separate connections to abilities to gun okay cool well I’m gonna pause there because I think we have a bunch of stuff in here so there is this a this thing that came up last time not last week so I was sick last week but two weeks ago if you remember we’re talking to the psychic and we were just kind of throwing around some ideas and then we had to study hey what if you could cast shield on other characters that would be pretty useful and that prompted this idea of what if what unified the psionic characters was this set of warlock in devotion stand vocation style abilities and I really like that I think that’s something that would really let us put a lot of just the classic psionic talents into one place and then let players dip into those and so I actually think because the thing is when we think of soul life yeah why not like good assault I’ve read minds you’re sure they’re psionic but do all soul knives read minds maybe not right maybe that’s some in which we let you delve into some specialty and it made me feel like maybe and I don’t know how easy this is gonna be the pull off because the one thing is the classes their schedules for delivering subclass abilities or a little they’re not synced right for instance the wizard is getting an ability at sixth and you know if I just look at the fighter I’m getting something at seventh but that’s not quite I mean it’s usually close enough it’s in the neighborhood but I can’t use level necessarily as anything other than a great a wideband where abilities drop in but I kind of feel like that would be a fun thing essentially a set of what I’m imagining in my head is a set of feats that are available to sign up characters only and that might let you access an additional customization layer that could be fun and be a bit more tying into what your characters doing you know in terms of your theme and so I kind of like that because I feel like that’s also for DMS if you want to run run a very high sinx campaign you could you could let all characters access that so there’s some so that’s something I’m thinking of doing will see as we flesh this out a bit more but what I want to do now is take a look at our main comparison for from monks it’s not way of the drunken master it is the I almost said way of the is it way of the no it’s not wait wait no buddy had I was gonna say way of the fist today is all about fists so way of the open hand this is our essentially our default monk monastic tradition the so the traveling how to put it this is what we see is the most classic monk right obviously your tradition changes your character but if you’re just to say hey I’m playing a D&D video game and there’s one monk character I can play as and I want to make that monk super iconic like just you know this is the monk everyone expects this is the monk would say okay look at the way of the open hand right or if you had someone playing a monk or the first time they didn’t know much about D&D and you’re like I’m gonna make your character for you kind of help you rather than maybe give you the subclass choice maybe you’re coming into the fifth level game I just want to give them something really classic open hand is what we would say that’s our default the other monks sort of orbit around it so let’s take a look at what the open hand does now another thing too this is an interesting thing with the monk that open hand is also one of the more highly rated subclasses this is one area in which you will see some shift in how we look at what we consider to be the default subclass if way of the open hand was very poorly rated by all of you out there in chat and in the aggregate of our community we would consider moving away from it as our baseline simply because we wouldn’t want to replicate if there’s a design pattern in here that just isn’t connecting we don’t want to repeat it now we have the opposite thing here which is great people love the open hand it’s one of the most highly rated classes that’s always what is a you know obviously we want everything to be well regarded but for us if he followed zenith arse and unearthed Arcana we would often present a subclass if it didn’t test well we would just drop it this is the good a good example of though it is the monk like this one had to work so because you just you wanted to play the character who was the you know martial arts expert this is what the open hand is you know the all fit masters of martial arts combat where there are armed or unarmed they learn techniques to push and trip their opponents nipply key to heal damaged and practiced advanced meditation that can protect them from harm so let’s take a look what we get here are one quick thing I want to take a look at is just to give us a sense since we’re just going to look at four one to ten for now we that means that we need abilities at level three when you first come into the Sasso class I always like to do this because it just keeps keeps it reminds do what I need to look at in terms of my schedule for things so that’s third level that’s when you’re gonna come in you’re gonna get another feature at sixth did we sneak another one in before tenth I don’t think we did nope we didn’t so yeah okay so we need two abilities to capture two of the two abilities before 10th level and then when we do tenth level and higher if we have time today we get out do a similar thing I’ll go through I’ll skate through and just take a look at what are the core class features I don’t want to create things that don’t work well together then I’ll go back and then I’ll take a look at my thing but anyway I’ll take a look at my uh my monastic tradition so anyways let’s go back down to the way of the open fist oops so what we got here open hand technique starting when you choose this tradition of third level you can manipulate your enemies key when you harness your own whenever you hit a creature with one of the attacks granted by your flurry or blows so this