I'm gearing up for a 2-person campaign (my wife and myself, with myself as DM). The party will be two characters, with occasional hirelings/NPCs. One of the characters will be a DMPC (we've run one similar game in the past, but with 3 DMPCs, and it turned out well).
I don't want to run 3/4 of a party as the DM – even though it worked in the past, I had to struggle to give the PCs definite personalities, keep DM/character knowledge separate, and keep from railroading my player.
To simplify things, I'm going to limit the 'core' group to two characters, each of them a Gestalt. I'm going to try to encourage my wife to pick up the primary melee role, with my character filling in healing/secondary combat (ranger/cleric possibly).
To this end, and for stylistic/storyline reasons, I'd like my wife's character to be a gestalt containing a monk.
This will leave our party somewhat weak in combat.
To counteract this, I'd like to change the monk for her gestalt to have full BAB. I don't want my wife to get the opinion that monks are horribly powerful. What can I take away from the class to maintain it's balance? My going-in position is that the removal of flurry of blows would be a big step, but I'm not certain.
Best Answer
It wasn't gestalt, but I was in a game where a monk was given full BAB. He behaved like a proper melee character. I would give them full BAB in the future and not bother imposing a penalty.