The Power of "NO". Banned Races and Classes?

[MoonSong]

He's the guy with a sword standing in front of the tree, next to the woman.

And I bet the guy next to him holding the quarterstaff is little John

 

[TwoSix]

He's the guy with a sword standing in front of the tree, next to the woman.

Oh yea, now I see the green clothes. I guess he blended into the tree the first time I looked, like a good ranger should.

 

[Nergal Pendragon]

And I bet the guy next to him holding the quarterstaff is little John

I think so!

 

[Elf Witch]

Elf Witch I agree with what you said. Trying to play an elf in a human only campaign wouldn't fly and was not what I was talking about. The DM isn't banning elves simply because he doesn't like elves but has a very specific game in mind. No problems.

Where I tend to fall is when someone had fairly generic fantasy setting, even one that is very detailed, and bans something because he or she either doesn't like it or can't conceive of how to compromise. At that point, big warning bells are all going off in my head that I am probably a poor fit for that table.

It is not because I am a control freak DM. after 12 years of powergamers in 3rd ed a few weeks in 4E before I binned it I got sick of the min maxing and most of it was due to player options. Feats, powers, ability to easily aquire magical items and combo them with feats and/or powers. Just makes DMing a pain in the ass. Basically you spend hours developing a world and story and the players like turning up with some cheeseball combo and ruining it IMHO.

There's a large difference between "monastic order" and "monk." Monastic orders often had large numbers of members who were actually not monks; the monks themselves tended to be people who had taken vows of poverty, celibacy, nonviolence, etc. A monk was ultimately defined as someone choosing to live the closest to what was considered the most pious life, which typically came with some pretty heavy standards.

And, yes, we can have fighting monks... but the only sources to model those on are Eastern sources. Otherwise, the closest you come is the holy knights, and those are modeled by paladins.

Thus, why DnD monks are Eastern-themed.

Edit: Also, look up the original stories; Friar Tuck didn't actually do much fighting. That's a modern addition to the story.

As a player, seeing a DM with a shopping list of banned stuff does set off alarm bells in my heed. If the DM is, in my view, micromanaging the campaign to this degree, it's a sign that my playstyle will likely conflict and I should be asking a lot more questions before joining the group.

Hussar I know what you mean. If I get a long list of banned things from a DM I have never played with before I will sit down and talk to him and ask why. Because a long list sets alarm bells off in my head. In my experience a DM who micromanages his campaign world that rigidly will also usually end up trying to micromanage the PCs as well. Usually you can get an idea from them by just talking if they tell me well I am going for this flavor and that is why I don't think certain things will fit I am usually okay with that. But if they go on how this is broken and I hate this and I will never allow this in my game ever then no I don't think I am a goof fit for them.

One thing that really irks me is a DM who says no I don't allow this because I have seen other players abuse it and ruin campaigns that make my job harder. First of all I am not other players and why should I be penalized because of bad players and second you are telling me you lack trust in your players. I am a big believer in trust at the table.

Zarndaar I certainly understand your frustrations. I have found that players who do this are players that I don't want to DM they take to much effort because you have to check everything they do. To me it is just easier to ban them instead of the the things that in other players hands is not used to break the game.

As for monks I think there is a lack of imagination going on if you can't see beyond the eastern trapping. In a Kalamar game one of the players played a monk. The DM reskinned some of the flavor not the actual abilities he made monks come from the temples of the God of three strengths. Clerics represented one aspect the divine will of the god. Monks represented the strength of the body and psionics represented the the strength of the mind.

In my campaign monk style fighting comes from the elves they train their minds and their bodies to be weapons and some have taught this skill to the other races.

I can understand if your campaign is a historical fantasy and you basically want say Rome with magic. But I don't understand limiting yourself in a fantasy setting simply because there is no historical precedent for fighting monks in western civilization. Maybe in this world there is. There are a lot of disconnect in most generic fantasy gaming worlds where you have paladins and fighters in plate armor fighting alongside dex based light weapons and armor. If you can have a swashbuckler aka musketeer fighting along side a knight in heavy armor then why is it so hard to imagine and unarmed fighter fighting alongside them?

 

[Nergal Pendragon]

As for monks I think there is a lack of imagination going on if you can't see beyond the eastern trapping. In a Kalamar game one of the players played a monk. The DM reskinned some of the flavor not the actual abilities he made monks come from the temples of the God of three strengths. Clerics represented one aspect the divine will of the god. Monks represented the strength of the body and psionics represented the the strength of the mind.

In my campaign monk style fighting comes from the elves they train their minds and their bodies to be weapons and some have taught this skill to the other races.

I can understand if your campaign is a historical fantasy and you basically want say Rome with magic. But I don't understand limiting yourself in a fantasy setting simply because there is no historical precedent for fighting monks in western civilization. Maybe in this world there is. There are a lot of disconnect in most generic fantasy gaming worlds where you have paladins and fighters in plate armor fighting alongside dex based light weapons and armor. If you can have a swashbuckler aka musketeer fighting along side a knight in heavy armor then why is it so hard to imagine and unarmed fighter fighting alongside them?

