Worldwide Europe - Are People Doing This?

[genshou]

Good stuf so far... let's get this to page 2 while I look for all the stuff I need to reply to!

Edit: Er... nevermind. Someone seems to have posted while I was preparing this response.

 

[Sound of Azure]

I'm mighty fine Ny, have fun at work, eh?

The Bruiser looks cool (I can't get the table to work, tho). Luckily, I'm work on an "asian" campaign right now anyway, so very little stress about monk.
</derail>

On that note, though. Despite the fact that I'm running an "oriental" campaign setting next, I'm still resistant to having both Samurai and Ninja in my game. I'm using altered Wu Jen and Shamans, though. Monks, too (they are "Northerners" from the "Chinese" empire the Coalition pays fealty to). Most monks are seen as something a bit sinister for this reason.

It seems strange that as creative as I and my players are, it is so hard to divorce Samurai and Ninja from their Japanese roots (there is no "Japanese" analogue in this campaign setting).
It's partly due to the design of the setting it would seem, but I wrote it that way.

Perhaps I'm just reacting to the "fanboy overload" of those images? hmmm

Sorry Genshou, back to you.
</hijack>

 

[Psion]

There isn't any rationale there, just some crappy patch that "travellers from a distant land have set up monasteries in X Kingdom."

Can I get an illustration of where this explanation actually exists for the monk?

Because of all the campaigns I own (and there are many), I can only think of one.

The rest which include monks make them part of the local setting. Which is not all that unreasonable. Many of the settings out exhibit differences from Europe so major that complaining that in this particular world, a monastic martial tradition evolved, is nitpicky at the very least. Assuming that another land other than India and China could evolve such traditions is not a stretch compared to the inclusion of powerful magic, meddling gods, and creatures that can lay waste to villages.

 

[Gold Roger]

I don't know if this is helpfull for the thread, but here's my own approach on the whole issue:

I don't really like traditional fantasy.

I'm no history freak (despite being interested in it) and not interested in any historical correctness.

I like cool and fun stuff though.

I like old mythology, but more for the crazy out there aspect. I actually think Dragonball Z has more resemblance to real world mythology than LotR.

Still I don't have any Oriental Areas in my campaigns. Nor do I have European areas though.

In my campaign different cultures are mixed, matched, cut into pieces, warped, misinterpreted, reinterpreted, misunderstood and ripped out of context. As long as the end result is coherent and as versimilitude any notion of political, geographical, cultural, and historical correctness can follow realism out of the window.

I don't want to shoehorn D&D into pseudo European flavor or argue with my players about the actual customs of feudal Japan Samurai.

But give me adventurers hailing from a quasi-european realm that has daisho wielding knights, scientistic wizards, warforged bodyguards and outragous martial arts orders as well as secret azket cults, fighting a high magic scry-buff-teleport+countermeasures against a empire of egypt/wiking pirates and slavers that are fanatacally devoted to an evil reptilian god of the ocean but are secretly led by a hidden clan of greek hobgoblin ninjas any day.

This is no hyperbole but an actuakl example of something I'd use. Don't think I only like braindead "coolnes" games though, I like my fun to be complicated as well.

 

[Mad Mac]

I'm with Gold Roger. I like to raid historical cultures for cool ideas, but I'm not out to copy any paticular culture wholesale. Still, I do think it odd that many campaign settings seem to include less cultural diversity than the real world...

 

[genshou]

Genshou,

Just a few questions.

Will you be developing your setting with a "whole world" approach? That is, will you develop the world as a whole-continents, nations, cultures?
Other that "Oriental" and "Occidental/Europe", will there be other regions in your world? How will they relate?
If so, you have quite a task determining the interaction between them all!

In my homebrew, the world has been split up into innumerable smaller islands for the most part (much like Earthsea). Cultures tend to be isolated to specific islands or groups of islands as far as their major influence goes, but with sea trade on the rise, there is a great deal of mixing going on.

Of the islands I've detailed so far, I've included English, Celtic, Roman, Egyptian, Hebrew, Arabic, and ancient south African tidbits here and there, sometimes mixed, sometimes not. It makes perfect sense in my setting for a samurai to be adventuring with a Zulu witch doctor, an Egyptian warrior-priest, and a Spanish swashbucker. I can see how this would be more difficult in worlds where horse-drawn caravans are still the primary means of trade.