is I respect a key point to Fleury you can oppose one of the following effects on that target you can make you knock them prone on a failed deck save you can push them away on a failed strength save or you can shut down their ability to take reactions with no saving throw quick note so we have three abilities two of which trigger saving throws and one at which doesn’t typically speaking this is a good example of our removing a saving throw for both balance and play speed reasons being knocked prone is bad I you know you don’t want to be not prone because it slows you down and more importantly gives advantage to people attacking you in up close so a saving throw makes sense right throwing this out for free especially in a flurry if I knock you prone then keep attacking you this is the nice thing to pile up moving people 15 feet away a little more corner case but potentially I could use this to her to hurl you off a cliff I could send you into a very a situation which you’re going to be introduced to a lot of pain for instance I use this to knock you next to there barbarian and the fighter or the Paladin who has a smite locked and loaded and ready to go I could use this to break you up maybe from a creature that’s protecting you or from a position you want a whole reactions are a little because they’re very situational rather than tax you with the saving throw for this option we just give it to you for free so a a lot of cases reactions aren’t the creature might not care about its reaction so you’re only gonna use this when you say I want to shut down a tax opportunity and since that’s really rather than putting the creature in peril you’re just kind of denying it you have the opportunity to do something maybe the opportunity to take an opportunity attack the we don’t throw saving through on this cuz the power level it doesn’t have doesn’t require save and you know what whenever I can cut something out I want to do it because it speeds up playing right I just do this throw it on UDM notes it move on so that’s why you see you save save than no save then it’s six level you’re getting the ability to heal yourself as an action we’re getting hit points equal to three times your level your monk level and that’s on a long wrist cooldown you’re probably using this outside of comment you know you probably don’t want to spend a turn not beating up people in order to heal you know that the classic maneuver is I’ll use my turn to heal and then the people that you weren’t beating up decide to they they are not going to return that favor they’re gonna beat you up back and then you lose all the hit points you just regained so you’ve just spent to turn doing nothing essentially so this is really that’s when we balance that we think this is probably being used not in a fight that’s supposed to this is a bonus action it’s competing with some of your other abilities but we’d assume you’re gonna use this to heal up and also beat up people all right so what we know up front third level we’ve got to give you you’re still alive and what’s interesting here is we have a nice little pocket of power we’re giving you we’re saying is we’re taking a flurry of blows we’re augmenting it I mean this is for free I already paid the key costing two right to ride this ride and I’m just getting extra value for my my key point the so yes the dawn secret denying counter spell I’m sure there’s a lot of characters you’re happy to use this on an NPC who had counterspell or a lot of DM so like to use it on Creon characters who like spamming counter spell or shield I guess in theory you know you’ve already hit so it’s too late the shield either didn’t work so we want to give you your soul knives and the soul life though is essentially I think the way I’d want to build it is it’s the Gateway to all this other stuff that we just listed so essentially is gonna be pipe I want to start by saying it’s gonna be power neutral I’m going to kind of do the thing the you know basically augments on arm strike but what I want to do is give you then some constant benefits I want to give you things that are essentially the cost of a benefit I get for spending key but that make me feel like I’m not just punching you with a different name you know it’s the punch button but it’s now called this the soul life button and it’s really just the same thing what was the point of this sub class so let’s take a look at our list throwing that’s a first to me to go through here this can be you know can be arranged attack now the one thing I’m gonna put here so I want the range to be like maybe thirty feet or a throne weapon I don’t want this to become the ranged monk this is always a little tricky because what you don’t want is in your mind if you think hey maybe eventually we’ll have a monk who uses a bow you don’t want people to go what’s the best ranged monk option oh it’s the guy who makes sonic blades come out of his hand right then it just it’s missing the flavor it’s a more like the laser monk which okay note that will maybe build it at some point the laser mark it just sounds wacky but you know this is something which I’m gonna put down it’s sensible but we just have to make sure it doesn’t crowd out our design space or lead to something where the sort of story and flavor is getting lost it’s getting some soon by what’s really just meant to be a bit of chrome so psychic damage oh that’s an easy one if I can do psychic damage to you so now I feel a bit you know some of that’s they’re bypassing armor you know that’s an interesting one I don’t know if it’s something that I’d want to throw on that it’s constant I’ll also like that it’s adaptive so change weapon type I’m sorry change damage type that might be part of a psychic in so you know I don’t know if I want to do that yet I don’t know if I want to give it to all the time because then it starts feeling a little warlock II to me the idea I’m doing damage than getting damage