D&D 5E (2014) UA Samurai proposal: swap Fighting Spirit and Strength Before Death

[TheCosmicKid]

Holy hyperbole Bataman!

All I'm saying is that almost everything in this game is a "cultural artifact". What makes the samurai any different?

 

[Salamandyr]

All I'm saying is that almost everything in this game is a "cultural artifact". What makes the samurai any different?

Except you didn't say that. You snarked and asked a rhetorical question.

Socrates was a jerk.

Now, since here you asked an actual question that invites an answer, I will do my best to repond.

Yes, everything in D&D is a cultural artifact to one extent or another. However, the best of those cultural artifacts are very high level and applicable to a myriad of situations. i.e. The originals-the fighting men and the magic users were meant to represent just about anyone who solved problems by force of arms or by magic respectively.

Of course, even waay back then, specific cultural interpretations started slipping in (the cleric) and by the Greyhawk supplement they were already falling hard for them (the paladin and druid). I can't do much about those, since they were considerably before my time, and the years have worn the edges off of them--though to be fair, I'd probably remove them if I could.

To me, the best character classes are ones that can be turned to a myriad of interpretations in your campaign world; ie, the fighting man or the magic user. The more specific a concept, the less likely I can use it unmodified in my own games. There's a slippery slope of course. The Barbarian is a lot easier to generalize than the druid for instance. The ranger is a lot more subject to different interpretations than the paladin.

And then you come to things like the knight and the samurai. The knight is uncomfortable--I'd prefer Cavalier because, while it has a very specific cultural interpretation as a loyalist of King Charles' l, outside that very specific interpretation, it's a pretty general term for a heavily armed horse soldier (and it's been used in that fashion in D&D before), whereas knight presumes social station, and to an extent cultural background--though on a continental scale. To be fair, knights have been used to describe noble warriors of many cultures by English speaking peoples--so it's not a complete stretch to say it's a broad, fairly generic term. However, I think by using the term "knight", it makes it a lot harder to put aside the King Arthur trappings surrounding the name when you try to play in a campaign that doesn't include King Arthur trappings.

Everything said about the knight is about ten times more true for the samurai. It's a very specific term deriving from a specific time and place in a single country, that, incidentally, has never been used for anything else (even in cyberpunk-the term street samurai really only arises because of the assumption that Japan has taken everything over). And as such, it makes it really difficult to justify using "samurai" in a campaign world where Japan or a Japanese ersatz culture doesn't exist?.

I mean, look at those rules. Is there anything in either of those subclasses that don't fit a Primeval Thule campaign? No, not really, but in order to use them, the first thing everyone has to do is agree that samurai doesn't mean samurai and knight doesn't mean knight.

Do we have those problems with Champion or Battlemaster? I would submit that no we don't. Call the samurai the "Insightful Warrior" and then put in the flavor text that the inspiration for the class is the "legendary samurai" and now you've got a subclass that works in all sorts of campaigns without shoehorning and reflavoring.

As for Dungeons and Dragons...when I'm dm-ing, those things are whatever I say they are. When I'm playing, it's not up to me to decide what those things are--so no beef. But every time they tie fun mechanics to very specific cultural archetypes in the character creation rules, they create a potential point of conflict between the player and DM.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

The knight is uncomfortable--I'd prefer Cavalier because, while it has a very specific cultural interpretation as a loyalist of King Charles' l, outside that very specific interpretation, it's a pretty general term for a heavily armed horse soldier (and it's been used in that fashion in D&D before), whereas knight presumes social station, and to an extent cultural background--though on a continental scale. To be fair, knights have been used to describe noble warriors of many cultures by English speaking peoples--so it's not a complete stretch to say it's a broad, fairly generic term. However, I think by using the term "knight", it makes it a lot harder to put aside the King Arthur trappings surrounding the name when you try to play in a campaign that doesn't include King Arthur trappings.

"Cavalier" is just the Norman word for "knight". It absolutely denotes social station -- that's how it came to be used for Charles' aristocratic supporters. In fact, "knight" is an unusual word in English. Most other European languages use cognates or calques of "cavalier" as their word for the medieval warrior-nobility: chevalier, caballero, Ritter, and so on. If anything, "knight" is the broader term, because Sir Elton John is a knight, but not a cavalier (unless he's got a side project I don't know about).

And to the best of my knowledge, this has been D&D's usage of the term "cavalier" as well. I know for a fact that the 3E cavalier prestige class got large bonuses on Knowledge (nobility and royalty) checks and other leadership abilities, in addition to the horse stuff. So while I agree that "cavalier" would also be an appropriate term for this "knight" fighter archetype, it's because the word is a synonym.

Everything said about the knight is about ten times more true for the samurai. It's a very specific term deriving from a specific time and place in a single country, that, incidentally, has never been used for anything else (even in cyberpunk-the term street samurai really only arises because of the assumption that Japan has taken everything over). And as such, it makes it really difficult to justify using "samurai" in a campaign world where Japan or a Japanese ersatz culture doesn't exist?.

Whereas all the English words we're using make perfect sense in a campaign world without an England?

I mean, look at those rules. Is there anything in either of those subclasses that don't fit a Primeval Thule campaign?

I don't know the setting that well, but well-mannered courts of nobility seem somewhat out of place.

Do we have those problems with Champion or Battlemaster? I would submit that no we don't.

But we already have the champion and the battlemaster. We don't need to keep replicating their genericness in every single other archetype.

But every time they tie fun mechanics to very specific cultural archetypes in the character creation rules, they create a potential point of conflict between the player and DM.

Every time they print a word on a page, they create a potential point of conflict between the player and DM. If the two parties are willing to cooperate and compromise, the game is fun. But if they're determined to be adversarial, no amount of carefully generic terminology can avoid it. And in trying to be generic, all you do is end up at bland. (I mean, "insightful warrior"? Really?) Culture is a strong influence on people's lives, both players in the real world and characters in the campaign world. The game loses a lot if it tries to bleach away that influence.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Whereas all the English words we're using make perfect sense in a campaign world without an England?

In the context of a game published in English, sure, a "Knight" class makes sense. Translate the game to French or Japanese and it would make sense to change from Knight to Chevalier or Samurai, respectively.

Every time they print a word on a page, they create a potential point of conflict between the player and DM.

And every thing the rules doesn't cover explicitly is, similarly, a potential point of conflict. Thus, someone has to have the final say, that someone being the DM.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

In the context of a game published in English, sure, a "Knight" class makes sense. Translate the game to French or Japanese and it would make sense to change from Knight to Chevalier or Samurai, respectively.

I'm willing to say that "samurai" is an English word at this point. Ask a random person on the street what a "samurai" is and they can probably tell you.

And every thing the rules doesn't cover explicitly is, similarly, a potential point of conflict.

...And he was enlightened.

 

[MechaTarrasque]

I'm willing to say that "samurai" is an English word at this point. Ask a random person on the street what a "samurai" is and they can probably tell you.

+1. To quote http://www.dailywritingtips.com/italicizing-foreign-words/:

In American usage, if a foreign word has an entry in Merriam-Webster, it need not be italicized.......However, if the writer feels that a word is largely unfamiliar to the intended audience, italicizing it may be the reasonable thing to do, dictionary entry notwithstanding.

Not only is samurai in Merriam-Webster, but it is legal for Scrabble (http://scrabble.merriam.com/finder/samurai). You can't get more English word then that.