de-Orientalizing Oriental classes

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Ronia Sun
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Post by Ronia Sun »

Oh, but I wouldn't take the *artwork* as definitive. As a commercial artist myself, I am well aware that the artists don't always read the text. The art director likely told the artist "I need one of the non-human races--like a dwarf--in samurai armor." and the artist, working under the pressure of a deadline and with about a thousand other jobs on the table, churned out a standard dwarf, but dressed him up in samurai armor, without really stopping to think "Y'know, this if for the Oriental book, he should probably look Oriental..." because he/she'd already spent a lot of time researching the bloody armor and didn't have the energy to research Oriental facial structure as well...

That's my theory, anyway. :D

And yeah, Al-Qadim was another great example of different classes for different races. I'm in the process of trying to get a 3.5 AQ campaign started up--and those classes will replace the standard player classes, unless a player wishes to have an outlander character. Why? Because it's just more interesting that way...
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Post by elliott20 »

I actually think that class abilities and the mechanics of should be open to interpretation as well, if it helps fit the concept better.

i.e. A samurai could very well be a character with paladin classes attached to him. Granted, such a paladin would have a very unusual and different philosophy as compared to the normal samurai since his paladin code basically forbids him the almost blind devotion to his lord that a normal samurai class character requires. (Rich Burlew actually did this for his comic, Order of the Stick) But in the end, mechanically speaking if you want the samurai who rides his trusty steed into the world to right wrongs and fights evil and serves as a shining example of goodness, you actually might have a good fit.

But there in lies the problem. A lot of the time, that means your abilities need to be reinterpreted to fit. all of it needs to be justified to fit. And if you can't come up with a good enough justification for why a character has a certain ability or why a character has a certain skill, or why he must remain a certain alignment, you run the risk of having a character who just doesn't mix well with the background around him. Not that I'm speaking out against diversity. But in a setting where paladins are not normally a class choice, placing one without adjusting him to fit the background behind him just destroys whatever ambience that the setting gives. It's like watching a movie about King Arthur and suddenly Rambo jumps out of the sky and mows down Mordred with a machine gun half way through the movie. It would just feel... awkward.
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Post by Ronia Sun »

Rambo mowing down Mordred...what an image. :shock: Awkward doesn't begin to cover it. ;)

I suppose, when you get right down to it, I am a DM who will allow my players to try anything, so long as they have a damn good story to go with it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Like the werebear paladin I had in my (recently fizzled--I hate real life, sometimes) campaign: great background, and the player really was doing a good job. THe character, however, has proved to be simply too overpowered, and finding a combat balance with the rest of the party was proving impossible.
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Post by elliott20 »

well, that's why I would never try to port over a western class into an oriental campaign without retooling or re-interpreting the abilities. The back story that would have to go with it would have to be a very unique incident otherwise.

And when people speak of the de-construction of classes, I believe that is what they mean. However, I'm fairly certain this is not the way that the game designer originally intended. After all, if you read through the PHB, you'll notice that every classes not just have their abilities set up, they even tell you their attitude towards other people, other alignments, and how they adventure. Make no mistake about it, their cultural identity has already been defined for you. Granted, you don't HAVE to take their interpretation, but I can assure you, even the most humdrum fighter or sorceror already has a philosophical outlook prescribed for him.

And often, it would make sense to rewrite new classes for new settings if you're going to stick that closely to how the classes were intended. After all, they were written for that campaign.

Of course, we can always just chalk that up to WotC trying to sell more books this way as oppose to being truly interested in authenticity and all that.
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Post by Ronia Sun »

Sales are always something publishing houses are interested in. :)

I think I qualify as a demanding DM. If my players aren't willing to make something other than a cookie cutter PC, I tend to become very Evil. I suppose it's a symptom of being a writer...but I *do* warn them coming in that I expect them to exercise their own imaginations, and not the PHB's...

That's the great thing about the books, though. They provide the templates for those who don't have the inclination or time to write out in-depth characters, but also provide flexibility for those who like to get creative. That can't be an easy balance to maintain--and I think that's partly why there *are* so many books.

