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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 1972663" data-attributes="member: 7240">Ok... I'm ready for the evidence.I think you need to brush up on what evidence is. I believe the above is what is referred to as "opinion."Excepting the crossbow, can you name a culture in Eurasia, Africa or the Americas that did not have these things? Universal does non-Asian. The fact that some Asian weapons were weapons that were so universal as to be used practically everywhere does not make these weapons non-Asian. Does it not seem odd to you that no non-European words are used to describe the magic used by Bards, Paladins, Rangers, Clerics, Druids, Wizards and Sorcerors and that only Oriental words are used to describe the magic used by Monks? Is that just a coincidence?Kensai... hmmmm... I wonder what ethnicity that word might be.So, why do you suppose for this text that you see as exclusively flavour would they employ the only instance of a non-English word in the magic system in the entire core rules?Well, we know one thing about the outside cultures: they produce monks who train in unarmed martial arts. Now, what sort of cultures might those be?Yes. And only one particular set of cultures have monastic institutions with those values. Yes. And in this case, the form of the homage is direct representation. Your use of the term "homage" here is a little perplexing. You see, the term homage speaks to the motive behind a particular work not to the actual nature of the act itself. I'm happy to acknowledge that the Monk is an homage to everything from Shaolin monks to ninja assassins.I don't care what the writers of the rules thought they were trying to do or what they intended to do, I'm interested in what the rules ended up saying.I thought the point of 3.xE was to create a game system that could accommodate people with other more diverse mythoi; in general, I think it has been successful in that enterprise.And yes, I agree that D&D is divorced from historical reality. What it is not divorced from is myth and that's what I have been talking about throughout this thread.</blockquote>

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