Paladin.. monk?

[hong]

What do you think Dr. Strangemonkey? Is this a response from the Primal WANGER, the Jingle WANGER or the Tautological WANGER?

Primal WANGER, of course.


Hong "hello, custom title!" Ooi

 

[fusangite]

Primal WANGER, of course.

Glad to have been informed. I looked up wanger on dictionary.com and it claimed it meant "cheek pillow."

By the way, your fortune cookie logic is inescapable. The sentence is funnier that way.

 

[hong]

Glad to have been informed. I looked up wanger on dictionary.com and it claimed it meant "cheek pillow."

... if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

 

[fusangite]

... if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

You mean a ranger with a speech impediment? Why yes then.

 

[hong]

You mean a ranger with a speech impediment? Why yes then.

Now after all that talk about Odin, I have visions of a wanger, wunning awound with a spear and magic helmet, shouting "kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit!"

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Funny you should mention that. The fellow I co-GM that game with is a close friend of Sean's and has been closely involved with the world building for the books you mention.

I don't know that I'm surprised, in fact I believe my sense of order has been affirmed. Particularly given that I'm living in the town Sean was born in.

Where is that thread? You phrased this a little ambiguously; can you just post the URL?I might not be very helpful here.

http://www.eos-press.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=3

It's about five down from the top and entitled, "How I learned to stop worrying and love the plate mail," there's also some on Kung Fu Homer and Kung Fu Lord of the Rings. I think Homer works better than LotR but only if you play both gods and heroes in the same game. LotR has got problems, but only about as many as you have when you go DnD with it.

I almost never pay attention to physical combat styles so I don't really recall how any character physically fights in a story I like.

Somehow that explains something to me.

I think the fact that there is no clear answer is one of the problems with constructing a monk equivalent in the West; I don't think there is as stable a theory of what physical perfection looks like in the West because the terms "physical" and "perfection" exist in opposition to eachother in most classical and post-classical Western cultures. I think that pre-modern ideas of physically incarnate perfection actually are in liminal places with respect to Western thought.

There's much I might disagree with in that, but then again I'm very genre minded so when I deconstruct a genre I don't so much arrive at a different structure as simply another genre with a different set of rules. Lateral movement is thus much easier for me. So I see the laundry list in hagiographies, thank-you for bringing that up in the cleric thread BTW, and I don't think, ah this has to do with the exceptional nature of miracles, so much as, ah, super-heroes. Though I wonder now if we're actually considering the same laundry list in the genre. Or maybe I'm just reading earlier or more southern hagiographies than you are. huh.

Personally I find the life of St. Anthony the Great to be a superior version of Sandman in character. So you might call it a sort of intellectual synaesthasia.

Anyways I'm not looking for a monk equivalent. I'm looking for a genre breakdown of the knight.

So if the monk demonstrates bad assitude by being lighter than the dew, than how does the western knight do it? And all right, you can't answer it, but this could be an interesting answer:

So, instead, what we really have for Achilles, Sampson, Beowulf, etc. is the idea that the character's final heroic act is one in which soul/spirit is so powerful it animates the physical body beyond the body's intrinsic capacity to be animated.

And I don't think it's wrong generally, but I may have to rephrase the question. Cause there has to be a laundry list for that moment. It's there for the 'monk' - and that's in quotes cause at this point we've made the term so generic it's becoming dangerously loose in meaning - and for the saint, it's gotta be there for the knight.

Plus that answer does seem to take me in a direction I think I'm heading. I think for the armored warrior, the knight or cavalier, the basic movements are complemented by the tone or mien with which they are performed. That's true of Kung Fu heroes as well, but in the west I think that tone or mien is actually a big component of the feat itself.

So that at level one you get on and off a horse in a manner that noone could mistake for anything other than a noble knight and level seven you're Achilles where noone could mistake you for anything other than the reaper of men and none can oppose you. And somewhere in there you're someone who just obviously is experiencing some form of transcendant emotion in the midst of battle. BTW, there's an interesting work out that posits that the descriptions of Achilles' rage may be an early depiction of battlefield PTSD.

Somewhere else in there you've got to have the armor trick, the great breath, the fearsome mien, the charge through opposition, and the burst through obstacles. Not too mention variances in armor according to use.

