Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheCosmicKid" data-source="post: 6763183" data-attributes="member: 6683613">Categorical denial doesn't advance a conversation any. And I'm afraid it's a bit more of a balancing act between generality and specificity than you say.  If the designers really just wanted to cover as many character concepts as possible, they wouldn't bother with classes.  They'd do something freeform like the Fate system and say, "Here are some guidelines for how much damage you can do and so on.  Work out for yourself how you describe what you're doing."  The classes exist on the theory that writing specific rules for specific character concepts makes those concepts more distinctive and exciting than they would otherwise be.  Rather than just give you generic rules and let you call yourself a monk, they give you monk-specific superpowers!  You can catch arrows and paralyze people with pressure points and astral project!  How cool!  As long as you want to be a monk.  If you don't want to be a monk, you're left with the task of making up ad hoc reasons why your character can do these things, or else writing your own class.No, of course the rules don't absolutely limit your monk characters to being in-game monks.  Nobody's going to come to your house and take your PHB away if they aren't.  But if you speak of intent, then yes, the intent of the monk class is very obviously to reflect mystical martial artist characters in the style of wuxia films, anime, and other East Asian action-adventure media.  Like I said, the designers did not sit down and put together some fluffless mechanics and then just slap on the kung fu flavor as an example.  The intent from the beginning was to write a class for kung fu characters; the mechanics flowed from that.  And if you disagree with this, don't just say deny it with a "no".  Tell me where you think the collection of monk class features came from, if it wasn't Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.He's aware of a category distinction between the sorts of people that the PHB calls "fighters" and other sorts of people.  Per these rules, every character you build with fighter levels is going to trigger this class feature, no matter how you fluff him or her.  To pick up your analogy, the rules seem to demand that every such character has some classical training.  I thought that's what you were arguing against.</blockquote>

Verification