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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(Psi)SeveredHead" data-source="post: 2990745" data-attributes="member: 1165">Unfortunately, elves aren't real, whereas Oriental people are. Elves aren't humans; while I wouldn't be happy if the game rules said "elves never harm other elves" or something along those lines, I could still accept it. I could not accept "Chinese people are quiet" or some other silly stereotype (even if I had never met any Chinese people and couldn't disprove the stereotype), simply because human behavior varies too widely for such a statement to make the slightest bit of sense.That too. (Then again, the monk sucks in terms of mechanics. Do Oriental classes get shafted? Or am I just missing out on the power of the OA samurai?)Usually barbaric culture doesn't get stereotyped to that extent (IME), and some Europeans are descended from barbarians a short enough time ago that the Romans and other civilized Europeans were capable of writing stuff about them. And even if the Romans were as arrogant as the stereotypes suggest (doubtful) and got many things wrong about the barbarians (quite possibly), they were quite capable of saying "this barbarian chieftain built a city, this one was a poet, this one became a good general - maybe we should have thought about that before training him in our tactics and then fighting against him", etc, so not everything they wrote about barbarians involved stereotypes.Furthemore, barbaric culture rarely is specific enough to offend anyone, or isn't specific enough to contain obvious inaccuracies. It's also often variable - there are so many barbaric "tribes" that even if one group is acting in a non-realistic manner, you know there are tribes that don't do so. The European barbarians are basically gone now (maybe there's a few left somewhere, I don't know for sure), but Oriental people of course still exist and so do their old writings.If you're going to restrict looting, you're going to have to change a big part of the game. Plus, if you do have mixed cultures in your adventuring group, and Mr. Oda warns Mr. Pendragon about looting, Mr. Pendragon isn't going to care and therefore gets whatever cool loot is available, whereas Mr. Oda has to wait until he finds his amazingly wealthy benefactor to get his own powerups. (Mind you, given enough thought, you could probably fix this situation. But I hate DnD magic item requirements and don't want to think about that anymore.)I guess I fail to see that hatred. Most of the players I've seen who play monks (in person, not on messageboards) kind of ignore the Oriental ki stuff as part of their character concept, but complain how weak it is. I've seen plenty of obivously non-lawful monks who nonetheless have "LG" or "LN" written on their character sheet.Okay, I have to admit, that's a great plot hook. <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=":)" /></blockquote>

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