On somewhat of a side note: do Achilles, Sampson, and Beowulf really deserve to be on the same list, particularly one apparently defined by Christ? Achilles doesn't have a final heroic act, his epic stops at the point where Sampson slaughters thousands and Beowulf is Achilles in reverse bringing in order and then collapsing it through his death. Christ is doing something else entirely. Which is why you end up with Arthurian knights who just sort of run into him and don't know what to do. Most western Christian knights past the early ones like George or Martin seem to be constantly stuck in the story of Peter pre-keys. They've got good hearts, but they just can't get it.

Which you could make a really interesting argument out of in terms of Western treatments of the culpability and toleration of power, but then again this conversation is interesting enough.

Another question, how would you explain the monk in western terms? It strike me that you could kill him and then use our dynamic for the perfection of the body coming from the outside. The technology angle is still hard to deal with, though, unless you want him to be inhumans. Inhuman things never have good tech. Even Tolkien elves are just great craftsmen not great tinkerers.

Excepting Dwarves and tinker gnomes, of course, they have awesome tech they're just horrible at using it.

 

[focallength]

ok big question, how do you advance in either class when both classes require that they be the only class you can have. Wouldnt one class be forever stuck at first leve? ( if you want to go by the written rules that is )

 

[fusangite]

There's much I might disagree with in that, but then again I'm very genre minded so when I deconstruct a genre I don't so much arrive at a different structure as simply another genre with a different set of rules. Lateral movement is thus much easier for me.

I do that all the time too. Congruencies between different systems are easy to see. My whole faerie campaign is a world mythology thing where the Japanese Tengu are in the same category as Shakespeare's Titania and Oberon. So it's not that I don't see these points of correlation regularly myself and sometimes incorporate them into games.

However, when I translate things into gaming terms, the there is a price to pay for imposing a transcultural meta-structure on these phenomena. The result of doing an RPG Golden Bough is that one is inevitably forced to present magic (and possibly other parts of physics) as working differently from the way the culture in which they are situated understands them to work. This dissonance then directs the play towards discovering the true nature of the world. If that's not the project I want the campaign narrative to centre on, it can become distracting.

Or maybe I'm just reading earlier or more southern hagiographies than you are. huh.

I doubt that. Most hagiographies I've read were written before 900. Certainly, the ultimate laundry list style is Gregory of Tours and he's about as early and southern as one can get without resorting to the earliest hagiographies of Late Antiquity like Antony and Martin.

Personally I find the life of St. Anthony the Great to be a superior version of Sandman in character. So you might call it a sort of intellectual synaesthasia.

I guess. Thinking that way is not really a big deal to me; that's one of the main ways I normally perceive the world. I think the ease with which I see things that way is part of what orients me to finding the ways that underneath superficial and generic similarity, there is often real and irreconcilable difference. Thinking like a 17th century Jesuit is not all that hard really but if one thinks like that all the time, one's games always end up being commentaries on the familiar rather than escape into the alien.

So if the monk demonstrates bad assitude by being lighter than the dew, than how does the western knight do it?

OK -- you want a two-paradigm approach for the Western versus the Eastern hero? Both heroes are responses to the clientage/patronage paradigm. But they theorize opposite ways out.

Eastern heroes transcend clientage through self-sufficiency. Western heroes overcome clientage by trumping their patron. One can generalize this through essentially the whole Western canon -- Agamemnon is Achilles' patron but this relationship is trumped by Achilles' divine parentage. Medieval holy men were situated within a pyramidal hierarchy; the moments where they were special were those in which they appealed directly to God and trumped the hierarchy. In the East, the ultimate expression of heroism is to be so self-sufficient as to make the patronage system in which you are situated irrelevant. If the capacity to expel demons inhered in Antony, he would be a perfect Eastern holy man; but because it is situated outside himself, he is a Western holy man.

This is one of the reasons Sufism is interesting to study: Gnosticism has hybridized with enough Eastern thought that that Sufi stages of awareness progress from "There is no God save Allah" to "There is no God save He" to "There is no God save I." Gnosticism is used here as a transition from trumping to transcending.