That's just it: We're not the ones who limited the class. Reskinning a monk has always been easy, as has been altering their weapon proficiencies; I've reskinned them before to be Egyptian holy warriors and given them Egyptian-themed weapon profs.

The issue is that WotC chose to limit it. When they did a fighting monk, they did it based off of Eastern monks and chose weapons that are primarily seen as Eastern. And made that a base class. And someone made the claim that there is a historical basis for it based on Western monks (which, there specifically isn't; Friar Tuck doesn't count because he's known for repeatedly violating his own vows).

My comments are primarily to explain why the base class is the way it is. Not to say it's a good thing. If it were a good thing, we wouldn't be arguing about it.

 

[Celebrim]

The awesome thing about this picture is that, besides not being the monk or the woman, I have no idea which one is Robin Hood.

In my opinion, none of them are, but I can tell you which of the characters is called Robin Hood.

Seriously, the modern movies rarely have anything to do with Robin Hood beyond name dropping. It's really just laziness. They are creating completely new stories about completely different things, but they don't want to try to stand on their own so they do a bunch of name dropping and allusion to powerful older myths in order to basically market what might otherwise be seen as incredibly cheesy.

Laziness is the least damning explanation.

When they don't make me sad, it's because they are incredibly comic - most often unintentionally.

For example, Kevin Costner's Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves trivializes and simplifies the historic story by removing from it Prince John and his agent - the mercenary Sir Guy du Gisborne - who is traditionally one of Robin's main rivals. They do this by promoting up the Sheriff of Nottingham from being a corrupt flunky to the main evil antagonist. They pick the Sheriff however mainly because its the Sheriff that is famous from parodies, comedies, spoofs and light-hearted children's entertainment as the more buffoonish character among the villains - a characterization reinforced by these comic portrayals and in which he's usually given the larger (or sole) role. As a result, they pick a buffoon for their main antagonist. And the character never rises above that despite this supposedly being a drama.

Worst of all, they apparently have no idea what the title sheriff means or what role they originally played in English government. Sheriff is just a contraction of 'Shire Reeve', where Reeve is a person that serves criminal warrants. The Shire system and its reeves were instituted by the King in a direct attack on the independence of the nobles, and as such were hated by the aristocracy. The Shire Reeves were appointed directly by the king from out of the commoner class, precisely because they would then be entirely dependent on the favor of the king for their power. This means that a Shire Reeve plotting with the nobles to usurp the king and take the throne has got to be the most ridiculous political power play in the history of literature.

And none of this is helped by Alan Rickman's over the top acting (so well suited for Snape), because it just makes the thing look all the more buffoonish. Neither Rickman nor Costner are naturally athletic and clearly neither had ever held a sword in their life, so the ultimate climatic fight between them looks like it was staged for slapstick comedy, and then performed by two rubes with no gifts for physical comedy, with the two spending more time tripping over props than actually crossing blades and never looking like they are anything but overacting and uncertain of what to do next while doing it. Gone our the days when you couldn't call yourself an actor if you hadn't spent at least a year in fencing classes so you wouldn't look like an idiot on a stage. At least most modern movies generally put their actors through an intense short course to try to achieve something of the same effect (at least to the eyes of someone who also hasn't held a sword). Costner clearly didn't even bother to do that.

Anyway, enough of Robin Hood. It was never really that relevant outside the apparent assertion that Friar Tuck justified the inclusion of the class. I guess I'm going to have to actually explain myself now why I think D&D Monks don't fit in my world, lest people thank it's mostly because I'm an occidental history purist that doesn't like peanut butter in my chocolate. I think Hussar does a decent job of justifying the inclusion of Monks in his setting. I'll try to justify why they aren't in mine in a later post.

 

[Elf Witch]

That's just it: We're not the ones who limited the class. Reskinning a monk has always been easy, as has been altering their weapon proficiencies; I've reskinned them before to be Egyptian holy warriors and given them Egyptian-themed weapon profs.

The issue is that WotC chose to limit it. When they did a fighting monk, they did it based off of Eastern monks and chose weapons that are primarily seen as Eastern. And made that a base class. And someone made the claim that there is a historical basis for it based on Western monks (which, there specifically isn't; Friar Tuck doesn't count because he's known for repeatedly violating his own vows).

My comments are primarily to explain why the base class is the way it is. Not to say it's a good thing. If it were a good thing, we wouldn't be arguing about it.

I don't agree with a lot of the flavor that WOTC has put into their classes or the flavor TSR did for some. Thanks to TSR making rogues thieves we have that annoying legacy where so many players think I have to play a rogue as a kleptomaniac. I thinks druids of all editions have the worst flavor ever they don't in any way really represent what the druids were.