back healing back I’m a higher crit that might just be strictly just too much of an upgrade so let’s damage boost you know there this might be a very natural thing would be a key spend ability to do more damage Astro punch punching through things that that is hmm that starts well maybe that’s what we want to do with the range kind of having something here maybe the range attack and I’m gonna put it might be rather than saying you’re literally throwing it it might be that you are extending the reach on it so emphasizing the activity of the blade of the soul knife that it’s not just that I’m throwing it’s coming back it’s just that I can reach out and I can extend its reach to fifteen feet that might look a little comical and I think about it but I’ll just put in question marks there so I think just off the bat looking at this list of things we’d get some we can you know now actually I’ll put this right here I like the idea that one of the things this lets me do is I can change my damage type I can you slashing damage I can do piercing probably can’t do bludgeoning that is a quite feel on flavor but being able to do psychic damage totally makes sense so I can I can tilt I can tell tailor my damage to my enemy some sort of range element whether I’m manipulating the weapon or I’m actually physically throwing it either one and then I like this idea of letting you spend key for a damage boost I want to take a quick look you know I don’t think chant throw me an idea is I’m gonna take a quick look do we have any monk subclasses where I can just burn key to do extra damage the I don’t know if we do now I don’t want to just make it like a paladin smite that’s always such an easy thing to do but directionally going that way we’ve got Sun soul who can look inside can do that yeah mines me essentially yeah mines by John John Silver that’s exactly I’m thinking of so we’ve got Kensei and wave the form oh yeah the way the four elements you know what the for the traditions so shadowed don’t think this one in their drunken master I know yeah that’s four elements I think that the fort allowance I think you’re you’re getting it for you spells though if I remember right yeah you you cast casting elemental spells I think that’s casting kono cold so this is this is this is just this is letting you cast spells and this is actually one thing to keep in mind oh and then you can things the fire snake it’s like it’s been a key point to do an extra detent fire damage one thing to keep in mind too is that this is one of our very poorly rated subclasses because so much of it is just need more ways to spend your key contrast this to what we just talked about in the way of the open fist which was you you get an additional benefit for key you’re already going to spend the trickier that’s saying great you get to cast fire off a four key that’s for uses of fluff flurry of blows that you’ve lost is it worth fireball so with fireball in a party where there’s already a wizard it isn’t right like your wizards probably doing that okay so we’ve got some of these here but I don’t think so I know a that this isn’t really highly rated so I’m okay kind of muscling in its territory a little bit and I also it’s got a lot of other options kind of float around here then with the Ken say let’s see gets a shot let’s see you are getting sexually when you can use a bonus action to make your range attacks deadlier okay that’s that’s using your bonus acts which means you’re not flirting I might say can say magic weapons sharpen the blade okay so I can do this to get a flat bonus to my weapons I feel like this is gonna feel different I can use this to make my weapons magical but what I’m imagining here is I’m gonna be able to spend some key to do a really disruptive like psionic you know strike the so I think we’re okay is there anything I missed chat throw it up there if you saw if I missed anything def strike Michael let’s search for that because just like we hit a target spend one key point to deal extra damage there Ichi martial arts die okay so I can you can use future only once on each of your turns okay so with death strike I can throw a key point to get out there to do some extra damage thank you much Archmage and Eric my friendly copilot here okay that’s like that’s useful it’s maybe not I think there’s still space here for us to do this like I’m not saying anything it’s like oh yeah that’s super defining alright I don’t want to mess with it I think what I would like to say is in the spirit of what we did earlier I’m sorry what the monk of the open hand is how about this we call this psyche psychic flurry and let’s do this whenever you use never you you you use flurry of blows and let’s throw in some very similar to what the the wave of the open hand does let’s just give you some riders you can throw on top of your the opening and strikes I think this would be kind of cool right the yeah these are probably in tour wisdoms saved based effects schoo beats the so I’m thinking of something here like probably don’t wanna punch people than charm them I mean that’s kind of hilarious you’re going around like how do I make friends and influence people punch them in the head but we can maybe like throwing maybe it’s a fear of fact the nice thing is we can pry say you trigger this so here’s the basic model I’m going to throw in here do this so applies to everyone you hit with your flurry I’m doing that because what I like about this is it lets me throw out a pretty interesting status effect I’m potentially a lot of targets or just one target obviously if I just punch the heck out of one guy or slice slice sorry soul knife not so probably throw in a fear effect we can probably throw in something like god we get really exotic and [Music] a stunt I don’t know if I do a stunt cuz we’ve already got stunning fists kicking around the game but I like a fear effect people want to move away here is a weird thing yeah I got taunt