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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doctor Shaft" data-source="post: 1870607" data-attributes="member: 25737">Wow, that was the most depressing monk thread I have ever read.  I've personally never understood the overwhelmingly negative reaction that monks receive.  And then the reactions like "fighter's should excel at everything!"  As if they aren't good enough already. When I play DnD, I always say "to heck with the regional likeness'" crap.  Especially isnce half the time, we claim that we're following a "norse tradition" or "indian tradition" or some other cultural tradition.  In reality, the government and landscape is copied, but the classes and the characters are essentially modern day people wearing DnD armor and taking on DnD class archetypes.  Very rarely is roleplaying ever about playing an authentic European character type. Sure, you base your fighting prowess and maybe your "religious" views on it.  But otherwise, Tandry the epic dwarven fighter is really just Bob pretending to be some kind of modern day guy with real problems in a Hellenistic environment.  Or the dwarves all coming with Irish accents.  Come on.  While I accept the ideas many people present about exactly why they don't allow monks (suspension of disbelief issues, etc.), I don't know, it just disappoints me. I find I'd have a hard time enjoying a majority of the campaigns described with the "alternate" monks or the Franciscan monks.  It's like - so we'll all play typical tin cans with swords that somehow break through tin cans, and we'll have typical wizards and sorcerors who aren't smart enough to wear tin-cans.  But once anything remotely "asian" appears, the whole fantasy falls apart.  I find that strange. I've never had a problem simply melding the two worlds together.Perhaps the best campaign to do that was Forgotten Realms. While there was plenty of more emphasis on the typical Western world fantasy, it created a nice niche for monks.  It didn't matter that they came from the "asian" fantasy type.  They were there, and they had a role to play. All without completely disrupting the fantasy world.Perhaps the best fun I've ever had is with a long term character that I've been playing on a particular FR campaign/world. I play a Monk of Ilmater.  While the majority of characters involved in the campaign are of the western archetype, the monk at no point really "destroys' or diminishes everyone concepts. If anything, the character, because of his unique class features and background, kind of enhances things.  Rather than having everyone touting about typical Western morals, ethics, and thoughts, you get a character that comes from a different set of goals and beliefs. So, we're not all Scottish dwarven jokes pretending to be in India.  <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 guess I'm the opposite from most of you in that I have a hard time believing in a great deal of the fighter classes and rogue classes.  To me, while I enjoy having them around in some form or another, they can often become ridiculous.  There physical feats and ability is rarely explained, they have no discipline or background attached to them. Basically, they are so free form - and yet so powerful.  The monk is more structured and believable, like a wizard or sorceror, in my mind. In those three cases, at least some kind of cultural history is applied stringently upon them.  Fighters are super "just cuz."  Rogues have great back-stabbing abilities "just-cuz."  That ruins the fantasy for me sometimes.  I don't like playing Oriental Adventures because once again, it's so focused on one particular culture or regional setting, that it's just not attractive. You don't have a "full world experience." At least it seems that way to me. It completely diminishes the chance of meeting an interesting cadre of characters. Instead, we're all the same "I wear lots of metal on my body" stereotypes. And some of them have an accent.</blockquote>

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