I had a bit of an idea about H2H damage when unarmed, to allow more scale with item progression, but ... It might actually be something that would be overpowered, abused, underpowered, or require too much work to 'fix items' or something...
What if the damage of your unarmed attacks was based on the armor bonus of the gloves in your hands? So basically, your gloves are your weapons! That would make cloth weapons less effective then unarmed combat (Akin to using a rusty dagger!) as it adds padding to the hits. Usually a good idea for Sparring (cushion the damage to not harm your fellow monk) but when it comes to fighting real monsters: Leather and Studded Leather is where its at. Nice, hard protection for your fists to allow you to hit harder, and studs to add even more to the injury! Now, figuring the right formula to transform AC from gloves into damage would require some work, and there are items open to All that have tremendous Hand AC... but if those are only found on Adepts or difficult quests, then I wouldn't see much of a difference to a monk doing an adept for a pair of good gloves, or a Fighter doing an adept for that awesome sword of trolling hate.
That would allow unarmed combat to scale with gear: Better hand armor usually means better gear in general. So, high end content gloves could allow a Monk to fight on par to other DPS classes, whereas if he decides to put weapons into his hands, he can use the hardness proposed by the weapons (Claws, force fields, staves, clubs, punching daggers, etc) as a means to be more able to Block/Parry/Riposte without risk of bringing harm to his own hands, thus being more tanky. Lore-wide, that would make much sense!
