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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4984068" data-attributes="member: 4937">Yes, considerably dumber. If you'd bothered to read, you would have seen I'd already briefly answered this entirely predictable objection.To begin with, your argument seems to be that if I accept 'fantastic' things then I can no longer object to 'unrealistic' things.  This draws a false contrast between 'fantastic' and 'unrealistic', because once I accept the premise of the 'fantastic' world where 40' long firebreathing lizards exist and people can conjure fire from thin air by mumbling the right words and even where I accept people's 'kung fu' is strong, I can still object to a lack of 'realism' within such constraints.In the case of the open-hand fighting monk, I can point out that back in the real world were we get all the stories, myths, and ideas that we are creating our fantasy from, the idea that someone with strong 'kung fu' is not disadvantaged when forced to fight with only their bare hands just doesn't exist.  It doesn't exist in wuxia.  It doesn't exist in eastern martial arts.  It just isn't found, because even amongst people who believed strongly that by practicing kung fu you could do magical, mystical things, they still understood that someone with equally strong kung fu but also wielding a sword, spear, or other weapon had the advantage.Even if you believe and accept that someone can move with magical speed, float above the ground with the power of their ki, or strike with such force to break bricks, you still find yourself led to believe by the internal logic of the setting that said person ought to be able to move a sword with magical speed, float above the ground with the power of their ki, and strike more heavily holding a weapon than they would with their bare hands.  You might well believe someone's kung fu let them beat non-heroic armed and armored individuals with only their bare hands, but any familiarity with actual Shaolin, Kung-Fu, Karate, Jute-Kwan-Do, or whatever and the myths around them would lead to you to think being armed was better than not being armed.  The monk in 1e was recognized as badly designed almost universally and immediately, but it is this badly designed peice of crap that created the whole 'unarmed attacks ought to be better than armed attacks' nonsense.But it's more dumb than that.  The basic problem here is that reliance on arms and armor represent a serious drawback.  Arms and armor are expensive.  They can break.  They can be dropped.  They can be a hinderance.  They are heavy.  They give away that you are prepared for battle.  If some dude could compete on equal terms in a fight without weapons with the guy who had weapons, then why would anyone use weapons at all?  In such a world, where you could do just as well without them, who would bother to invent weapons?  In such a game, where you could do just as well in combat without weapons as with them, why would anyone play the martial class that had the disadvantage of needing breakable, theftable, dropable, encumbering implements?Great.  That's believable in the light of fantasy.  What's not believable is the expectation that some dude next to him with equally strong kung fu, but also a magical spear can't use that same kung fu thrust to skewer said dragon like a shish-kabob.  So the entire idea that you can somehow balance an unarmed fighter against an armed fighter in any granular game system is just dumb, as is any complaint that your unarmed fighter can't compete with armed fighters.  If the Monk is a subpar fighter, that's the only way it can be balanced.Right.  Because not needing to breathe, eat, sleep, or drink and being immortal and completely immune to pain, poison, disease, nausea, energy drain, ability damage, compulsion and virtually every other thing (off the top of my head I don't remember the whole list) doesn't involve anything mystical at all.</blockquote>

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