Ascetic Rogue Mini-Handbook
By James Raviolos
0.1 Introduction
Ascetic rogue is a feat from complete adventurer that combines some class features of the rogue and monk classes. It requires you to have improved unarmed strike and sneak attack, both easily attained with one level in each of your classes. To reward you for using stunning fist and not sneaking a target, the feat gives you a minor boost to your stunning fist DC when also
delivering a sneak attack. A minor boost, but where the feat really shines is in second paragraph: your levels in rogue and monk stack for the purpose of determining your unarmed damage. That means that if you spend a single level in the monk class and a feat, your monk1/rogue19 build just got an unarmed damage of 2d10! And that's only when not using unarmed damage boosters (increasing size, using feats, etc).
For those of you that actually read the table description, yeah, that's right! It says right there that monk and rogue levels add for the purpose of determining your sneak attack dice. In this handbook I am going to assume that the feat lets you stack monk and rogue for both sneak attack and unarmed damage. You however should consult your DM for this matter. Also note that if you go with the obvious optimal choice of using one or two monk levels and the rest into rogue, you are only going to lose 1 dice of sneak attack, so it's not that big of a deal. Last but not least, ask if you can swap ascetic rogue for one of your monk bonus feats at levels 1, 2 or 6 (look at the special part of the ascetic stalker's description in complete scoundrel, page 71).