CybAnt1 wrote...
Well, you know, some people want clerics.
No. Doesn't fit lore. Religion is just a mysterium and the Chantry is just a political force. There are no gods who grant spells, and the priesteses don't adventure, they hire us to do that.
But yes, somebody did write a cleric class mod. I tried it. I want a 4th class, but that's not the right one, and didn't even seem to me to be the right way to do it. And it had bugs.
And there are probably other people who want to play half-orcs and gnomes.
Not me. More playable races, though, well, maybe.
Seems to me if they really wanted to break from Tolkien/D & D/90% of the fantasy settings out there, the two other races wouldn't be elves and dwarves. Oh sure, their take on elves & dwarves is a bit different, and suddenly they and humans aren't getting along all kumbaya-like, but it's still the same stuff.
But as somebody said, most other games in trying to figure out other races hardly ever come up with anything much more original. In general, it's some form of animal human hybrid. In Avernum, you can be cat people or lizard people. In WoW, you can be cow people, wolf people, etc.
And so if you want to satisfy everybody, pretty soon you're playing the same old classes and races we had in AD&D. You might as well be playing in the Forgotten Realms, if you're going to force-fit the traditional D&D classes into every bloody game.
No. I want them to have their own IP. It gives them freedom. However, having your IP doesn't mean you can't borrow (and maybe rework or reimplement) ideas from other existing IP. In fact, it give you the freedom to take what's already been done in other IP, and actually maybe do it better.
But the only argument you've put forth for having monks boils down to this: "Monks are cool. Other games have them. Dragon Age should have them." This applies to any number of other classes. It's like arguing that Blood Mages are missing from NWN2.
For the idea to work, there has to be a rationale for the skill to have evolved. Even if you buy the idea that highly skilled martial artists can compete in a straight-up fight with armed and armored men, at lower levels of skill that simply can't be true or weapons and armor would never have been invented. So you have to come up with some reason why some particular group in this particular world would have ignored the easy path to combat success and concentrated on martial arts.
I can think of four possibilities:
1) Some sort of religious convictions could forbid weapon use. Problem is, we don't have a lot of religions to play with here. Maybe some obscure isolated sect of the Chantry (sort of like the guys at the Sacred Ashes) could have it, but it's certainly not known. Since we know a lot less about the Qun'ari, some sect of theirs--whirling dervishes perhaps?--would be a better bet. But unless we have the opportunity to play a Qunari PC, or in that part of the world, I can't see it.
2) There could be some people living in an environment where they simply don't have access to stone or metal, like a vast swampy area. This would probably be more like a sort of barbarian than the D&D monk. But again, no such area exists in the world as far as we know at this point.
3) The biggest tangible advantage of not using wepaons armor is silence and the ability to be lethal even if forced to relinquish all weapons. The key group to whom this would be useful are assassins, so this would be a sort of ninja group. However, we already have an assassin organization and we know the Crows don't do this. Nor have any rivals of theirs been mentioned by Zevran. So again, if such a thing exists, it exists far away and is unknown in Ferelden and probably Orlais.
4) In Rolemaster, essence users had a limit on how much material they could carry with them without impeding their spellcasting, and metals were particularly harmful. Ideally, they wanted to be naked to the world to maximize their connection to the essence. However, magic doesn't work that way in this system, so that's not an option.
So while there might be some way to fit them in, I don't see that there's any particular reason that martial artists are needed in this world. And I think that it's far better to design your world and fit your classes to the world than make up your classes and alter the world to fit them...that's the fundamental reason the Forgotten Realms is such a thin, unconvincing world. It's a world built around pre-existing D&D game concepts.
I'd rather see any new specializations (and a monk would more logically be a specialization than a class in this sort of system) fit things that already exist in the lore. We know what the chantry army has as a skill, but what about all those non-martial, non-spellcasting chantry people. Could the chantry-trained brothers and sisters have some particular abilities (coercion? inspiration?). How about a Grey Warden specialization making that "sense darkspawn" ability something real, and maybe something equivalent to favored enemy status. At the very least, they should be the people (ok, other than dwarves) best trained to fightthem. Some of our existing specializations are kind of culture-related (Antivan assassins, Orlesian bards, Dwarven berserkers)--maybe we could have some additional spellcasting types from Tevinter.
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