Being non-European (ok I do have a scots/irish ancestor) I was happy to develop a World where the europe-analogue is confined to one small Island 'Cruithne' (which is itself a reflection of Pict/Celt legend).

Excellent! 'Bout time Europe got that treatment at least once. There's just so much else in the world that works just fine as a cultural influence for D&D.

I think the problem is the term "world." My worlds are of limited geographic and cultural scope. Why? Because in the mythic past that fantasy tries to evoke, the "world" was a whole lot smaller. By "world," I mean the totality of places, things, ideas, etc. that shape the reality in which the characters live.

Most RPG campaigns seek to evoke a Bronze Age or Dark Age feel. During those times, the "world" was a pretty small place. The great civilizations that inspire RPGs are things like the Roman, Phonecian, Inca, Aztec, Chinese, Medieval Islamic or Medieval Christian civilizations. While there might be distant rumours of strange lands, peculiar customs and humanoid monstrosities at the edge of the map, the "world" in which people lived was a whole lot smaller than Planet Earth.

I think that the modern idea that says planet=world really takes away from the fantasy feel of a society. Continents are not good units of geography for a world that is supposed to feel magical and be evocative of mythic time.

Does this mean that those of us who model our worlds on the Circle-T maps of the Crusades period, the floating disc of the ancient Judeans or the four-cornered universe of the Toltecs don't like cultural diversity? No. It just means that we like to look at the complexity and diversity within a civilization rather than trying to replicate the feel of extreme exoticism and incomprehensibility of the European Age of Discovery.

This is, I think, where our opinions are going to seriously differ. The technology available in standard D&D is more evocative of the Middle Ages rather than the Bronze Age or the Dark Ages. Of course, what kind of culture develops and such is dependent on the setting but I just can't imagine crossbows, Welsh longbows, and full plate in a world with a "Bronze Age feel". And don't forget the siege technology of the standard D&D world, either.

The modern idea of "planet=world" is mostly due to the fact that there are no longer "edges" on our maps–the world has been explored now, and there's nowhere left to unknown regions. I've delved into determining the availability and accessability of magic in standard D&D possibly more than anyone else on this forum, and I do understand that even with teleportation magic available, it's not going to cause the cultures to mix as much as simple things like sailing technology did in our own world. But that cross-cultural bleed of ideas is still going to occur to a noteworthy extent.

With D&D the way that it is, I don't imagine "Circle-T" maps in the way that they existed in the real world. When the king's royal advisor can use divination and scrying to help fill in the blank areas on the map, I imagine a world more like Faerûn, where adventurers in the Dalelands are fairly likely to have heard of Calimshan, can get more information about it from a bard travelling through Ashabenford, and can realistically plan to go there someday.

Hmm... First of all, is the question posed on this thread inquisitive of whether or not gamers hate oriental flavored things?

Or if the posters to the forum simply dislike or are vehement in their disdain for anything in RPGs that is not Euro centric?

Or...Is "oriental flavored D&D hating" the majority? As of this thread seems to be heading?

I guess I am a little confused as to the answer we seem to be looking for.

I posted this with multiple intents. I wanted to draw out some of the vehement Oriental-hating crowd (such as Turanil and Numion) and get a feel for why they react that way, as well as figuring out if this creates cultural elitism in their world-building, or if it just means that they don't include Oriental flavour, but do still have multicultural worlds. I'm a bit surprised by this, though:

No katanas, ninjas or samurais in my games. Or if there is, they'll be strictly inferior to longswords, rogues and fighters

Making a katana inferior to a longsword is driving hatred past the point of any degree of rational thought. Deliberately and blatantly ignoring intelligent design and proper game mechanics modeling of real-world physics because of cultural dislike is, to me, equivalent to racism. I've seen the katana vs. bastard sword debates numerous times, and I've stayed more or less on the fence in them. This kind of viewpoint, though, is enough to make me disgusted. The "cool" emoticon just makes it worse. I read it as "I'm biased and I think that makes me awesome." Those aren't the kinds of posts I want in this thread, but rather informative responses as to why people feel that way.

These have been part of DnD for a long time, long enough for their origins to fade. Just because the mummy is Egyptian-flavored doesn't mean it always gets presented that way. You can find completely un-Eqyptian mummies in adventures. Meanwhile, things like the samurai are so drenched in Oriental flavor that it's nearly impossible to separate the samurai from that flavor (if some people in a gaming group don't like the flavor). This is a bit ironic, as in game terms there doesn't need to be much difference between a samurai or a knight concept.