like oh yeah there’s gonna pay attention to you I also this is a weird one I’m going to throw it in I kind of like the idea of a teleport effect when I’m picturing is you’re literally like slicing open space and pushing people through it so like you know like I cut into someone and won’t they get pulled in through a little like neutral wormhole thing and pop out like ten feet away oh yeah like a sickness effect oops that might be some so a weakness thing where I’m gonna deep off there damage and probably could what I call a daze effect if we’re back if you played third or fourth I think was fourth I don’t know if third how to use days this way shut down reactions I put that in question mark because I think that might not be interesting enough here so here we go that’s something here we’re right off the bat I’m making you feel very different because I want these to be like super super psionic feeling right that this is all about messing with people’s minds or messing with time and space and interesting ways so I want all of these to feel very much like I’m scrambling someone’s mind and they’re their neurons the maybe even a confusion effect I don’t wanna go too crazy because I don’t want it to get too complicated especially I’m using it to control a mob but the you know another wacky thing you could do so this is a good example of this might be too clever for our own good but I not throw it in here so here’s something where you could say vulnerable to psychic damage right now the smart player does this and hits this this might be something I want to keep because what it might let us do is say I’m attacking the dragon I’m making a bunch of attacks against one person i flurry I hit I trigger this and the rest of my attacks doing psychic damage then I feel pretty cool I just had a pretty fun alpha-strike moment so boom boom boom boom boom it might be too good though but I’m gonna keep it up there cuz rule of thumb if your thing is broken at the beginning that’s okay that’s actually good it’s much easier to tone down the volume than it is to go hey this actually isn’t really fun broken is always broken to me is just like it’s like too much fun right like you’re having too much fun this is too easy then you rein it back if you don’t have anything that’s really striking a core yeah it’s harder you might just be on a bad path if something’s broken then it might be that you’re on a good path you just need to figure out a way to tone down the power it’s bringing to the table now it’s always possible you may find you can’t tone it down because just by the nature of what you’re letting someone do it’s just too good but it’s better it’s better if you had to ask me like hey Mike you’re you’ve designed something it’s either broken or too weak which do you choose I would choose broken because it’s an easier position to recover from so the let’s see yeah so I think that oh you know what some other absorb they’re in a key what if he regained keep you hit someone smokey 80 I kind of like that right I’m gonna put energy vampire here because it could be healing you know if we think it might be too good like I spend a key and get a key back then that’s easy to loop that but if it is something pretty simple like I had a bunch of people and Fred when I hit I get some some temporary hip points or heal that’s kind of cool that feels okay with me because I really feel like that’s coming in through the blade yeah I was gonna when I was saying seeing soul-saving before I was thinking that that would trigger when you drop someone but if we’re just saying no this is when you flurry that feels cool okay so that feels pretty nifty to me I think we have a good like solid chassis for the Soul knives the everybody’s like today is the day of Destiny references I’m seeing the throw up here somebody avoid Walker yeah the oh I can’t remember the was it the skull of diet diary hum car that let your a void bomb drain energy I can’t remember anyways if you don’t know I a huge destiny fit have him plate actually have not yet played destiny tune just have an end time having a three-year-old will do that but yeah that’s the it’s like how do I go back and get drawn back in we’ll see we’ll see maybe like my wife is taking a vacation with my daughter and my mother-in-law I expect I might be taking some time off work to catch up my video games the will see the okay up sitting in mine was the refreshing void bump yeah okay so and now we pause the stream for me to talk about all the video games been playing yeah I have a really either run in Slate aspire it’s a fun game that’s a it’s a roguelike deck builder and I have this really fun poison deck I built I’m about to fight those the little too boss we’re gonna see if I can the floor to boss Baikonur whatever it is called and I will see it’s a bit of fun deck but I always have awful luck with my card drawers in that game ok so let’s see 6 level ok we got eight minutes so focus Merrill’s get it done so holes of body again this is the healing ability ok I knew my face would I felt was like this look of like real disdain like really like no okay this is I’m looking at I’m in character for the soul I feel myself I heal myself I stab in dudes to death with my psychic blades I make so this is not an ability that’s really powerful in combat you know looking at this well you know what I want to do here I want to go down to the way of the Sun soul this is another one that ranks pretty well what is the Sun so look at it sixth you get an additional two key points to cast burning hands the bonus actions actually kind of nice on burning hands in addition to doing everything else I’m going so okay that’s an AoE but that’s kind of its kind of power neutral because it is I’m spending key to do something I could be spending that key to do something else there’s an opportunity cost here so it’s not just a clear powerup and I get if I didn’t make it clear when I was talking