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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 9069919" data-attributes="member: 6801228">But fiction first is also how you get things like Tongue of the Sun and Moon, or the various "you don't suffer the effects of old age" abilities. Those make perfect sense in the fiction.... and they are useless mechanically. Maybe you could argue Tongue is kind of useful, but do you know what the effects of old age are? Ready, it's a doozy... Nothing. There ARE no effects from Old Age. You don't suffer the nonexistant effects of a condition that they didn't put into the game. They gave an ENTIRE leveled ability to what is essentially meaningless flavor text. Unless SOMEHOW at level 15, you somehow end up in situation where you can't get food and water. Yes, you don't want to design the monk as a master of arcane magic, or a divine servant of the gods, but since we are already talking about "the monk" who we know is a master of unarmed combat... we've got enough story and fiction to stop and instead focus on "what would be mechanically good and interesting for them, as a class" rather than focusing on telling an even more specific story. Because doing something like "at X level, your monk finds a wise old master who begins tormenting them and will die a heroic death to save them" makes for great fiction, but would be a crappy mechanic. If we were starting from nothing? If we were starting from "design any class" I would agree with you. But we aren't. We are starting from "redesign the monk" and the monk doesn't need any more specific fiction. Their fiction is handled. Now we need mechanics to make the monk worth caring about the fiction.</blockquote>

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