If the mummy can be divorced from its cultural origins; and the sphynx, genies, golems, etc. can too; why not samurai?

I also suggest that a lot of these Oriental-flavored classes just aren't needed. There is no need for a samurai class, for instance, so every time WotC makes a samurai class, there's a good chance they'll mess it up. At most, the only changes needed are making the fighter class a bit more flexible (so they can compete while wearing lighter armor, might have some leaderhsip feats available other than just Leadership, create a chain of Iajitsu feats, and so forth).

There's more to the OA Samurai class than just Iaijutsu Focus. They get several other skills as class skills that are appropriate to a Samurai, but not a Fighter. They also get more skill points. A straight up soldier is going to have a lot more to offer in battle than a Samurai (Fighters get more bonus feats), but a Samurai is going to be a lot better off when dealing with nobility. If a proper culture exists for them, Samurai have just as much place alongside the Fighter as a Barbarian or Ranger does.

If your talking about Enworlders, your typically talking about gamers are you not? It is the D&D/D20 reviews site correct? If your talking about Enworlders living in the United States you are then talking about American Gamers, thus I wasn't the first one nor the second one to bring it up. It got brought up in the first two posts. If we make it a point of singling out where the gamers come from, we could easily have a whole new can of worms. I don't believe this was Genshou's intent, which is again why I asked for some clarification.

Yes, I'm guilty of bringing it up first, in the OP.

I certainly don't think that every American is this way, of course. I've seen plenty of eastern Europeans and even some Asians with the same viewpoint. But in my experience it's a lot more widespread in the US.

Hey Genshou

As one of those 'ferverant haters' of the monk class, I must say that I actually have a good reason for this. Allow me to explain.

What, genshou and Nyaricus disagreeing on something? I knew it was too good to last

I dislike the idea of the level of cultural intergration -- not influence per se -- in D&D; this is mainly due to the inclusion of the monk class in the core rule book, which forces the assumption there must be shaolin-style monasteries in medieval psuedo-europe. I don't like that. It doesn't make any sense and takes away from the feel of it all - I am being forced to play a corssover campaign striahgt out of the box with the monk class sitting there, staring at me, laughing the whole way to the bank. I frankly feel jipped that I have been forced to have a waste of space in the PHB. The monk class is decidedly a shaolin monk, not a benedictine, which actually could have been useful/interesting in a psuedo-european setting, which is the core assumption.

You certainly have a point there, and quite a valid one, in fact. I would like to point out a few things that make me disagree, however. First of all, the Benedictine monks can easily exist in a D&D setting. They would have the Expert NPC class. Second, while the core rules do force you to include a monastery or two in your kingdom, remember that Monk is a PC class, and therefore there are very few of them in the kingdom, and very few monasteries need to exist for a PC class when new members of PC classes spring up so rarely, right? You could possibly even get away with not having any monasteries in a given kingdom, and have the monks living in that kingdom travel from elsewhere and settle there for whatever reason.

Magic has nothign to do with it. It happened in real life; the facts are there. But the monk doesn't belong in core D&D, not in the least. It just isn't appropriate, frankly. D&D has never been sold like that.

Magic has everything to do with it! The dissemination of ideas is the one thing that would be most heavily influenced by the alterations standard D&D would make to a culture. There are those in every society who seek out a life of peaceful contemplation, as well as training in the martial arts. Just look at all the yoga and/or self-defense classes people in the US take (not sure how widespread these things are in other cultures; I'd appreciate some chiming in). Through the influence of magic and the existence of Monks in a foreign culture to begin with, possessing so many abilities that would aid them in long journeys, I don't see it difficult at all to swallow some of them travelling to a Euro-centric region of the world and wanting to set up a monastery to enlighten their fellow men. Psion aids me in explaining:

The rest which include monks make them part of the local setting. Which is not all that unreasonable. Many of the settings out exhibit differences from Europe so major that complaining that in this particular world, a monastic martial tradition evolved, is nitpicky at the very least. Assuming that another land other than India and China could evolve such traditions is not a stretch compared to the inclusion of powerful magic, meddling gods, and creatures that can lay waste to villages.

It really isn't much of a stretch at all.

Well, there's something to chew on for a bit, folks. Have at thee!

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Making a katana inferior to a longsword is driving hatred past the point of any degree of rational thought.

But it isn't better than a longsword.

