Flurry of Blows Damage Calculation

Question

Flurry of Blows

You can make unarmed strikes with supernatural speed, using your fists, kicks, and head-­butts.** You can use your attack action to make two unarmed attacks*. If you haven’t used your whole move for the turn, you can move between the attacks.

You can spend 1 ki point to make an additional unarmed attack as a part of the same action*. You can decide to spend this point after seeing the result of the previous attack.

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Unarmed Strike

As a result of your training with martial arts, your unarmed strike is considered to be a finesse weapon that deals 1d6 bludgeoning damage on a hit.

Your unarmed strike damage increases as you gain levels, as noted in the Unarmed Strike column in the Monk table.

Your unarmed strikes count as being magical for the purpose of overcoming resistance and immunities.

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Both from D&D Next 09/20/13

Does that mean that a normal attack using Flurry of Blows is 1d6+Dex + 1d6+Dex at lvl 1 and using Ki can increase it an additional 1d6?

or

Does Flurry of Blows act like Two-­Weapon Fighting and which makes the second hit not add the dex; making your normal attack 1d6+Dex + 1d6 + 1d6 per Ki used?

or

Do you use a Ki to activate Flurry of Blows to make your attack 1d6+Dex + 1d6 per Ki used?

or

Is there something else i am missing?

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• The Bold and Italic parts in Flurry of Blows makes me think it is this one or the second one.

Answer 1

For the basic Flurry at level 1, you make two separate attack rolls (1d20+Dex/Str+1 each). With a Ki Point, you make yet a third (or fourth) attack at the same bonus. Each attack that successfully hits deals 1d6+Str/Dex damage. Because they see an unarmed attack, even with a higher damage threshold from being a monk, as an inferior weapon to dual wielding they have opted not to treat it like an off-hand weapon because monks are also considered to use any part of their body equally during the attack - just some part finally hits for damage if the roll is high enough.

Answer 2

You make three separate attacks, with independent attack rolls. Every attack has the same damage roll.

First of all, the part saying using your fists, kicks, and head-­butts is just a fluff text. Thus, it does not interfere with the game mechanics.

Basically, when you make additional attacks using Extra Attack or Flurry of Blows, all the attacks are done separately. With Flurry of Blows and no Ki points spent, you already make two attacks on the row, which must hit and damage the target separately. This is similar to Extra Attack applied only to your unarmed strike. You attack the enemy/enemies twice. If you succeed both times, you hit both times. If you succeed only once, you hit only once. The other was blocked, parried, missed, or whatever the DM says so.

Then what happens when you spend a Ki point? It just increases the number of attacks you can make within that action. So, you make all the three attacks separately. Three attack rolls, all done separately, and damaging the target independent to others.

Distinguishing between adding the damage and accumulating separate attacks is important because sometimes it matters. For example, the feat Heavy Armor Mastery reduces incoming damage from every attack by your constitution bonus. If a 1st-level Monk successfully lands two unarmed strikes via Flurry of Blows to a character with that feat, damage reduction is done twice, and one of them may even fail to damage the target.

Regarding the damage, unlike two-weapon fighting, you commence all your attacks with the same weapon (namely, your improved unarmed strike), so you apply the modifier to every attack. At level 1, all your attacks have the damage of 1d6+Dex. Mod. (Or Strength Modifier, if you decided to go classic and raise Strength rather than Dexterity.)