The Monk - Part 6: Making an OSE or B/X Monk

 After looking through the various incarnations of the monk/mystic there are some elements that stand out as must have features:

 * No armour

 * Access to some thief skills

 * Restrictions on what magic items they can keep

 * Unarmed combat abilities

It is the last point that I think is the hardest to deal with as it comes with the assumption that monks can also use any weapon. This is both hard to balance and design around, the ideas that monks can use weapons but that their unarmed strikes need to be at least as good as or possibly better than the other options. How do we make it so there is a meaningful choice between the two? Should it even be a choice? 

 There are some elements I am pretty clear on but this balance between unarmed and armed combat for the class is what I think most people struggle with. We have this confused fantasy we are trying to achieve of a mish mash of different kung fu films all smooshed through the lens of the B/X chassis. 

 In many editions there are so many monk abilities it would never be possible to fit them all on a B/X class, it would be nice to retain some of them or even all of them in some way. This could be done by reflecting the different traditions of orders that monks belong to. In the carcass crawler mutoid class there is a table where you roll for mutations on your character, something like this could be an interesting feature for a monk class to reflect the different types of monk orders. Likely this will be hard to fit with the other XP costings and is something I will cut for now.

 Ideally I would like to keep the XP cost for the class to get to level 2 as something around 2500, that would keep the class in line with the Barbarian and just below the Paladin, two classes are think are roughly comparable. 

 Some of the abilities that monks have had in past editions also just do not have anything at all like them currently in OSE which makes it hard for me to gauge what sort of "cost" these abilities should have when it comes to XP, this may also be a factor as to which abilities I end up including.