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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Henry Hankovich" data-source="post: 2122182" data-attributes="member: 20280">Look...when you get right down to it, lots of the character classes in D&D are based on relatively arbitrary archetypes, rather than common historical or mythical/cultural figures.  There's no "Western European" tradition of "the guy who runs through the woods with an animal companion, fighting with two swords."  There are certainly woodsman/ranger archetypes--but the Ranger class has a lot of features, such as two-weapon-fighting and divine spellcasting--that mark it as an construct of modern fiction, rather than some historical figure.The same goes for the Druid, only more so.  It's basically a late-20th-century agglutinate of Amerindian and Aboriginal "noble savages," mythical shapeshifters, and environmentalist versions of 'pagan' or 'Wiccan' religions.  It's a character class that is completely unrecognizable outside of contemporary fantasy-fiction.  For that matter, even the "eastern kung-fu monk" archetype that the D&D Monk class dwas so heavily upon, is a 20th century creation, rather than a historical 'reality.'  That is to say, while the Eastern martial arts themselves have a very long history, and have their own mythologies and philosophies, the D&D Monk is based more on cheeseball 1970s kung-fu movies, than on some sort of 'historical' concept of martial arts.  Frankly, combat in the Far Eastern world was much the same as everywhere else--wars consisted of people with armor, swords, spears, and bows and arrows smashing into each other, rather than monks in orange robes leaping around spinning staffs over their heads.   So in short--nearly all "thematic" elements of D&D stem not from any sort of coherent historical or mythical "tradition," but instead are completely modern creations, screwball combinations of mythology, movies, pulp SF/fantasy and Tolkein, comic books, and the infinite variations of modern, non-Christian occultism.  Once you embrace that the Fighter, the Cleric, the Rogue, and all those other classes, don't stem from any 'tradition' deeper than a bunch of stoner kids playing games in their basement, the problem of the "Eastern" versus "Western" monk is pretty much pointless.  And confusions regarding terminology, I would argue, stem more from unimaginative roleplaying than anything else.   After all, the original meaning of "cleric" refers simply to priests or other religious leaders.  In-game, it's rather silly to assume that all holy-warriors will refer to each other and themselves as simply "Clerics," as opposed to priests, "Warriors of [deity]," Templars, Brother/Sisterhoods, or whatever.  It seems to me that the confrontation described in the original post, was more a problem of poor or unimaginative roleplaying (perhaps more on the other, unarmed-fighter "monk's" part, rather than the paladin's player).  On a different note:  There are a few interesting paladin/monk archetypes that can be played.  The FRCS has the "Broken Ones," which are Paladin/Monks of Ilmater.  Which make sense, since holy warriors of a self-sacrificing, commoner deity would probably revere a tradition of fighting with hands and feet, and simple 'peasant' weapons.Also, there's an interesting character in a (non D&D) fantasy book, Return of the Blue Moon, by the name of Jericho Lament.  He's basically a self-appointed herald of "God," who goes around punishing "sinners" with his bare hands and a walking staff.  His incredible strength and skill, of course, he attributes to divine grace.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  I've always thought that would make an interesting way of playing a D&D monk, monk/cleric, or monk/paladin...</blockquote>

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