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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7145745" data-attributes="member: 82106">The sorts of martial arts styles practiced in the East however have almost no precedent in the West. Savate is one of very few traditions you can name, and it dates from the early 19th Century, there's little evidence that there was anything like a 'style' or taught practice in older times (doubtless people did kick each other, but there's no history of masters or students or anything like that). Boxing and wrestling of all sorts of forms are of course quite ancient, but in the West were never seen as really serious offensive or defensive techniques, but almost purely as sport even in ancient times. Certainly there were martial arts in the sense of training people to fight professionally with weapons (and ancillary techniques that are somewhat similar to some Eastern techniques). Still, there just wasn't the sort of tradition of practice and widespread practice that existed in the East.Its quite true that certain individual mythical heroes were accredited with great feats of combat that are similar in some ways to Eastern fantastical martial arts, but the tradition is vastly less prevalent and dissociated from everyday practice. A person in medieval China could actually go to a place where they could find extensive training in armed and unarmed combat within a school that had a recognized tradition.You could look at some Western 'monks' or more like religious military orders during the High Middle Ages (mostly) and see some degree of parallel with something like Eastern monasteries training people in whatever-fu, but I don't think the parallel is all that great. In the West these things never evolved into formal martial arts schools and traditions in any way. In fact they were simply armed militias of a sort that carried out various religious and ethnic pogroms. Usually they fought in the manner of armies, not individualistically. So, I would say there's not really a Western equivalent of the 'Monk' class. You could build a character and have his background be that he studied with the Teutonic Knights or something, but they'd have taught him to be a 'fighter' not really a 'monk' in the D&D sense. Obviously in a fantasy world that's all colorable and its not BIG issue, but if you're creating campaign settings around particular temporo-geographical portions of the real world, then D&D Monks don't fit well with Western European settings. Not to say that using the 4e monk class might not be a good way to portray certain fictional characters. You might for instance use it for a D'Artagnion or whatnot, or maybe some of your cited Celtic crazy men possibly, though I'm hard pressed to really pigeonhole Chu Cullain enough to put him in ANY one class...</blockquote>

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