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Message: <blockquote data-quote="prosfilaes" data-source="post: 5367321" data-attributes="member: 40166">They're based off Asian films. If I ran across a Japanese RPG where there was a Western culture based off "Dude, Where's My Car" and similar films, I would be amused. I suspect you can find Asian films where the martial artist kicks ass in the West.For one, the religious part has been stripped out of the roleplaying bits, which makes a huge difference. Secondly, I don't see the implication that all westerners felt this way. But there is an anime where a Christian American foreign exchange student joins a Buddhist and a Taoist to send ghosts back to where they came from. I'm amused, not offended, by this concept; how about you? Japanese and American culture have spent years ripping each other off. Which might have something to do with the fact that Japan, the US, and the UK are the only three countries in the world that are net exporters of copyrighted material. There's some genuinely offensive material both ways but acting like anything that doesn't represent a full and representative section of one culture is offensive is silly.More directly responding to the original: Very little of my reading gets deeper than Terry Pratchett's Small Gods. If you check out the numbers, I bet there's a lot of roleplayers like me.  I'm not seeing this deep reason to be upset that FR doesn't encourage me to get into deep ethical probing. Moreover, if I'm with a group where the Paladin doesn't understand why he can't torture prisoners, I suspect encouraging us to get into deep ethical probing would be a lot less fun then the way it is. There are games out there that play with it--Dogs in the Vineyard is one I keep hearing about but never played--but D&D is the standard entry game and is designed with no more ethical probing than most of its audience are interested in getting into.Personally, I'm not a fan of the monk. There's a reason why plate mail and long swords were invented, and that's when someone with plate mail and long sword goes up against someone unarmed, the usual result is pretty bad for the guy with the plate mail--he's got all this metal covered with the the other guy's blood and guts he's got to clean. But what the heck, some people like the supernatural martial artist idea better than I do.</blockquote>

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