I'm looking to build a monk character with the A:RPG rules. I don't have as thorough an understanding of all the rules as good character-building requires in this game system (but I do own the A:RPG and CoH), so I'm seeking advice from the community.

In particular, I'm looking to play a val'Abebi monk in the Order of Althares. I envision him as having martial skills in unarmed combat and flintlock pistol, a few psionic spells, several knowledge skills, and other monkish skills. A trained owl pet would be a nice perk.

Any suggestions on character creation, please?

Thanks,
David Thomas Chappell

man what more do you want, you have a really solid concept already, you are going to have to make the Expert or Arcane archtype decision, I would suggest building the character both ways and then planning their advancments for the first tier and see what character you like the most.

I got a dollar that says you end up going Expert

If you look down bellow I wrote a thread called "A Meditation of Character Building" that sums up my thinking on the mechanical side of building characters. To me the big thing is that talents mostly define "what you can do" while skills mostly define "how well" you do them. By definition you want three attack skills at "combat grade" ... roughly 3 ranks at start and improved by three ranks each tier. That's doable, but making that choice work is going to govern a lot of other decisions.

I personally do not like the arcane (or divine archetypes) ... they work well for dedicated casting builds but IME few people want to play dedicated casters in this system (mostly because you have issues managing your clock). Your design as described is not a dedicated caster, so I think its a poor fit. Even with the talent Warrior Mage you will only keep your fists roughly at combat grade. Your flintlock accuracy with dwindle as you go up in tiers till you can't hit anyone by Tier 5.

I agree with Josh that Expert is a viable (maybe the default) option. You'll want one of your Archetype's skill talents to be Adaptable so you can get a rank of Arcanum and Fisticuffs out the gate to build on. Experts are relatively talent starved though even if they get all the skills you could want.

If you only want a few psionic spells then Martial archetype w/ the Sword & Spell talent also works well imo. Definitely puts the fisticuffs and flintlocks first. Still cast a few spells at combat grade skill ranks. The advantage of the martial archetype is that you will have lots of combat talents to make your fighting dynamic w/ Martial Techniques, pick up Pugilist & Weapon Mastery Unarmed (etc etc).

Either way you'll probably need to choose paths to provide skill and talent support.

A last thought on the owl. If you take Heirloom (raptor) you could reskin it as an Owl and make it a Loyal Companion. Loyal Companion is a Skill talent so advancing it would play well with the expert Archetype.

I created a Nierite monk for the Kickstarter and had pretty much the same design challenge. I ended up deciding on an Expert Former Templar, using Adaptable at character creation for Melee: Unarmed and Melee: Balanced. No reason why you couldn't do the same, but take Ranged instead of two Melee skills.

I did submit a Former Monk background a few months ago, but I have no idea whether PCI will publish it.