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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2119801" data-attributes="member: 7240">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.Youch! That would be beyond me. We're working with a skill-centred classless system in this particuar case. However, I see from your speculation you're proposing Aristotelian rhetoric as the main organizing principle which would be a good deal less difficult because of Aristotle's sense of hierarchy and order. (As opposed to "if order, then hierarchy...")Where is that thread? You phrased this a little ambiguously; can you just post the URL?I might not be very helpful here. 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. (Except the scene with the old bicycle and the bucket of oil in The Transporter -- now that was cool.)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. The heritage of Plato and the Platonizing of Christianity in the Pauline-Johannine synthesis makes Western thought fundamentally hostile to carnal expressions of perfection. 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. The West's ideology of the body is expressed in the dialectic of "Lord, why hast thou foresaken me?" and "It is finished." We tend to over-emphasize the idea of self-sacrifice in these scenes but they also tell us about how the West thinks about the relationship between heroism and the body. This is part of why medieval hagiography looks like a laundry list. Every time a saint does something miraculous, it has to be treated as an individualized exception, no matter how many miracles he has performed because each miracle is a separate act of divine intervention in which the boundary between the spiritual/intelligible and carnal/self-perceptible worlds is breached.</blockquote>

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