When I DM I have a consistent house rule that if you have the ability to do a bonus action, you can do a strike with an unarmed off hand if you are adjacent to an enemy regardless of class. If it connects it does 1d4 bludgeoning and has a chance to knock a medium or smaller enemy prone if the player wins a strength contest. Nat 20 achieves both the connecting of the hit and the prone.

Martial arts? Like monks are trained in?

DND is a weird mix of too many rules and not enough rules.

I didn’t write things in a good way.

Yes, like monks are trained in, but more like real world monks that are martial artists.

“Also, f*ck monks.”

I like when my monk players take 15 minutes to decide what to do only to end up punching a bunch of times and end their turn.

I’d allow this but, I’d let it just be the flat Str score of an attack.

Monks get to have their unarmed strike to be special.

The prone stuff seems a bit OP. I’d make it a part of Crusher instead.

…most folks don’t like that…

It usually works out fine. Plus sometimes the potential of just getting a 1d4 out of it doesn’t seem worth it to waste a bonus action, especially at higher level encounters. I have other house rules that also incentivize other options too. But I’ve been blessed with players that like to keep things interesting and inventive for the fun of it rather than just cheese everything they can.

weird… am I the only one who grew up w/ ‘dual wielding is two weapons of the same kind’ table rule? hence, the dual label…

DW in real life means that you have two weapons, of any kind. It literally means that you are wielding two. Not a pair.

I think that has less to do with monks and more to do with your players.

There’s a phenomenon in TTRPGs called a Mermaids Amulet. There was an item in a game that let a mermaid breathe in air, which was the ONLY thing that indicated they normally couldn’t. In short, a rule was only shown to exist by an ability to overcome it.

Monks have the ability to make a bonus action unarmed strike after making an attack, which would be redundant if the dual wielding rules let you do that.

If you have nothing else to do with your bonus action that round then it isn’t really a waste of time, no matter how bad it is. 1 damage is sometimes all you need.

Rapier and main gauche was my first idea of dual wielding, shrug

Probably, considering the meaning of dual

Stuff like this is why I like my DM so much. He has basically a “common sense” time for stuff like this where if an action makes good common sense within the world he’s built (like a warrior type being able to punch someone after swinging a sword, or a brawler type being able to use both their fists without having to have some esoteric attribute attached to their character sheet), it’s allowed, and you can roll for it.

That is massively more powerful than a RAW normal action unarmed attack, which does a single point of damage with no other riders.

More fun

Depends on what era. In Europe, coats of plates didn’t really appear before the 13th century and full plate armor wasn’t developed until the late 14th century. Before that you mainly had people wearing chainmail and a helmet if they could get it, or gambesons (cloth armor).

At that time, weapons were still somewhat effective against armor. Spears, axes, and arrows could punch through chainmail.

When full plate armor was developed, only the very wealthy had access to it, and everyone else continued to just wear chainmail and gambesons. Fully armored knights effectively became tanks that could slash their way through all the peons.

The only realistic way the foot soldiers could stop them was to have several guys swarm an isolated knight, each grabbing a limb, and hold him down. Then they would either stab the knight through the gaps in his armor (like the eyeslot of the visor) or more likely would drag him off for ransom.

That being said, there are plenty of instances of 2 armored knights fighting each other, with them often half-swording or grappling each other to the ground and stabbing each other with daggers.

But my earlier comparison to tanks still stands. Most of the time, tanks are actually supporting infantry units, with tank v tank encounters being relatively rare. Similarly, knights spent most of their time in relatively small units killing a lot of unarmored opponents