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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hong" data-source="post: 688382" data-attributes="member: 537">Depends on what you mean by "martial artist".Technically a member of any fighting class is a "martial artist", since the term just means someone who's trained to fight. But let's not get into semantic quibbles.If you consider a "martial artist" to be an unarmed fighter, then it's true that your typical kung fu master would be slightly out of place in most stock pseudo-western settings. There are western bare-handed martial arts like pankration, but such character archetypes typically aren't high on the list of candidates that people want to populate their campaign with. (The fact that the standard D&D monk's special abilities are obviously taken from chop-socky Shaolin kung fu/ninja folklore doesn't really help in terms of making it broadly applicable.)On the other hand, if you consider a martial artist to be an _unarmoured_ fighter, then there are plenty of examples of such. Swashbuckling types (eg the duelist prestige class) can be considered martial artists by this definition, and nobody ever complains that they're out of place. Further afield, you have the Jedi to use as a starting point; just think of Yoda in Ep 2. Then you have characters like the swordsmen in A Chinese Ghost Story and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; but for some reason that's too "foreign" for some people.Heck, it seems to be almost a tradition in fantasy that pragmatism (in terms of protection) has no bearing on armour use, at least for heroes. Just think of LOTR: Aragorn never seems to be wearing more than leather, while tramping from one end of Middle-Earth to the other. Gandalf doesn't need armour at all, nor does Legolas. Characters who _do_ wear heavy armour, such as Gimli or Prince Imrahil, do so because it's part of their character concept, not so much because they need it.</blockquote>

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