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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Urbannen" data-source="post: 1964827" data-attributes="member: 7643">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.)</blockquote>

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