Do we really need Monks?

[Knight Otu]

I don't think the monk is a necessary class - but I also think it can be more than just an oriental class. I have played a lizardman spirit warrior in a pbp here, listening to hardly understandable warnings from spirits, requested minor aid from them, such as healing from a spirit of life... a normal monk with the flavor changed. Unfortunately, with a hiatus on my behalf, and increased workload for the DM, the game pretty much died, and I couldn't develop the character to the depth I wanted.

 

[fusangite]

There are no centaurs in British Myth.
There are no Frost Giants in Roman Myth.
There are no Paladins in Greek Myth.
There are no polythestic religions in Crusader myth (save the Infidels).
There are no druids in Germanic Myth.
There are no dwarves in Spanish Myth.
There are no mummies in Norse Myth.

I think you're really failing to comprehend how unified European has been for the past 2000 years. Many of the creatures for which diverse origins are described were available in bestiaries and encyclopedias read from present-day Ireland to Turkey. Many D&D monsters got their start in books like Pliny's Natural History and Strabo's Geography that were circulated from one end of Europe to the other starting anywhere from 100AD to 1100AD. You can read poems and commentaries paying tribute to Greek and Roman mythology written in 6th century Ireland or 9th century Germany. The names of Norse gods were known from Kiev to Ireland by 1100AD. Writings of Romans about British druids were preserved and studied in libraries and monasteries throughout the Roman world. In the first century BC, the Roman theologian Varro was attempting to theorize whether Egyptian, Greek, Roman, etc. gods of the same thing were the same god.

Not only was shared European culture and myth an actual reality; it was a self-conscious one. Europeans understood themselves to be a diverse group that was nonetheless a unity.

To say that assyrian and jewish myth is "euro" because of settlers from west (or the crusades allow for arabian myth) is a far stretch. By that locic, most aisan myth is possible because of the Mongols and the Silk Road.

But that's not the case. Jews lived in European cities. They lived all over Europe. Many if not most Jews were Europeans. In 100AD, the largest single Jewish population centre in the world was Rome. But the real reason these things are not comparable is that the written record shows thousands of instances of European Christian citations of Jewish sources from the 4th century onwards and basically no European citations of Chinese sources until the 17th century.

I'm not making an argument about geographical association here. I'm making an argument about what actually happened.

D&D is vaguely euro, but it really is culture neutral.

Then if it is, it should act like it by providing more than one Oriental class in the core rules or more than 10 Oriental monsters in the Monster Manual. Again, I think you miss the point of what I am saying. I'm not saying D&D should be Eurocentric. What I'm saying is that if D&D wants to include Oriental things in its core rules, it should include enough material to support these things. D&D should either stick with European archetypes in its core rules and consign all Oriental material to a supplement or it should add enough Oriental material to the core rules that if people want to play Asian-style archetypes, they will not end up being totally out of place.

 

[Ranger REG]

Heh. I started a thread like this one about two months ago, only this one's nastier.

Yeah, the monk is optional. Optional just like the paladin, bard & ranger. There are some settings where you'd have to use a shoehorn to fit the monk in and others where you'd have to use a jackhammer. In other settings you could have the same problems introducing the paladin.

IOW, it's up to the DM and his own campaign setting he's running.

If this were a DM-only discussion, then I can understand having such a debate, even though it is still an individual preference.

But if this is a discussion as to whether 4e should or should not have a monk class, I still say it should.

 

[TroyXavier]

Does DND need monks? Do they need Paladins, druids, etc? Technically no, but as the Complete books prove, I think the game benefits from having each of them.

 

[Orius]

BECASE ASIA HAS JAPAN AND JAPAN HAS NINJAS, NOT WUSSY NITES THAT HAV OT WEAR ARMER!11!! NINJAS HAVE REAL ULTIMATE POWER, AND THAT"S WHY D&D HAS TEH MONK!!

Please. Everyone knows that pirate pwn all.

 

[Darkness]

Please. Everyone knows that pirate pwn all.

My undead cyborg monkey ninjae beg to differ.

 

[Captain Tagon]

My undead cyborg monkey ninjae beg to differ.

Well my latent psionic alien space pirate with a laser rapier has to agree with the original statement.

 

[Darkness]

Well my latent psionic alien space pirate with a laser rapier has to agree with the original statement.

The original statement - i.e., Maddman75's?

 

[Doug McCrae]

For non-oriental martial artists with abilities similar to D&D monks, check out Geoff Ryman's The Warrior Who Carried Life.

 

[Urbannen]

It actually came back in the AD&D2 accessory The Scarlet Brotherhood. The monk class is rather integral to the Greyhawk setting. There is a significant nation run by evil monks and assassins called, not strangely, "The Scarlet Brotherhood". The Scarlet Brotherhood also reintroduced the assassin class to 2nd ed.

Greyhawk assumptions were at the front of the 3e design team minds. And it was Greyhawk where many of the first impressions of D&D were made in the early years of the game, so many out there wished for certain Greyhawkian conceits to return to the game.

Eric Anondson

This is the best explanation I've seen as to why there are monks in this game. The rules of the D&D game reflect D&D's implied setting, which is Greyhawk. Monk characters often appeared in 1E modules, such as the Village of Hommlet; they are an integral part of the setting. I think the monk class works for the Greyhawk setting. I also think it works for settings that have a more central Asian or Hyporborean feel.

Every setting should have its own discrete base classes and races, IMO. A lot of people seem to want to play in a medieval or Dark Ages setting and so they go to D&D because it seems to be such a setting. I would argue that it is not. If someone wants a specific flavor for their campaign, whether it be Middle Earth or 13th century British crusades or mythic 8th century Britain, why do they look to D&D? In order to recreate the flavor of any one of these settings, you need an almost completely different set of classes, races, and monsters. (And that set of classes would not include the D&D monk, I'd imagine.) As many posters to this thread have remarked, the monk-as-base class demonstrates that D&D is not a generic medieval European setting.

I think the D&D, and the monk, work best in the base D&D settings of Greyhawk and perhaps Forgotten Realms. It's just marketing on the part of WotC when they insist on including every PHB base class and race into every product that they produce. "Monks make excellent [gnome] giant-slayers." "Monks...have also been know to embrace [the] calling [of occult slayer]..." I imagine monks also play some kind of important role in the steampunk dinosaur pulp of Eberron. Blah. WotC might do well to publish a mini-setting that is true to the flavor, realities, and yes, myths of medieval Europe. I think as it is now, lots of DMs end up doing that already, each throwing lots of time and effort into tweaking D&D in order to come up with the medieval flavor they desire. (Of course, these homebrews still end up having to include clerical magic for healing, and the D&D mechanics are still better suited to looting and plundering dungeon crawling than to explorations of medieval society, but that's a topic for another thread.)