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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 1972394" data-attributes="member: 7240">Based on your reading of this thread, what on earth gives you the sense that my opinion about the monk is isolated in my gaming group? If this thread is anything to go by, my problems with the monk are anything but unique. I have just moved cities and met members of three local gaming groups here; in all three cases, the GM does not allow monks. Obviously, without market research, neither of us can know how large a constituency my group represents but, from my own experience both in meeting other gamers in person and interacting with other gamers online, there seems to be a pretty high level of disapproval for this class's presence in the core rules. You are free to bet. I would bet the opposite way but that's in part because both of our samples are self-selecting. However, the reason I clipped this part of your response is because of your opinion that Kingdoms of Kalamar, Greyhawk and the like don't have a European flavour. These settings clearly do. If you think a campaign can only have a European flavour if it has a neon sign on the front of its books saying THIS IS EUROPE then I suppose they don't but by any other reasonable standard, they do.In part, that's because nowhere outside of East Asia is there any tradition of a type of warrior who is more effective without weapons than with.How, exactly, can a shaman be created using the core rules?If the class were properly supported with sufficient resources in the core rules, I might well agree with you. Remember: my argument is not that the monk should be stricken from the core; my argument is that unless WOTC puts other East Asian things in the core, the monk doesn't belong there.Just because the creators of Greyhawk think the monk fits in their setting does not mean it does. It just results in Greyhawk being a flawed setting. The fact is that the monk's prominence is one of the things that makes the setting unattractive because the setting ends up feeling culturally incoherent.I guess I'm using the term "indisputable" in the wrong way. If I am wearing a green sweater and because you are colour blind you see it as red, I suppose that it is no longer indisputable that my sweater is green. Failing to comprehend my arguments is not the same as effectively disputing them.Surely if you can turn a sorceror into a shaman without changing a single rule, making an unarmed fighter with fighter and rogue levels should be a piece of cake for you. Better still, why not just rename the fighter "monk"? -- piece of cake!In response to my statement that the Orient has 5 elements and the Occident has 4 (in the sublunar sphere), and that therefore adapting D&D to an oriental setting should include mechanical modifications to deal with the addition of wood and metal and the deletion of air you state that no mechanical adjustments are required:Do you mean here that I should imagine 4=5? What am I supposed to be imagine? It seems to me that the main way you "use your imagination" is that imagine all non-European cultures in exclusively European terms -- the Conan phenomenon.So it doesn't bother you that making a shaman powerless without fetish objects doesn't really fit with anybody's idea of how shamans work?What a shame that there are no holy warriors in Japanese Buddhism or Shintoism because Japanese culture does not conceive of religious affiliation as exclusive. This is what I'm talking about -- sure, if you make Japanese culture identical to European culture except with everything renamed, you don't have a problem. But then you don't have Japanese culture either. So, for you, "use your imagination" means "imagine that things that are actually different are really the same." That's one way to use one's imagination but I have to say it's my least favourite way of using mine.So far, I've given a lot of examples and if you've read my posts to other threads, you can see that I'm positively dripping with them. Perahps, without citing the monk, you would like to pick something in the mechanics that you think isn't either newly made-up or of European origin, aside from the monk and the dozen or so non-European monsters we have managed to list.I asked how you have shamans without interaction with spirits. You replied,No. I'm claiming that when a word is used it should mean what it means. A shaman is someone who interacts with spirits by definition in that that is what the word "shaman" means. I realize now that I should have dealt with this more completely when dealing with hong on the question of what "monk" means so I think I'll roll these two together and remind people of the following:</blockquote>

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