The Western Faust is ultimately someone who violates the patronage system in an unacceptable rather than virtuous way -- he extracts power from patrons through threats or manipulation rather than suplication -- the definition of demonic magic.

Now, how does this come back to the Knight? Well, it foregrounds the fact that the exceptional qualities of the knight must necessarily be those that make him attractive to his ultimate true patron. Now, one can see why the D&D cleric cohabits so much more comfortably with polytheism. Or why the grail knight has to be modeled through the paladin rather than the fighter -- one could argue, in fact, that the fighter class is a generically unobtrusive embodiment of the Oriential heroic ideal of self-sufficiency (but really he's more an embodiment of post-enlightenment Western ideas thereof).

So that's why I cannot answer your question. The qualities that make a knight a knight are not the qualities that make him a good fighter. A knight is a good fighter but it is his humility and righteousness that make God enhance his latent fighting capacities.

Plus that answer does seem to take me in a direction I think I'm heading. I think for the armored warrior, the knight or cavalier, the basic movements are complemented by the tone or mien with which they are performed.

I really can't follow you here. Not in that I don't know what you're saying but in that I don't pay attention to the things you're asking me to look at. It would be sort of like moving into a discussion of hockey at this point; sure, I've lived in Canada all my life but hocked is surrounded by an SEP field.

On somewhat of a side note: do Achilles, Sampson, and Beowulf really deserve to be on the same list, particularly one apparently defined by Christ?

It's not defined by Christ -- it just so happens that this key point where John and Paul Mark contradict eachother, the gospels express a tension that appears to have been in effect throughout the Western tradition.

The only point I was trying to express here was that hypostasis is at the core of a lot of what is going on in the West. The Western body cannot approach perfection without an exogenous factor. The Eastern body can mainly be understood as approaching perfection due to endogeonous factors.

But, as Burke observes, we are all, Western and Eastern alike, "rotten with perfection."

Another question, how would you explain the monk in western terms?

You can't. That's why I get so cranky. One must convert the monk into either a humility-powered creature or into a Faustian one. I think the humility-powered monk is one that would be easier to do because humility is also an Eastern value and is also a requirement for transcending clientage. But once he becomes a humility-powered creature, the question then arises: why is his share of divinity circumscribed by the precise physical bounds of his body? And there's no answer to that question within the pre-modern Western tradition. If one wants to factor divinity out of election, there's plenty of post-enlightenment stuff out there but, of course, that's what I'm trying to get away from in D&D -- costumed modernity.

Anyway, a most interesting discussion so far.

 

[D+1]

Surely we can both therefore agree that conditions do exist in which the monk class can feel out of place. We're not debating that. What we're debating is the question of what the conditions are under which the monk can feel out of place.I think there's a misapprehension your part as to where archetypes come from -- they come from literature and myth not from the real world.

And isn't the creation of a D&D campaign an exercise in creating NEW literature and myth, that while using elements from established literature, myth, and real-world example OWES NOTHING to them in terms of needing to follow the strictures responsible for their creation.

So, yep there are certainly conditions in which the monk can feel out of place. What ARE those conditions? In my opinion one of the biggest such conditions is when there is an insistence that monks be considered genuinely oriental and that the campaign in which they appear be patterned specifically after some given literary, mythical or real-world basis which produced the INSPIRATION for the D&D monk. That's what I see being advocated. That monks have no business in D&D because they must be looked upon (for example) as if they were Shaolin, but then are not provided the same seeds that created the Shaolin. Or that because monks DON'T fully resemble Ninjas they need to be modified until they do and then inserted into a distinctly Medieval Japanese-inspired setting before they "fit" D&D.

Now if that isn't your assertion then I've misread/misunderstood. My contention is simply that there isn't much of a legitimate argument that monks as written inherently "don't fit/don't belong" in D&D. Their very inclusion as part of the Core Rules defeats that. They ARE part of D&D. You don't have to include them in any/all campaigns any more than you have to include paladins, spells above 5th level, alignments or even Humans(!). But by virtue of their mere presence it is effectively asserted that they most certainly CAN be included in campaigns without needing to explain in any depth how or why.