about the way of elements that’s really the problem with it is just the opportunity cost for those abilities I’m just giving you more options to spend your resources rather than additional resources or just new static abilities I think that’s the root of why people aren’t crazy about it I can’t say weapon this is really just get another weapon which you might as well say all the weapons like balance wise really just kind of limiting you more for flavor so what I’m seeing here when I go and this is always something useful if you come to an ability when you’re looking at your comparative subclass and you kind of what you’re starting with you get something that’s not super powerful take a peek at the other ones and get a sense this might be at six level or our design pattern might be we’re just giving you something flavorful so our reaping this doesn’t sound a flavorful the ceramic she sounds like it should be pretty deadly that’s this is the way of the long death at this a sneaky good subclass not many people use it but it’s actually I think pretty good at six level you gain the ability to unsettle or terrify those around you as an action for your soul has been touched by the shadow of death that series like we’ve liked this is so important we’re gonna throw in the middle of our mechanics okay by the way this is why this is happening it’s really creepy when you take this action I’m allowed to make fun of this clan think I wrote this when you take this action each creature within 30 feet of you must make it wisdom saving therapy frightened until the end of your next turn so this is actually I really like this ability because when I look at it compared to the way of the open hands heal there’s a lot more flexibility here notice that this does not have a cool-down I can use this whenever I want you could imagine that the way of the long deaf monk let’s say you’re playing an urban based game or it’s more of a role-playing scene you can just keep you know using this to scare people off like okay we need to get into this tavern and there’s a guy there he’s got this man he stole our map we know he’s in there I’m gonna clear this tavern out without a fight you can imagine the way of a long enough monk walks in and just and starts using this ability and hopefully throws in some cool role-playing because we ready threw in some cool some flavor text here and this ability and you’re like oh I’m just gonna scare the hell out of everyone in this bar they’re gonna clear out I’m gonna use it and I’m gonna use it intelligently on my target so he has to go in the corner rather than moving closer to me and we’ll grab this dude grab the map you stole from us and get out so I really like that more than say healing because healing is pretty much like okay I’m gonna use this after a combat that’s it right this so I’m gonna do something here that’s a similar thing so let’s say it’s six level maybe this is where maybe this is what I don’t want to just put an ESP ability here or something I want to put something here that’s gonna be really cool outside of combat and will be the kind of ability the player looks at it and starts trying to get creative so let’s see see a confusion effect that could be fun though Knights still kind of drift toward combat levitate it’s some form of site I mean yeah it’s kind of do something to phase through walls oh that’s kind of chrome refers to like that like maybe something where it read mine’s a touch yeah I can like sort of pull things oh wait okay read minds a touch okay so stabby row game’s inspired this is might be a little creepy but also might be a little fun so how about this so you’ve got these soul knives well no this is kind of common what I was gonna say was those what to this entire like you know demonstrate to you how this actually works that’s that’s just stupid to be put yeah start waving my hands aside a fight you must act out everything the character is going to do to design it I was thinking there’s something like you might pick up knowledge as you fight people you know when you hit someone you can grab a memory using as tools yes I could surgery with knives if theory okay yeah a rift opening read the mind by a stunning strike maybe something with a I’m a little nervous about you can use your soul life as a surfboard to get a swimming speed Aki Maya I love how you think that is psychic surfing we’re done the class is all that’s purely a role-playing thing you come up with your DM the you know I’m not think you know I don’t know if we could like open a gate that feels a little bit still I want on something that’s like a tool I’m not gonna immediately think to use in combat getting a read on their opponent that would feel kind of like a monk thing look in the past when our actions are you touch an item so every people sue records it still feels like a combat ability hmm psychic lock-picking I give up the thing the with your knives maybe there’s you know it’s kind of hard right so I don’t give you two knives and maybe there’s something here of okay everyone let me know if this is a stupid idea or an interesting idea so we have this ability I can I can transform I can create these blades of psychic energy what if my non-combat stream is I can make myself into psychic energy we sort of hint at some of that that transformational element and if you can do it you can do things like move through walls temporarily you know something very simple and direct hmm you don’t see chats not burst into flames over that idea yeah oh wait yeah our serious has got my back it’s cool idea the so ococ are is or that would be kind of cool so let’s do this like oh I’m gonna put I’m not gonna give up this idea yet cuz mine I love it yeah I’m just trying to design something that makes chat as salty as possible like what do you guys hate but a are a site that’s cool because I like the idea that we can we could say in our flavor Oh attack roles for no attack equals