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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 9545821" data-attributes="member: 6799660"><quotes clipped and moved around to touch on individual themes>They were in oD&D, AD&D, and BECMI (there called 'mystic') in roughly the same form. 2e made monk 'kits' for most classes and introduced martial arts concurrently but tied to expending weapon proficiency slots instead of a discrete class.  The quiet parts out loud is that the Monk class was based on a 1970s Western pop culture pastiche of wuxia media and (Eastern) martial arts tropes and legend, as seen through the lens of a 25 year old fanboy (Brian Blume). Yes, The Destroyer series is the referenced direct inspiration, but everything from Kung Fu to old samurai movies* are in the mix. It is a grab bag of tropes that seemed iconic at the time that got written down and ossified into the game. *seen in B&W on Saturday afternoons on some old UHF station.People correctly point out that A) you can re-flavor to fit your own needs, and B) the most recent ruleset has tried to strip out the explicit quasi-Asian framing. The won't change that no small part of your players who want to play a monk probably want to be playing some level of the above concept.Here's the other quiet part out loud: -- Some people like playing quasi-medieval Europe* if magic and mythical creatures were real (plus exceptions A, B, and C); and some people like playing globetrotting (if not planehopping) adventures.  Early D&D certainly did conform a lot more to the former than modern versions -- except for all the exceptions. The monster manual certainly never shied away from including whatever Japanese or Native American critter Gygax thought interesting. However, character creation did lean heavily on knights in shining armor and pointy hat wizards... but then monks and psionics. *with some renaissance equipment somehow coinciding with classical/iron/bronze-age stuff, but not firearms**or a spell-point magic system at least, in psionics' case.And those did stand out -- not least of which because Gygax wasn't 100% thrilled with their inclusion, but did so because others wanted them. So plenty of people spent many years gaming with them seeming like outliers (because they were). More to the point, the game itself never really got around to integrating them cohesively into the game world and system the way other things Gary wasn't fond of (PC demihumans, for instance) were. So I vaguely get why someone would not wanting monks in their game because of their vibe -- particularly when D&D monks aren't a great representation of IRL Asian culture (again, Western 1970s pop culture pastiche). If someone said they didn't want non-pseudo-Europeans in their game, that would be different -- and people have rightly brought up how much world travel did happen bitd.That said, if you are one of those people, but have successfully integrated psionics, or artificers, or swashbucklers (also something early D&D didn't support, and breaks the knights-in-shining-armor vibe), or interplanar nexus cities and dragonborn/tiefling/warlocks/whatever else has been introduced in the past 30 years -- at least contemplate your reasoning as to why this lift is the one that is too hard.In the game? In the game at all, yes, monks are here to stay. Do you need to have them in your game/utilize them heavily? No. Plenty of people don't use psionics or artificers (or only have them around when someone wants to play one, etc.).If 3E 3PP are any indication, plenty of people have been willing to do the legwork. None of them have gained universal traction. I think that's the underlying problem with 'fixing' the monk -- much like psionics, no two gamers agree on what they want out of them. So even though the current product is unsatisfactory, there isn't a strong incentive to greatly reexamine it. I would argue that clerics are at least as much a lift, at least the ones we landed on with late 1E-modern D&D. Clerics from oD&D, early AD&D, and the B-BECM lines were pretty generic -- they tended to worship 'gawds*.' However, once settings like the Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms boxed sets came out, you got whole pantheons and clerics started choosing gods and then eventually other PCs were encouraged to choose their own specific god within the pantheon**. To my mind, that's more worldbuilding requirement for a given class than monks, druids, or paladins have. We're just really really used to it. *Mornard's recollection of 'Church of Crom, Scientist'  coming up when someone finally asked who the clerics worshipped is pretty hilarious**despite that not being really how polytheistic religions work. </blockquote>

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