No monks?

[geeman]

At 04:35 PM 3/10/2003 -0500, Daniel McSorley wrote:

> > All of which does rather beg the question, where are the Western unarmed
> > martial arts based monks that equate to the D&D monk character class? If
> > the animist thinking of Vikings equates to the Oriental concept of ki why
> > didn`t they punch and flip their way through Europe rather than hack and
> > slash? Why didn`t Joan of Arc kick (literally) the English out of France?
>
>The same reason they didn`t do these things in east Asia. Warriors there
>went armed and armored, just as they did in Europe. Asians soldiers
>learned to kick and punch, too, but you couldn`t show me a knight in
>Europe who didn`t know how to throw a punch or apply steel boot to ass.

There`s a pretty big difference between those two, though, isn`t
there? Being able to competently deliver a sound, booted kick is a far cry
from flying across the room and kicking someone. I`ve never heard of a
knight or even a Western soldier having the martial tradition to deliver a
sound round-house kick before the martial arts diffused into the West. Oh,
it may have happened, but I don`t think that`d make that person qualify as
the D&D equivalent of a monk.

_The Brotherhood of the Wolf_ gave a really cool fantastic interpretation
of that kind of thing happening in 18th century France, but going with
something like that is a pretty major shift in the emphasis of a setting....

>Yeah, various Asian cultures were at times oppressed, and forbidden to use
>weapons, so they worked with what they had, and developed a wide variety
>of unarmed techniques, but overall, if you go to war, you take a weapon.
>What nobody mentions in this history of unarmed combat is that for most of
>Asian history, China had the biggest army, and Korea and Japan and Okinawa
>depended on China`s goodwill. Then the Japanese got the best army, and
>China and Korea and Okinawa, with their ancient traditions of mystical
>martial arts, were mostly Japanese provinces right up until 1945, or for
>Okinawa, modern times. Must be something to that armed-combat stuff.

I don`t think the relevance of a post-gunpowder soldiery with repeating
weapons is very apt, but let`s go ahead and assume all of that to be
true. It still doesn`t answer the question, where are the Western unarmed
martial arts based monks that equate to the D&D monk character class? It`s
not so much the lack of _armies_ of Viking monks that is the problem. It`s
the total absence of a monk-like tradition of unarmed combat. If the
Western equivalents that were proposed (an animist belief in the spirit of
a weapon and the French concept of elan) or any others actually equate to
ki then why no Western monks who focus on martial arts? Why hasn`t that
become part of the Western tradition in the same way it has in the East?

>The reason we westerners ascribe magic powers to martial arts is because
>it`s exotic, and we`re gullible.

I don`t think you can really blame the supposed magical powers of martial
arts on Western ignorance and gullibility. It`s more a product of Eastern
legend, mythology and myth making (much of it modern) than something than
the product of Westerners.

>We don`t think boxers and Greco-Roman wrestlers have special powers, so
>why do we think that ninjas and Buddhist monks do?

We don`t think boxers and Greco-Roman wrestlers have special powers because
people who study them don`t combine their efforts with the crypto-religious
aspects that are often associated with Eastern unarmed combat.

The magical or mystical aspects of the monk, however, aren`t really the
point. You could play monks by assuming that none of their powers were
really mystical in nature. The point is that such things are distinctly
Eastern in flavor (as in somewhere starting to the sunrise side of the
Punjab) and not something that one should include in a campaign setting
based on Western cultural paradigms.

Gary

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[kgauck]

Well, implicit in changing the names of Monk abilities would be changing the
setting ideas behind them. My parallel between Viking animism and oriental
ki was that special performance produces game modifier. I don`t think they
are the same. If Arnulf the Rjurik atunes to the spirit of his axe, could
he achieve DR penetration? If so, what is the difference from a mechanics
POV? Setting and decription difference is certainly different.

Kenneth Gauck
kgauck@mchsi.com

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[Cobos]

Kenneth Gauck wrote:
> Well, implicit in changing the names of Monk abilities would be changing the
> setting ideas behind them. My parallel between Viking animism and oriental
> ki was that special performance produces game modifier. I don`t think they
> are the same. If Arnulf the Rjurik atunes to the spirit of his axe, could
> he achieve DR penetration? If so, what is the difference from a mechanics
> POV? Setting and decription difference is certainly different.
>
> Kenneth Gauck
> kgauck@mchsi.com
>
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>
Personally my problem with the monk PC class in BR is more of a
mechanics stand-point. The monk has lots of cool special abilites to
let it function in a medium-high magic setting since that class hardly
can use magical weapons at all. That is a problem in BR, since hardly
anyone else either has any magical items... So as such the monk is not
balanced at all (the same argument can be said about the cleric too
of course...) when in a typical low-magic BR setting.

Cobos

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[kgauck]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Sindre Cools Berg" <cobos@SAERS.COM>
Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2003 10:29 AM

> The monk has lots of cool special abilites to let it function
> in a medium-high magic setting since that class hardly can use
> magical weapons at all. That is a problem in BR, since hardly
> anyone else either has any magical items... So as such the monk
> is not balanced at all

Personally, I`ve never played a monk, think the monk is a goofy class, and
would rather not use the class at all (except in an oriental based campaign,
which I`m not really interested in). But I do think the class can be
modified to fit Cerilia.

Kenneth Gauck
kgauck@mchsi.com

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