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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2119848" data-attributes="member: 7240">I agree. And all I'm saying is that fantasy worlds should feel self-consistent and shouldn't have parts that clash. If you want to put the monk in a setting, you should probably make one in which the monk doesn't look or feel out of place. I'm sure you can agree that sometimes setting don't feel self-consistent; sometimes things feel out of place in a particular setting. This is one of the interesting ironies of the fantasy genre that much as we all accept that fantasy is not reality, we nonetheless expect fantasy to be internally consistent with respect to physical laws, social structures, genre, etc.You seem to have this idea that things are either 0% consistent with "reality" or 100% consistent with it. You seem to be articulating the view that because of this binary you see, there are no requirements for fantasy worlds to feel self-consistent. But you must acknowledge from experience that sometimes when you read a flawed setting, or fantasy novel or play in the flawed game of another GM, something that happens in the game can feel inconsistent even if the game is not modeling a real world situation.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. When something clashes in a setting, it usually clashes because literary and mythological archetypes are not getting along with eachother.Really? 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.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.That's not what Gygax says.This depends entirely on your audience and their needs for a world to be self-consistent. I like to make worlds that feel real and self-consistent to a broad range of people, not just people with low standards.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. Right. 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.</blockquote>

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