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Monks Are Stupid- A Pointless Gaming Rant
Entry posted by Alex Kennedy
1,522 views
I kind of promised my entries would become more lighthearted after the first one, didn't I? Well, um... do anger and whiny ranting count as lighthearted? Because that's all I've got at the moment. Anyway, on to our scheduled programming.
First of all, I don't mean religious monks, I mean crazy martial arts monks. That should probably be obvious by the fact that I labeled this as a gaming rant, but I want to make sure I've got all my bases covered. Actually, not even just monks, really; generally all characters in gaming who punch things rather than using a weapon (with some exceptions, obviously). I could probably go on forever if I talk about everything though, so I'm going to focus primarily on the monk class from D&D, which I feel exemplifies pretty much all the problems I have with this type of character.
Alright so, problem the first: these characters never seem to sustain any damage to their hands (or any other body parts they might be attacking with) from relentlessly beating on things. Looking at the monk class, their fists are essentially unbreakable, more so even than other weapons. Ordinarily when an attempt is made to bash down a door or attack some sort of structure, the weapon typically sustains damage in the process. Since unarmed strikes don't have a hardness rating or a hitpoint total, they can't sustain damage, and can't break. You also can't make a sunder attempt to damage or destroy them, nor can you disarm a monk using an unarmed strike. The problem being that, no matter how strong you are, you can only punch solid steel so much before your hand starts to hurt. Going to a completely different example, look at Snow, from Final Fantasy XIII (who, by the way, is never actually mentioned as knowing any martial arts but just punches things anyway). Not only can he punch robots so hard they appear to disintegrate, but he can do this constantly without his fists being injured. Even a professional boxer, whose job it is to punch things repeatedly, needs padded gloves and knuckle wrap to hit flesh, much less metal, without messing up their hands. This problem is one that I would be willing to let slide by on suspension of disbelief, but it's just one issue, and hardly the most frustrating one.
The biggest issue, at least for me, is the amount of damage these characters can do. In many games, the monk or unarmed character has one of the highest damage outputs of any party member. Again looking at D&D, the monk class has, by higher levels anyway, the highest base damage of any weapon type with their unarmed strike. One might argue that the monk is just that strong, but this is damage before applying strength. Simply the base damage roll for the weapon type is higher significantly higher than any other weapon. Meaning a level twenty monk can do more damage with his unarmed strike than a fighter of the same level, and with the same amount of strength, could do with a greatsword. In fact, it's about twice as much damage. For no reason other than the monk is just that good at martial arts. Granted, fighters can get feats to increase the amount of damage they do with a given weapon type, but not nearly to the extent that monks increase the damage of unarmed strikes. And while I'm at it, if it's possible to reach a level where you can do roughly twice as much damage with your bare hands as you can with any weapon, why does anyone bother with weapons at all? Or, for that matter, why is it only possible to reach that point with your bare hands, and not with any weapon? Isn't the whole point of weapons that they allow you to hit harder than you could barehanded? I get the feeling that I'm not explaining this all that well, but hopefully you can understand what I'm trying to say.
I could probably go on, but this entry is getting to be pretty damn long, and I doubt anyone really cares that much anyway. Besides, I wanted to have this entry finished a long time ago, so I think it's time to finally put it behind me. Oh, and don't expect this to be the last of my pointless gaming rants. There will almost certainly be more of them to come in the future, perhaps as soon as my next entry. But for now, I've said my piece. Farewell until next time.
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