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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8695496" data-attributes="member: 18">I take your point (not invalid) but I think the key difference is "good enough" factor of those vs. the weird hyperspecificity of the Monk (which isn't even a D&D specificity really).D&D Wizards are good enough for any "book-learnin'"-type wizard. I mean, yeah we could get into arguments about Vancian casting, but the problem is Vancian casting, not the Wizard class. If you want to be "A Harry Potter", it's good enough (assuming you don't throw D&D entirely out the window because of Vancian casting).Warlocks are great and loosely match an absolute ton of existing fiction, not ultra-precisely, but "Person who makes a pact with a dangerous being to gain power and zaps people and maybe has a cool magic sword/familiar/tome" is absolutely a viable common archetype. It's very much good enough. It's not hyperspecific.Paladins and Clerics created, by sheer force of D&D's will and influence, archetypes, which survive and are popular to this day. Sure, in 1970-whatever, they were new and weird and not existing archetypes. By 2000, they were common default archetypes in Western videogames, Japanese and Korean videogames (who incredibly enthusiastically embraced them - moreso than the West even, especially Korea!), tabletop wargames, other TTRPGs, manga and anime, and whilst they're still rare, they'd started appear in Western fantasy literature. If you ask a random 20-something who is at least a little bit of a gamer (video or tabletop), or a fantasy nerd what a "Paladin" is, they're going to describe a D&D Paladin (or a WoW one, which is honestly basically the same thing - to be fair WoW Paladins are like 50% Paladin/50% Cleric).Rangers are very much D&D's crude and ineffective attempt to emulate a long-existing and very popular archetype. 1E/2E's take was too hyperspecific for sure, but since then, it's been getting less so. 5E messed up by force-including spells, which don't fit the common fantasy archetype, and by making it so hard to play Beastmaster in a fun way initially, but the concept is absolutely sound. They're "good enough". Just barely.Interesting you missed Bards - they're similar to Paladin and Clerics, in that D&D largely created them by force of will, but they're now an incredibly popular archetype and appear in all the same places as Paladins and Clerics, except they appear more often in Western fantasy literature.Monk are, on the other hand, haven't been been embraced to the same degree. Even when the archetype appears, it's usually NOT called Monk, but rather Martial Artist or the like (c.f. Lost Ark for a recent example), and is broader than the D&D archetype. We see that even with ENworld's own AD&D 5E, where Monk becomes Adept. The problem is Monk isn't good enough. Monk's design is too hyperspecific to Chinese Shaolin Monk. Something like Cleric is pretty specific, but it's also a bizarre fantasy archetype. Monk is just a recapitulation of a bunch of bunch of Shaolin mythology. And the problem is, Martial Artist-type characters are staggeringly popular in pop-culture. But almost none of them are monks, let alone Shaolin monks. And the Monk design for 5E is "Shaolin Monk", and then it lets you layer stuff on top, but you can't NOT be a Shaolin Monk. And very few people are into that, whereas "Martial Artist with fantastical powers" is one of the most common fantasy archetypes of the last 20 years. It's just bad design on WotC's part.</blockquote>

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