Reynard said:
That would be unfortunate. There is no reason why only an eastern flavored setting should provide for that kind of character archetype in D&D.
Reynard said:
Everybody was a farmer when their wasn't a war on.
Well, since we don't have 4E's complete rules, I'll assume similarities from 3E. I'm also going to generalize on a lot of historical examples, rather than make this post absurdly long.
The implied power-level of the vast majority of people means that a well-armed warrior or commoner/expert with Martial Weapons Proficiency is not ineffective by any means. The laws passed in England that required certain people to be proficient in the longbow? Those were laws requiring that they took martial weapons proficiency. Just because they knew how to use the bow, though, doesn't mean they're heroes. PC-classed characters in D&D are always heroic characters.
To take that further, though, the nobility or the more wealthy footmen weren't farmers when a war wasn't on. They administered their lands, administered their minor farm, served their lord, or, if they were mercenaries, looked around for their next paycheck. In order to not have a "woodsman" type background, we would have to have someone who was a member of the nobility who fought primarily with the bow. And that, by the way, pretty much always means someone armored - so an armored archer.
That's problematic because throughout most all human cultures, brave, admirable warriors are the ones who got in their opponents' faces and triumphed hand to hand. Ranged weapons are valuable, but not glamorous. And that's important, because virtually everywhere that a nobility has emerged, it has been a warrior nobility. And while not every noble was a warrior by any means, it was part of the implied social fabric that they would serve as defenders of their social order. It was allowable for people of the lower classes to be archers because that wasn't their job.
In times where they did not defend effectively, they were reviled and lost much of their power. Because all power only exists because people believe that you have it. For examples of such things happening, we can point to the turmoil arising from the French and German nobility's inability to stop the Viking invasions, as well as the inability of French lords to effectively defend their lands during the Hundred Years War, where they relied greatly on their castles and allowed the enemy armies to pillage their lands. We can even look at the drastically reduced political importance of the nobility everywhere after guns democratized warfare.
Japan and China are remarkable because, culturally, they valued guile, technique, and trickery far more than the Western world tended to. Thus an armored noble archer was permissible there. The only other examples I can think of are the various horse-archers of the middle-east and the northern steppes. But honestly, D&D has never had mounted combat in the forefront, and I don't think they've ever been easily simulated. And with the exception of some of the Byzantine troops, I don't think I'd characterize any of them as Fighters anyway - they look more like Rangers or Barbarians to me.
The horse-archers are also, arguably, not really part of the Western milieu, which is pretty much the standard one for D&D (I would argue that the monk is there due to the martial arts craze of the 70's). Otherwise an "Oriental Adventures" book would be silly. It would just be "Adventures".
So, in the end, I guess I'd say that I DO think that an armored archer archetype is a bit of an aberration from the standard D&D setting, and I don't have a problem with them coming up in a later supplement. Who knows - maybe it'll even be possible to "Fighter-up" the Ranger in the 4E rules to simulate that archetype.
