I want to respec a companion to monk.
I love the open hand monks, but my Tav is a bard right now.
I already did a run where I turned Lae'zel to monk and Karlach to fighter. It wasn't bad, Githyanki do have monks, but still it didn't feel right. Lae'zel should be a fighter.
Karlach could be an MMA fighter which is consistent with the barehand fights of the open hand monk. But, the [monk] dialogues invoking serenity, stilness and harmony are not quite compatible.
If I could find an example of a loud, undisciplined monk in fiction or history, that might help. Does anyone have a lead ?
I don't have a really good example from a fairly small selection of fiction I know about this type of monks, but I did think of either the chaos that Lu Tze (Discworld) causes while remaining mentally totally serene; or the frustration he seems to cause in all the other monks who have to deal with him. And in my current Pathfinder game, we have a player who plays a goblin who learnt to copy the actions of monks by watching them train, but doesn't know anything about the religion or mental side of it: he knows how to punch people, but he doesn't understand the theological basis of punching people.
Really, this is just playing against type. I played a bard who was shy and socially awkward. Mechanically it works fine, but I didn't use many of the [BARD] speech options that were really suave or involved gratuitously coming on to people, but I did use [BARD] speech options about writing songs and learning about the world.
Maybe just work on your own character idea as you play. I did it by seeing what seemed to fit the character over the first few levels as the personality came together. There were some things I did while establishing Myrna's character that, if I'd planned the character in one go, probably wouldn't have happened. But by justifying it afterwards, I had a more interesting character. For example, after generally being diplomatic, I thought it would be funny to threaten to rip Mol's tail off for stealing the party's stuff. Now I had established that she had a tendency to snap at people who pissed her off, which I kept through the rest of the game