But as a DM you don't have use the flavor. Yes I would like to see the eastern flavor stripped out of the PHB monk and made more generic. Save the eastern flavor for a splat on an eastern style setting.

 

[Nergal Pendragon]

Worst of all, they apparently have no idea what the title sheriff means or what role they originally played in English government. Sheriff is just a contraction of 'Shire Reeve', where Reeve is a person that serves criminal warrants. The Shire system and its reeves were instituted by the King in a direct attack on the independence of the nobles, and as such were hated by the aristocracy. The Shire Reeves were appointed directly by the king from out of the commoner class, precisely because they would then be entirely dependent on the favor of the king for their power. This means that a Shire Reeve plotting with the nobles to usurp the king and take the throne has got to be the most ridiculous political power play in the history of literature.

To add even more humor to it: Prince John is known as a villain primarily because he tried to enforce taxes on the rich. Thus, having him as the ultimate bad guy means that Robin Hood was fighting for the wealthy.

I don't agree with a lot of the flavor that WOTC has put into their classes or the flavor TSR did for some. Thanks to TSR making rogues thieves we have that annoying legacy where so many players think I have to play a rogue as a kleptomaniac. I thinks druids of all editions have the worst flavor ever they don't in any way really represent what the druids were.

But as a DM you don't have use the flavor. Yes I would like to see the eastern flavor stripped out of the PHB monk and made more generic. Save the eastern flavor for a splat on an eastern style setting.

Oh, druids are not based on real-world druids. They're based on hippies. I bet that suddenly makes everything about the class make a lot more sense

I agree; they really should just save the flavor for the settings. But, something tells me they won't. After all, FR is the base setting.

 

[Mercule]

Campaign based. For Greyhawk, I use what was in the 1980s boxed set. For Eberron, what was in the 3.5 hard cover.

For my home brew, I decided halls and gnomes were redundant, and gnomes got kept because they have a point. I added hobgoblins and trollborn (from 2E Viking handbook) as standard races, but you won't find most of the newer races. They just don't fit with the established setting and I don't much like kitchen sink settings.

Regardless of setting, it's explicitly known that any gnome PC that plays with machinery, especially in a comic fashion, will receive an immediate smiting, most likely in an out of game fashion. I wouldn't even consider playing in a group in which this was an issue. Halflings that act like kender have a lighter version of that ban. If I ran a Dragon Lance game, I'd allow kender PCs, but tinker gnomes would be off camera.

For classes, I like psionics and have included them forever in my home brew. Rangers don't have a TWF option. Most Western type classes are okay. Anything that's Wuxia leaning doesn't really for in my home game. I wouldn't be opposed to ruining an OA game, though.

No gunpowder. No aliens. No Far Realms or Lovecraftian horrors.

 

[Dungeoneer]

That's just it: We're not the ones who limited the class. Reskinning a monk has always been easy, as has been altering their weapon proficiencies; I've reskinned them before to be Egyptian holy warriors and given them Egyptian-themed weapon profs.

The issue is that WotC chose to limit it. When they did a fighting monk, they did it based off of Eastern monks and chose weapons that are primarily seen as Eastern. And made that a base class. And someone made the claim that there is a historical basis for it based on Western monks (which, there specifically isn't; Friar Tuck doesn't count because he's known for repeatedly violating his own vows).

My comments are primarily to explain why the base class is the way it is. Not to say it's a good thing. If it were a good thing, we wouldn't be arguing about it.

I think this conversation would go a lot smoother if you stopped stating your opinion and preferences as fact. It's not a 'fact' that Friar Tuck doesn't count as a monk. It's not a 'fact' that most people think of him using a sword. It's not a 'fact' that the 'monk' in D&D is Eastern-themed. And it's certainly not a 'fact' that fighting monks can't be a trope in Western fantasy/folklore/literature. You obviously have strong opinions on all of these points, but others could feel different, and clearly do.

Here are some examples of ACTUAL facts:
- There were monks in Western Europe from at least the 1st century AD.
- The Teutonic Knights were recognized by the Pope under the 'Order of Augustine' aka they were fighting monks.
- The Knights Hospitaller were monks charged with defending the holy land and which would escort pilgrims while armed.
- The opening of the Jesuit charter begins, "Whoever desires to serve as a soldier of god..."
- Founder Ignatious Loyola was a knight and is the patron saint of soldiers.
- There were monks in D&D starting with the 1975 Blackmoor supplement.
- The monk class predates both the bard and the druid.
- The monk appeared in the first edition of the Player's Handbook.

It is my OPINION that the monk is about as core as you can get. It is my OPINION that a fighting monk archetype has some basis in the western cultural canon. It is my OPINION that talking about 'history' in a game that involves armed dwarven clerics is ridiculous. But it is also my opinion that at your table, you can ban monks. You can also ban elves with pointy ears. Just don't ask me to play.