D&D has long struggled with how to balance itself between a “catch-all” fantasy environment and one with a specific flavor. In the late 80s and 90s, it was content to take a modular approach. The default setting was fairly vanilla, but they presented a dozen or more different settings with more races and mechanics (or less, in the case of the historical campaign settings) as well as optional rulebooks which could provide material for any campaign setting. The problem with that approach in 2e was that the optional material, including optional races in the campaign settings, were full of power-creep. DMs ended up being dissuaded from allowing more flavor, because that flavor was opening a Pandora’s Box of over-powered PCs. (And the text in books such as The Complete Book of Humanoids explicitly calls out that DMs should shut the door on players who are only interested in the power-gaming side of things.)

Now, D&D’s default setting is a lot more “kitchen-sink”. Fifth Edition’s version of the Realms is designed to be flexible enough to accommodate any official content they release. Consequently, most of the official content they release is balanced enough for organized play. A DM is rarely compelled to shut the door on a given race or subclass due to power-creep alone. That also makes it harder for a DM to say “no” to something like a Tiefling or a Long Death Monk unless there are very specific story reasons why they shouldn’t exist at all in the DM’s world. As long as the designers continue to avoid the temptation of too much power-creep (which, again, even Wizards has been somewhat guilty of in 5e’s player supplements) then the “kitchen-sink” approach works fine.

Just in case you’re looking for another useful variant, grafting the PF Unchained Monk back into 3.5 should work with almost no difficulty – one selling point of which is that it’s written with +1/1 BAB already.

Personally I’m struck by how little changed the 3.0 monk is from previous editions – how almost every one of its features is prefigured elsewhere.

It’s… almost impossible for me to really imagine your perspective, coming at this without having experienced it when it was the current D&D. I think one would have to say, especially of 3.0, that it was an edition of incongruities and bizarre excesses (f’rex, haste was too good by a country mile), and everything that did work was the result of judicious DMing and players that didn’t push things to their breaking points. It was still possible to have a ton of fun with the monk (I mean, I assume – I never played one, and in all of 3.x only had two of low-ish levels in games I was running), but you had to be ready to look past moments of dissatisfying outcomes.

Ultimately I would say that with every edition, from Gygax’s first releases to 5e, the designers have gone with the best idea they had at the time, based on as much playtesting as they could squeeze in. It’s often hard to understand how the thing they settled on was “the best idea.” As a professional designer, though, I’ll tell you for SURE that there are always reasons for things, most of which never become obvious to the public.

Another fun example is the classic “monk is not proficient with their own unarmed strikes”. Unarmed strike is listed as a simple weapon and since monks are not prof with all simple weapons they may not be proficient with their own unarmed strikes. I tend to argue that unarmed attacks are a variant natural attack and I believe in the monster manual I recall it says that creatures are automatically prof with their own natural attacks so that is how I try to get around that but it is a bit convoluted.

They were but IMO 4E managed to strip all the flavor from the Bo9S material. Bo9S was this funky little cafe with some really interesting concepts on the burger. 4E is the McDonald’s version.

As I’ve probably mentioned in previous discussions, I was completely out of the buying-new-content part of the 3.x audience when Bo9S came out. I was running a vaguely 3.5e-related game with wildly hacked classes and races, and the mechanics that WotC had otherwise been releasing in the year-or-so prior were interesting, but not enough so to spur me to purchase. In hindsight, of course, there’s no question that they were testing out the fundamentals of 4e.

I loved Bo9S. It was incredibly evocative and the characters were really fun to play. You could build a nastier character stat-wise other ways but for cool factor it was really hard to beat the Bo9S. Pity it came out so late in the 3.X cycle. I played a few characters with it but not long enough to really get the fun part.

The weapons that they leave out are frequently nonsensical, and it just emphasizes for me how very preferable the 5e model for monks is there.

I’m saving basically all of the Nine Swords content for the History of the Fighter, no matter which class they most play like. I figure that book alone will be a few articles of analysis, because it is such a stepping stone for D&D’s whole conception of fighters and even the dynamic of combat.

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