Speaking as a martial artist with ki-adjacent magic powers, it's because it takes around 90% of character downtime to maintain the skills necessary to deliver ki in the ways D&D monks deliver it. If everyone could do it, everyone would do it. But most folks aren't into the hours of bodywork and meditation it takes to make it work.
...I have questions.
Haha. Sealing the Breath is probably the earliest "magic" skill you learn. Though the most important skills lie in shutting down similar weak points on your body....I have questions.
Because wizards are all about complex things with many moving parts! How many moving parts does your typical sword have?
The same thing they do every night, Pinkie: Try to take over the world?
Have you heard the story about the daughter who asked her mother why she cut an inch off the pot roast?
They're by and for serious Tolkien fans.
I've read that it was because Vancian seemed the easiest way to put a limiter on what spellcasters can do, and my experience playing a variety of games (and armchair-designing alternative systems) makes that seem reasonable to me. But also, Jack Vance's stories were just bitchin'. If only D&D had adopted his spell-naming style in addition to the fire-and-forget part!
Class niche protection.
But no, it's a good question! My personal perspective is that ki seems to be such a limited resource, split over/shared by so many class abilities, compared to those of other classes, which are individually usable X times per day, that those other systems are just regarded as better.People like buckets. Even more, people like putting things into buckets. Also, people do not like to have their buckets be stole.
Good question. Never gave it much thought beyond thinking that monk should be a subclass of fighter. Another thought that I had that if D&D ever added psionics back into the game, the psionic class should use ki for its powers. All classes and subclasses are a bit arbitrary if you think about them too hard.
I'm already burnt out discussing this in the recent "So, how about alignment thread":
www.enworld.org
I feel like it started off as orientalism - treating the monk as the weird foreign class because it was cool, but now is kind associated with D&D-type monks as well. Daniel Kwan in his Candlekeep Mysteries adventure "Book of Inner Alchemy" has a bit that explains ki as something that applies to all living things, just that monks have spent time with training in how to use it. I think I remember him talking in interviews that was partially a goal to bring it to a more culturally accurate view of ki.
Not sure if you were playing during the 4e era, but that edition did classify monks as psionic but had them different mechanically than the other psionic classes. I actually like how Level Up did their monk equivalent (Adepts). Since a lot of classes get an "exertion pool" for features they just had some of the typical features associated with ki-use rely on the exertion and they get more in their pool than other classes
This one is actually pretty easily explained. See, long before Stranger Things, before Critical Role, even before Horrible Nerds Comedy Show, broader popular culture had really one and only one primary interaction with Dungeons & Dragons: alignment chart memes.
Chainsword-wielding wizard go!
It's got to be more than that. I've noticed the vehemence since long before the Internet as we know it was a Thing.
Anything pre-internet is One-True-Wayism directly linked to "Because Gygax"
In my interpretation, because that doesn't actually happen.
