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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(Psi)SeveredHead" data-source="post: 2990692" data-attributes="member: 1165">Oriental culture is "cool" and "popular" but also misunderstood by most of us Westerners. "Historical" Oriental culture is even "cooler" but even less understood, including by many people from Japan and other Eastern countries. (Just because someone's Japanese doesn't mean they know more than you do about samurai.) People from these cultures are very frequently stereotyped by Westerners; the stereotypes aren't necessarily negative, but like any stereotypes they are shortcuts in thinking, frequently inaccurate, and when they are accurate they still do not apply all the time.As a result, Oriental gaming material ends up being stereotyped. I was not at all surprised to see the Samurai base class get voted least popular of all of WotC's non-core base classes on a recent series of polls.Some differences between "East" and "West" also cause hidden concerns that aren't immediately obvious. For instance, in DnD, it's very common practice for PCs to kill bad guys, then loot their corpses. This isn't exactly honorable behavior among medieval Europeans, but it was done. This was not done in Japan. Repeated interactions with the dead causes spiritual tainting (or something along those lines), so unless a Japanese-equivalent adventurer is an eta, they will not do this. If they're a peasant adventurer rather than a samurai they will still not loot the dead. Oriental Adventures discusses this, but it assumes that everyone in the adventure is Oriental.The only base class in the core rules that carries specific Oriental flavor is the monk (there's absolutely nothing wrong with a Chinese fighter, rogue, etc), even though it can clearly be used by non-Oriental people. Unfortunately, it's terribly designed, poorly balanced (generally weaker), is heavily stereotyped, has a restricted alignment (alignment is terribly explained, with law and chaos being particular offenders) and even steals a niche ... meaning lots of people playing it don't really want to play the stereotyped class, they're just playing it so they won't totally suck at unarmed combat. The class is amazing inflexible, even if you like its flavor and think it's balanced.And on that note, why do you assume the PCs will travel the world? Maybe they won't. What is the point of an adventuring party travelling from Europe to China when China has its own equally-levelled adventurers solving problems in China? If things are so bad in China that China needs to import European adventurers, why aren't things so bad in Europe that Europeans aren't trying to import Chinese adventurers? A lot of adventuring worlds are smaller than Earth, anyway. Eberron was supposed to be smaller, but someone goofed, which is why the population figures seem so small.</blockquote>

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