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D and D's unarmed fighting style is bad,
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especially if you're a monk. Let me
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explain why. The unarmed fighting style
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raises your unarmed strike damage to 1d6
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or 1d8 if you're not holding anything in
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your off hand, which means you're using
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both of your hands to do as much damage
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as a one-handed weapon, like a long
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sword. So, right there, bad. The second
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benefit of the fighting style is that
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creatures that you have grappled take
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1d4 damage at the beginning of their
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turns. That's neat, but it's it's 1d4
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damage. A typical combat will last two
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to four rounds, usually around three.
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So, if you ran up and grappled a
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creature at the beginning of combat and
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they never escaped your grapple, you
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could do maybe 3d4 damage to them over
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the course of combat. Is that really
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worth a fighting style compared to
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dueling, which is going to do plus two
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damage per hit? And that will scale as
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you get additional attacks. For monks
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especially, the unarmed fighting style
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is massively redundant. Even in the 2014
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rules, the monk's martial arts die
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starts out pretty small in the 2014
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rules and then doesn't reach 1d8 until
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level 10. So, I I can see the appeal
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here. I can see why people look at this
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and think like, yes, this is an
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improvement over the damage I get. But,
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you know what else? You can do 1d8
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damage with a weapon. You can grab a
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spear and use it two-handed for 1d8
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damage. You can do the same with a
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quarter staff. If you use the dedicated
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weapon optional class feature, you can
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use a long sword and get d10 damage.
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Sure, that's only with the attacks
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during your attack action. But if you're
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going to take a fighting style, are you
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really going to take a fighting style
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just to slightly improve the damage on
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your bonus action attacks? It's it's not
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worth the resource cost. Use that
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resource for something more impactful.