There’s a couple of community-created monk classes floating around. I decided to try one of them out. This one I found on the Wizards forum, where it had evolved and improved through open discussion. Turns out it was awesome!
I had great fun playing the Hard-style monk of Paedan. You get improved movement and fight unarmed. I could charge from way across the room with a flying kick, hitting foes most of the time. For those rare occassions where I couldn’t reach any enemies I let fly my trusty shurikens (ninja-stars). I didn’t get hit often, having a great AC, +3 (class), and using the same stat (WIS) for attacks and AC-bonus. His defenses were good too, being a human and getting both monk and human bonus of +1 to all defenses.
The story went like this, all the PCs stay in a small village for the night when travelling. The entire village turns to various types of undead at a certain hour. We waste them all, and investigate to find out what happened to the villagers. Turns out some guy travelling through, posing as a cleric, killed them all and raised them. Next time we play, we’ll hunt that bastard down for sure!
The monk really shone through fighting enemies with a low AC, he hit almost all the time and could often do two attacks. Problem is, my group and I discovered, he’s way overpowered. It’s easily the most powerful 1st level class in the game, doing 1d8+5 damage at +7 to hit, up to three times a round, each round.
Good news, is that this unbalance is easily fixed, while preserving the feel of the class (fly around, seldom getting hit, kicking and hitting people with combo-strikes). I think with my changes and probably some other, minor adjustments, the Paedan monk class is ready for play 
Try it out for your next game! It’ll be fun
Tags: Player Stories
March 3rd, 2009 at 15:29
Thanks for your kind words.
I hope some of my ideas made it into the 4E Monk to be seen in the May playtest monk.
Cheers