intimidate yeah it kind of cool them in the but I kind of leave my sit here being Aras that someone threw out there because what it would let you do what if our flavor you know what do things this is where would we start trying to build up the story of this character the and I think if we if we’d like the idea of the turning into energy that’s prior looks I just said walking through walls which makes every dungeon master who’s trying to build a dungeon like hate me personally right there they’re writing the emails of the tweets right now but no I like our site cuz I mean you could imagine something like this like when I’m fighting you my psychic blades I might be what it’s actually happening is I’m kind of like psychically attuning to you and that’s how I’m getting some of these effects so when I go into a room and I’m outside of combat I study someone I start pulling out like some of the things they’ve done so I could I like that idea it’s an aura I can just kind of look and I focus on you and I so basically divination on one person tied to the flavor of tuning the soul life I like that that’s fun because then we get this idea that why is this stuff happening up here at their level I always like it when a subclass can tell a story what I like it up here is we’re saying when you do that psychic flurry what’s really happening is I’m not just like putting energy into my my soul knives these are soul knives these are knives that cut through your soul i’m a tuning this blade to your soul and i’m pulling out i’m using your soul against you that’s how i’m disrupting you is how i’m like you know the flavor here instead of taunt might be like you mistake me for your sworn enemy I’m the fear effect you see the thing you fear most right because I’ve created that psychic connection the blade creates the connection I hit you and that’s what I’m doing is I’m basically looting your mind for effects so yeah so yeah a hunter’s mark ability might be something automated or it could be maybe do well there might be some in which we could throw in that might be something which would come our senior chart our single targeted bill enough throw that in there does that be something interesting I can throw a debuff where I’m doing extra damage for the rest of the combat or I can track you oh but that else might be something to there like a track like I can I can spy your are a lock on to it and not let you get away oh I like that too because now we’re starting to get this sense with the flavors I gotta admit I when I worked on the soul life because we had a soul knife a build on the mystic flavor you hated me I just was like dropping it completely I just could not come up with a cool thing or something that really like locked it in into my mind but this feels pretty nifty right I kind of like it’s almost like a bounty hunter oh you could imagine like these are might be the monks that like gets awry you know it might be something that they do to track down elephants you know like they that might be some of the flavor here okay folks we are under five minutes to the top of the hour so yeah PTT to two seven six like a psychic bloodhound yeah it’s I’m kind of thinking these guys might be this cool bounty-hunter types that kind of pulls out some rough flavor you know these guys hunt down and eliminate psychic threats I like it question marks I’m not gonna say it’s cast in stone but but now you know I have to have this John I’m like oh it’s this subclass I can make that make Chavis Altius will do that son Oh where’s the guy can do oh okay I saw my Syrian I can’t quite read it but a soul person okay I’m going to put that because that might be some of our things we get later like you know I can grab someone’s psyche and capture it I mean that might be our topple availability ok cool these guys are ting to come into shape now and a really flavorful way that they hadn’t before okay so this is we’re gonna do next week it’s a holiday week here in the state said enough Memorial Day is observed by the world as a whole or it’s just the states I lose track of these things but it doesn’t matter because we go to we stream on Tuesdays so I’ll be here well tackle some more stuff for the Soul knife and then what I’ll do next is I want to take a little bit of a look at what those cross-class abilities might look like if we want to do like a warlocks invocation style benefit a special pool of feats I don’t want them to just feel like feats though they’ve got to feel the sting so we’ll figure out some other way to make them cool you know and make you go okay I really like here do my goal for needs to be pretty simple if you’re playing a sign of character you’re just like I always take these I don’t take the ability score increases because I love Sonics that want to get more but it is the nice thing is though we can balance it as a feat so we’ll see where we go all right so everybody thanks for the help thanks for taking part really excited where we’re going with this stuff I hope that the discussion of the class as a whole and how it started affect my view of the design is exciting that would be the goal I don’t want to just do it because it’s like yay we did it and now it structurally makes sense like no one buys games for their structure they buy them because they’re fun and so hopefully when you start thinking of mystic what this might mean for revising that character class please focusing it that actually sounds pretty exciting a distinct but again we’ll see this is all this is why we do this in the stream and design it so you get to see it and see what we’re doing so anyways I don’t want to run over time and squish into the next hour of programming here on the DD channels so I will say good day to you and see everyone next week [Music]

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The Monk: Soul Knife subclass – The Mike Mearls Happy Fun Hour!

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