I hate monks

I just don't like em.
They just don't seem to fit.
I am going to take them out of my games.

If you want to play a guy that fights with martial arts, you can take a fighter, ranger or barbarian and take the "combat martial arts" feats from d20 Modern.

In my games the monk is getting replaced with the Archivist.

I'm curious.

Do you dislike them for mechanics reasons? Flavor reasons? Both? Something else entirely?

I'm not a huge monk fan myself, but that's simply because the class doesn't appeal to me, not out of any intrinsic dislike for it.

Both actually. The mechanics never sat right with me, and the flavor never seemed to fly. Even in wild sword and sorcery where you have lazers and spells. Its too Kung Fu Movie.

jester47 said:

I just don't like em.

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Good for you! I don't like them either.

What upsets me is that I loved the 2E monk. Maybe it's nostalgia, but I feel that the old monk wasn't as strait-jacketed into a cliched Jet Li/David Carradine/Shaolin temple flavour.

Try as I might, I just can't work up a pleasing monk character concept. It always seems to boil down to picking the least cloying Jackie Chan stereotype, then squeezing it to fit the PHB flavour.

Hairfoot said:

What upsets me is that I loved the 2E monk. Maybe it's nostalgia, but I feel that the old monk wasn't as strait-jacketed into a cliched Jet Li/David Carradine/Shaolin temple flavour.

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I originally posted the following several years ago, but it seems relevant now.

Let me tell you about Jeremiah MacCree. Jeremiah is a human who was born to one of the very few human families in a primarily dwarven mining community. Like all members of the community, he grew up working the mines, digging for precious stones and gems. He got to know the earth and the stone as well as any non-dwarf possibly could.

He was also raised in the dwarven faith, in which earth and stone are themselves something to be revered, to be honored far beyond the worship granted to any distant god. The spirits of stone were very real, this religion said, and would grant boons to those who pleased them.

Jeremiah learned to call upon those spirits in very specific ways, ways that only the greatest dwarven warriors of the community had done before.

Jeremiah could call upon the strength of the rock to harden his fists, striking bare-handed crushing blows that would crumple metal and shatter rock more effectively than any hammer. He learned to sense his opponents' actions through the very earth around him, granting him an ability to sense incoming blows and avoid them where much "faster" warriors could not. As his skills improved further still, he learned to channel the strength of the rock through him, to purge his body of toxins and eventually even to heal wounds. He learned to allow the earth beneath his feet to speed his steps, and even to transport through it to another location in a matter of an instant. He learned to partially anchor himself to nearby surfaces, to slow his falls.

And so on, and so forth.

Mechanically, he's a monk. Culturally, and in terms of image, there's nothing even vaguely eastern about him.

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As I said, I'm not a huge fan of the monk, but I don't hate them, and I have played them. And while I agree they have some issues, I don't feel that being "straight-jacketed" into the Eastern aesthetic is one of them. It takes a bit of work to break them out of it, but as the above shows, it can certainly be done.

The first monk I ever played was a humble travelling wiseman, Kwai Chang Cain with another name.


The last monk I played was an arrogant bastard, a warrior seeking to perfect himself as a living weapon.

Monks arent any more straightjacketed than paladins are. The horrendeous multiclassing restrictions on both classes does a lot to ruin many, many concepts that could be built with multiclassing them. I think monks are great. The 3.5 opened things up a bit for them, tho a little bit moreflexibility wouldnt hurt. Fighter/monks can be absolute terrors.

And just to throw a little more gason the fire, Ive always considered monks to be psionic, and give the class the psionic descriptor in my game. Its like a very strictly defined unarmed psychic warrior. Psionics=ki is amost a no brainer for me.

jester47 said:

They just don't seem to fit.

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I agree with this, utterly and completely

I disagreed since the start of 3rd edition about having the Monk class in the core PHB. Why was it chosen to be there? Perhaps because they wanted to inherit the class from older editions, making some old gamer happy? Perhaps because they wanted to attract kung-fu movie fans to D&D? Perhaps because it was politically correct to have an asian option (what about the other continents then)?

The worst part isn't the class itself, but the implications that its inclusion in the core has on EVERY setting: unless the setting specifically takes them out, you have to allocate them a place in the world. Hence, you must have monasteries or monk orders for example. Not to mention aberrations such as monk gnomes or orcs or mind flayers or drow, since D&D is "about options"...

The only concept that I may easily accept for a monk is that of a traveller from far away that stumbles on the current continent, a thing you can play once.

Otherwise IMO two things could be done:

1) Leave the Monk in oriental settings only, which are wonderful in their own terms, and where the Monk fits 100%.

2) If you want a multicultural setting, hell make it really multicultural and allow other oriental classes as well. No sense that _only_ monks should be in. But then you have to incorporate oriental myth and religions as well, and not just trying to "stick" the classes on a western mythology that doesn't match.

This of course has nothing to do with the class as written, which works fine. The mechanics are ok, the flavor is great, but it doesn't fit with the rest. Think of reading Tolkien and at some point Frodo is ambushed by taek-won-do goblins, what a rot

Li Shenron said:

Otherwise IMO two things could be done:

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Or 3) Change the flavor of the class to remove the Shao Lin feel, as I've done above.

Or even if you don't want to create your own mystical tradition as I did, lots of cultures have martial traditions. The Asian martial arts are the most famous, but they're far from the only ones.

Mouseferatu said:

Or even if you don't want to create your own mystical tradition as I did, lots of cultures have martial traditions. The Asian martial arts are the most famous, but they're far from the only ones.

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Yes but the monk flavor (and to some extent, even the mechanics) are pretty much built around the oriental martial traditions.

Western unarmed martial traditions which I know are limited to ancient greek wrestling. Otherwise it's armed combat.

Li Shenron said:

The worst part isn't the class itself, but the implications that its inclusion in the core has on EVERY setting: unless the setting specifically takes them out, you have to allocate them a place in the world. Hence, you must have monasteries or monk orders for example. Not to mention aberrations such as monk gnomes or orcs or mind flayers or drow, since D&D is "about options"...

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I fail to see how the monk implies anything more problematic than do the druid, barbarian, or paladin -- each of those is a cultural archetype that require some force to get into a generic setting, and each one can feel a little strange when you start throwing gnomes and halflings into the role. How is the monk any different, or worse?

What I will agree with is the PHB should have included just the 'core' classes (i.e. Fighter, Rogue, Cleric and Wizard). Then again, i think it should also have been 64 pages and been the gateway drug to D&D crack addiction, but that's a different issue altogether.