How does the D&D monk resemble a Sufi dervish? How does the D&D monk resemble a Franciscan friar? How does a D&D monk resemble a Byzantine hesychast? How does a D&D monk resemble a cloistered Benedictine? And of these resemblances, how do they compare to the resemblance of the D&D monk to Oriental monk in the same category? Is there a case in which the monk class resembles a Western monk more closely than an Eastern one? If not, then the monk is what I claim it is.

Can you demonstrate that it DOESN'T? And why would you need to prove it one way or another?

And I'm just a tad confused so maybe a restatement of elementary position would be useful to more people than just myself. What IS it that you say the D&D monk is? Does it belong in D&D and if not, why not?

We have a statement on the intention on this board by Gary Gygax himself who explains in the thread next door that the monk class was originally intended to represent Oriental outsiders in his Greyhawk world and that monks were absolutely not indigenous to the quasi-European area. So, Gygax directly contradicts you -- 1E D&D monks were meant to be from outside of the pseudo-medieval culture in which the game was taking place.

Where they are FROM is irrelevant. They are now, and were then, included as a character class in a campaign setting that is quasi-European.

But the game has had plenty of revision to it since Gygax ceased to have close control of it. Perhaps because of Gary's initial intention of the Monk as an Oriental outsider in a European setting it was removed in 2nd Edition rules. And then it was reintroduced in several different forms in supplementary rules for 2E. It's inclusion as an element of 3E Core Rules wasn't because the newest vision of a general D&D campaign needed an Oriental outsider was it? I think the reintroduction in 2E and then part of the Core in 3E was almost solely because people enjoyed playing the class and wanted them back. But however Gary may have envisioned them for Greyhawk there are no rules now for how/why they should be included in D&D in general. They just are. I don't understand any insistence that that is insufficient for general purposes.

I like to make worlds that feel real and self-consistent to a broad range of people, not just people with low standards.

I too like worlds that feel real and desire self-consistency just as much as you I am quite certain. My campaigns are clearly less complex and literate than your own, but I have long advocated self-consistency and a certain amount of "reality" for a campaign world as laudable goals for everyone. But I enjoy inserting monks as defined in D&D into my game worlds without making them Oriental outsiders. That doesn't make my standards for running my campaign any lower than yours.

My inclusion of monks into the general campaign world only needs to maintain SELF-consistency. It needs to be reasonable and justified in the world which I create and it is. The way in which I commonly achieve this is by centering the campaign on a very cosmopolitan city or nation, or simply positing a much closer positioning of the relevant cultures.

You people are amazing. How can you possibly keep maintaining that this is my argument? I've spent this entire damned thread articulating what place I see the monk occupying within D&D.

Again, I wonder if a restatement of basic position isn't in order. I thought we were discussing the monk's place in D&D in general and that your vision of the monk is one which, if you will, carries a lot more baggage than I personally would attach to it.

That's exactly the standard of consistency I'm demanding -- not identity, just cursory resemblance. A D&D monk is far less like Franciscan friar than D&D Odin is like Odin of the Eddas.

Since my own campaigns contain nothing really resembling Franciscan friars, Ninjas, Shaolin, etc., there is nothing to stand in the way of D&D monks standing in for any and all of them as needed/desired. Thus for my purposes at least there's never been anything wrong with the fitting of monks into D&D.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

I do that all the time too. Congruencies between different systems are easy to see. My hole faerie campaign is a world mythology thing where the Japanese Tengu are in the same category as Shakespeare's Titania and Oberon. So it's not that I don't see these points of correlation regularly myself and sometimes incorporate them into games.

Gargoyles?

Anyway, a most interesting discussion so far.

Indeed, it is most interesting and I hope to get back to any number of specific points I, but ultimately I think that the root of our disagreement is identified a few posts forward from this.

And yeah, I have been workin with earlier and more Southern Hagiographies. Though I was also thinking of Bonaventure which is one the opposite side of things. Tours is big on laundry lists, but that's true of his whole work. Not to say they aren't good lists, and I think we probably are seeing a lot of the same things. Just, perhaps, shopping differently.

Incidentally, do you have any good recommendations for sources for Orthodox hagiographies? My cat destroyed my Life of St. Anthony the Great just as he was building his place in the swamp and Orthodox anything is hard to get locally.