Doppelschwert

Rly? Epic lvl warrior with 10 attacks per round? Nearly invincible monks or unhittable and shadow-dancing rogues, using any magic protection from items? More dependent on loot - yes. Much weaker? - hardly so. Which edition are you talking? In 3.X edition, the discrepancy between the magical classes and the rest just grows with levels.

I don't like anthromorphic animal races either. Apart from being lazy design, imho they most often aren't consistent with the game world. I always feel like their existence would imply there being offspring with regular humans and the more you mix them, the sillier it gets. So at the start its half-dogpeople and then you get quarter-dogpeople and so on. It doesn't even allow for characters that couldn't be human themselves in the first place. So you live with dogs because you have a dog head - a human could live with dogs as well. Elves, Dwarfes and halflings aren't that original either, because they are humanlike as well, but at least you can imagine them having the same ancestors as humans, just having evolved differently (although this is a magical world where technically "everything goes", that is still way more plausible). To be honest, I don't even need any humanoid races besides humans at all. Games like fire emblem show that a low fantasy can work as well, where its more about political conflict. Gothic comes to mind as well. Now what would be interesting to play would be werepeople, but without animals. Lets say there is a whole country of cursed humans which are forced to transform into some kind of ...something different at certain points. So you had the chance to play as them, and at random points during fights, your heritage would take over you. That would give you bonuses and disadvantages and you can't control the transformation (but it wouldn't strip your control of the char). No matter what they transform into (cliche demons, or have their personality inverted or something like that), the implications of this curse on the lifes of that people already sound more intriguing and interesting to me than anything that horse-head mentality could ever give.

That is exactly how I feel. God, that game was horrible for all the artificial emphasis on blood, it became tired really quickly. They propably thought to themselves "You know what would be cool? If we were to make a game were blood is the basis for everything. Theres blood everywhere when you fight and everything evil is tied to blood. Like bloodmagic and stuff. That would be a real mature theme, especially if we shove it down the players throats every couple of minutes." I hated the game for that reason alone.

Yeah, that sounds like an interesting concept, too. I think the perceived problem is that most people are not keen on neglecting class abilities. Of course you were able to play a monk with weapons and armor in NWN2 for example, but most people propably wouldn't do it because you were crippling yourself. Which is kind of true, but I think the most fun characters I played where the ones were I just did what sounded fun even though it wasn't that powerful. One time I was playing a hermit who was simply called "the gardener", which specialised in dualwielding scythes. He was a ranger and had a dinosaur pet and I imagined him riding the dino around his field harvesting crops with his dual scythes. That was neither realistic nor was it strong gameplay wise, but boy what fun has been had with that character...

It certainly would be nice to have monks displayed in a broader way while you travel so they aren't the cliche known from several DnD Games, as suggested in this thread. However, I don't understand the problems people are having mechanics-wise in most threads I read about monks. When its possible to equip armor to your mage, it certainly will be an option to give a monk some armor. Likewise, weapons. I would be surprised if it wasn't possible to change a monk build to reflect a sohei character or the like and I will be happy to twist the monk to my own concepts. As long as the character progression is open enough, that should be no problem.

Looks like I'm the first monk player around. Opposed to all the people suggesting that this class can only be played as an asian martial artist, I'll give him a nice bastard sword and play him as a wandering wise-man. Who totally kicks your butt when you're being stupid. With a bastard sword. In his robes. Later on, propably cipher.