If the mummy can be divorced from its cultural origins; and the sphynx, genies, golems, etc. can too; why not samurai?

Because the samurai is drenched in flavor (that's not going away) and researching Japanese history is comparetively easy. I can go the local library and read about samurai anytime I want to, or watch some inaccurate anime if I'm so inclined. Mummies are not drenched in flavor, researching Ancient Egypt is not so easy, and they're just not as ... cool.

There's more to the OA Samurai class than just Iaijutsu Focus. They get several other skills as class skills that are appropriate to a Samurai, but not a Fighter.

I did mention I thought the fighter wasn't flexible enough, this goes towards skill points and stuff, too, but I don't see why the samurai needs a different class than say a generic aristrocratic warrior class or knight class (not counting the PH II knight for this example).

Second, while the core rules do force you to include a monastery or two in your kingdom, remember that Monk is a PC class, and therefore there are very few of them in the kingdom, and very few monasteries need to exist for a PC class when new members of PC classes spring up so rarely, right? You could possibly even get away with not having any monasteries in a given kingdom, and have the monks living in that kingdom travel from elsewhere and settle there for whatever reason.

A kingdom can have hundreds of wizards, depending on its size. Why does it have hundreds of monks?

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

Making a katana inferior to a longsword is driving hatred past the point of any degree of rational thought. Deliberately and blatantly ignoring intelligent design and proper game mechanics modeling of real-world physics because of cultural dislike is, to me, equivalent to racism. I've seen the katana vs. bastard sword debates numerous times, and I've stayed more or less on the fence in them. This kind of viewpoint, though, is enough to make me disgusted. The "cool" emoticon just makes it worse. I read it as "I'm biased and I think that makes me awesome." Those aren't the kinds of posts I want in this thread, but rather informative responses as to why people feel that way.

Edit: nm, it's not worth it.

If the mummy can be divorced from its cultural origins; and the sphynx, genies, golems, etc. can too; why not samurai?

Uh, because animated mummies, sphinxes, genies and golems are fictional, and samurai are (or were) real?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I've noticed a trend on these forums for certain people to respond with immediate and fervent hate to any possibility of cultural influences outside of Europe appearing in their D&D worlds<snip> I can't imagine a world where, if there was an Oriental culture out there, it wouldn't have bled into the rest of the world a little.

A big part of the problem people have with things like the Monk is that nearly every other PC class in the base book has a Eurocentric or acultural underpinning, which lends itself nicely to a Eurocentric campaign...

...and then the Oriental-themed Monk is sitting there in the PHB like a sore thumb...a Polar Bear in the Sahara, if you will. It feels like a pandering addition to a perfectly fine Euro-themed game.

Some find that jarring, especially when you can do just what WotC & other RPG companies do and produce culturally specific sourcebooks to introduce such things within their proper context.

To be PERFECTLY clear- I find the including the Monk in the PHB jarring- but I also freely allow the use of OA and other PCs in my campaign, so I have no problem adding non-Euro themes to my campaigns.

I don't see why the samurai needs a different class than say a generic aristrocratic warrior class or knight class

Because there were huge differences between the expectations of a Samurai and a European courtly knight. A samurai was expected to be literate and cultured in many ways- skilled or at least schooled in calligraphy and at least one musical instrument, for instance. Such things were often bonuses in Europe- illiteracy was far more common among European aristocrats than their Eastern counterparts, for instance, and the musical arts were generally the province of women, monks, and performers, not knights.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Because there were huge differences between the expectations of a Samurai and a European courtly knight.

Roll out the stereotypes!

A samurai was expected to be literate and cultured in many ways- skilled or at least schooled in calligraphy and at least one musical instrument, for instance.

The "rough" Minamoto were said to be so uncultured, none of them could play a flute. (Not necessarily true, but no one would say that if it wasn't believable.)

Really, I don't see how making a generic class with Perform (any) and Craft (writing/visual art/whatever) is so bad. Some knights were poets too, and those who weren't (possibly the large majority) wouldn't be putting ranks into it.

Such things were often bonuses in Europe- illiteracy was far more common among European aristocrats than their Eastern counterparts, for instance, and the musical arts were generally the province of women, monks, and performers, not knights.

Nonetheless, some knights did play musical instruments, and literacy is available to all PH classes except for the barbarian, whether it's realistic or not. An aristrocratic warrior class would be literate by default, just like rogues and fighters, even if it isn't realistic.