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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6194489" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well sure, but I'm a programmer by trade and I'm not a big fan of "there is more than one way to do things".  There is a significant cost to the game in the approach of "more is better".   You end up in the situation of late 3.5 where you have literally 600 classes each of which is offering various minor mechanical variations and front ended benefits which often overlap and virtually none of which have been tested in relationship to each other or even considered in relation to everything else that is already out there.   It's too many moving parts, and its benefits ends up being not in that it lets players create more varied characters but that it lets players mix and match among mechanical benefits in order to make more optimized Johnny One-Tricks.   There is increased rules overhead, decreased balance among characters, and increased difficulty for the DM in preparing a setting and particularly in preparing NPCs to be challenges to PCs.  No, but you did say, "...removing the Monk from the game because of such arguments is kind of a fallacy, and one that is strongly tainted with their advocate's personal dislike of the class."   And in any event, I don't mind if you insult me.  I only get upset if you argue in bad faith.   If I'm guilty of hypocrisy, or you just think I am, get it out in the open.  If you think I'm being an idiot, say that too.  As long as you are willing to talk rationally about my stupidity, I don't mind.In any event, while I do dislike the class, the central reason for removing the Monk wasn't my dislike of the class.   And in particular, if you think my 'orientalism' argument was essentially a case of me arguing that I don't like chocolate in my peanut butter, I think you are missing the point entirely.  My objection to the monk is not at all that an eastern inspired class doesn't belong in a game with largely western mythic flavor.   My objection to the monk is that even in the context of game with an eastern inspired setting, the monk is bad design.   To my knowledge, I am the first one that used the term 'orientalism' and I didn't merely mean by it 'oriental'.   I agree.  Barbarian is just a background.  It's absurd that the assumption of having a background as a nomadic, aboriginal or technologically more primitive people should imply class.  Presumably the people from those cultures are as diverse in their classes as those from more civilized, settled, and technologically advanced cultures.   There are obviously going to be differences, but mostly we just have a difference in background.  But look further at your argument.  You say, "Maybe they taught Hunting there (go Ranger go)".   Ok, probably they did, but why in the world should we think that learning to hunt has anything to do with being a protector of nature, or having the ability to cast spells?  Ranger is itself a very specific background laden with non-generic abilities specific to a very particular (at this point highly self-referential) notion.   I wouldn't expect primitive hunter-gather groups to be crawling with Rangers just because they value the ability to Track and have great knowledge of animals.   The larger concept here isn't 'Ranger', but 'Hunter'.   That way we can play a demon slayer, big game hunter, undead slayer, magistrate, bounty hunter, or assassin without being laden with the flavor and mechanical burden of a class originally (and rather badly) attempting to model Aragorn from 'The Lord of the Rings'.   Not particularly that when we revert to the more flexible Hunter archetype, we find ourselves suddenly loosing the need for the literally dozens of 'slayer' and 'ranger' variants classes that 3.X produced to cover for the fact that the base class was a prestige class in disguise.   Done well enough, and we even lose the need for specialty prestige class hunters.</blockquote>

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