Sometimes you just want to smash things, regardless of your character’s vocation. Fifth edition gives some options for almost any class to become a viable beefcake.

For this post I’ll be covering the idea of a Monk class. Monks in Dungeons and Dragons -and as trope in most games- focuses on mechanics based on their dexterity and agility. In this guide we’ll be working on subverting that dependency in order to provide for their damage, utility, and survivability.

In the 5e ruleset, Monks are generally a martial focused class that use simple weapons or unarmed attacks. The damage with these instead is replaced with the class’s martial arts die, which scales with the player’s level. Monk also optionally lets you replace your strength modifier on attack and damage rolls with your dexterity modifier. Normally this enables the rest of the class’s toolkits like stealth, deflect missiles, and evasion. However, we’re going to be ignoring this in order to see what brawn can offer the class. The key to this will be multiclassing options in order to enable different routes of gameplay.

To start with, for monastic traditions, the three that directly synergize with what we’re trying to do here (as of writing this) would be Kensei, Drunken Master, and Open Hand. You can pick any tradition depending on your character, but because we’re focusing strength we end up better situated for a combat build. Kensei gives the option for martial weapons, extra damage, and extra AC with Agile Parry. Drunken Maser gives some extra character flavor and utility with Drunken Sway and Redirect Attack. Open Hand gives some additional options with their Techniques and a pretty beefy emergency self heal with Wholeness of Body.

Multiclassing is an option to make full use out of our strength focus. The two classes that give immediate benefits in this regard are Barbarian and Fighter. Most of our levels will be spent in Monk in order to keep our martial art die high enough, but our splits for class dips might look something like this, with impactful class features in bold:

One level dips are the most economical, since falling behind in Monk levels can be very bad for scaling. Second level gives some useful items as well, with reckless attack being especially powerful. Third level lets us pick a class focus, this can either be for additional flavor or synergy with the build. Going beyond third level dip in this case doesn’t offer much, as it makes you fall farther and farther behind in Monk and the class features that provide worthwhile power spikes become fewer and farther between.

For stats we focus on the typical martial stats: strength, dexterity, and constitution. Mental ability scores can be mostly dumped or not depending on the character you want. The exception might be wisdom when sub-classing into Fighter, because Monk unarmored defense uses the dexterity and wisdom stats.

Depending on party role, strength or constitution can be prioritized, but dexterity will always we secondary to these. The only reason dexterity isn’t a full dump stat is for Monk abilities that still use it and for unarmored defense. Worth noting between Barbarian and monk is that you get to choose which unarmored defense you use, letting you prioritize different stats based on the choice.

My example character sheet I used for drafting this can be found here. I have the character stated at level six, because I think that’s where the build starts to come online.

Also worth noting is that there’s several good homebrews of different ‘pugilists’ styled classes, which often function as strength based monks. This guide is more focused on keeping it within the canonical ruleset, but if one of those sounds fun then you can always check with your DM if it’s okay to play.

If you enjoyed this post, feel free to check on my other content! I try to update this site somewhat regularly with new content, mostly with maps and homebrew sheets from my campaigns.