I guess, in the end, it all comes down to you as the DM, and the disclaimer that always appears in the books: If you don't like the rules, change 'em. If you want to do something different, go ahead. It's your game, we just provide the sandbox to play in--what you build in it is entirely up to you.
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Post by elliott20 »

true, one of the guys I used to speak to online regularly buys books just so he could take a pencil and start crossing out sections and sections of it so that he could suit it for his game.
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Post by mistshadow2k4 »

Well, I may be late to the party (life has been very, very busy for a while now), but I'll add something anyway. Why not just culturally adapt them? Strip the cultural background and make a new one. The samurai could replace the knight as suggested or maybe members of a particular warrior society, dedicated to something in particular. The Knights-Templar is a good example, as given earlier; the samurai could be adapted as a religious warrior order dedicated to the Church of Ezra. The ninja, as pointed out, works well as a specialized assassin, especially since the ninja in the books doesn't live anything like ninja really did anyhow. It would be easy to have wizards be more like the wu jen because the wizard doesn't have a very mystical background to begin with. The shugenja in the books is a wandering holy man; that in of itself is pretty cross-cultural, so all you need is to add a religion for the wandering holy men (since Ezra has an established church I'd think it would be a different religion).

At any rate, I hope you'll do more adapting than simply transplanting them to the Core. I'd like to see what you come up with.
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Post by Dion of the Fraternity »

mistshadow2k4 wrote:Why not just culturally adapt them? Strip the cultural background and make a new one. The samurai could replace the knight as suggested or maybe members of a particular warrior society, dedicated to something in particular.

At any rate, I hope you'll do more adapting than simply transplanting them to the Core. I'd like to see what you come up with.
This is exactly what I was talking about. My idea of a samurai in the Core is that it emerged from within the Core, regardless of culture. In the Player's Guide to Eberron a samurai school exists stripped of all notions of Orientalism; this is what I'm looking for.

Okay here's an example I just made up:

An obscure fighting school called the Guards of the Shattering has been existing in Borca for thirty years now. While recruiting only true-blooded Borcans, its members are bound to a rigid regimen of honor and devotion to a certain few sefs in the area.

I could elaborate as needed. Just ask me.
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Post by Jack of Tears »

>>In the Player's Guide to Eberron a samurai school exists stripped of all notions of Orientalism; this is what I'm looking for. <<

It really seems a terrible shame. In Eberron there may be no oriental culture, which makes this a little more forgivable, but there are demains of that nature in Ravenloft - you dishonor the samurai by making it just another figher class in a western influenced domain.
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Re: de-Orientalizing Oriental classes

Post by DeepShadow of FoS »

Dion of the Fraternity wrote:If Ravenloft has Shaolin-type monasteries spread all over the place (such as Lamordia), why shouldn't there be for example a well-known dojo for samurai in the heart of Dementlieu that caters to non-Orientals?
I hate to burst your bubble, but the highlighted premise is not true. Monks in RL are restricted to a very few places. Granted, one of the places (Paridon) is Western in orientation, but this was a unique case centering around hte Divinity of Mankind's special philosophy.

That being said, I have no problem renaming the samurai and using the stats for something else, if someone can provide sufficient justification, just like in the Paridon case. The question then becomes: what non-Asian domains have the proper cultural system to justify a warrior defined by his loyalty to a particular lord?

First one that comes to my mind is Borca. It takes some shoehorning, but if we relate Ivana and Ivan to a Japanese emperor and a Shogun, and we say that their use of unswervingly loyal bodyguards has caught on among the other nobles of the domain, then we might justify a class of elite bodyguards that use the saumurai class under a different name.
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Re: de-Orientalizing Oriental classes

Post by Nathan of the FoS »

DeepShadow wrote:
Dion of the Fraternity wrote:If Ravenloft has Shaolin-type monasteries spread all over the place (such as Lamordia), why shouldn't there be for example a well-known dojo for samurai in the heart of Dementlieu that caters to non-Orientals?
I hate to burst your bubble, but the highlighted premise is not true. Monks in RL are restricted to a very few places.
Actually, there is supposed to be a monaster of sure-enough monks in Lamordia--they're flesh golems, though. Generally speaking, though, I think the point holds--there just aren't that many monks in Ravenloft, and the vast majority are Rajian, Rokushiman, and Paridonish.
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Post by Rotipher of the FoS »

"Monastery", in the Core, tends to be used in its European connotation -- i.e. a place where male religious ascetics can withdraw from the world's corruptions and worship in privacy -- rather than in the pseudo-Eastern D&D sense of a place where martial artists learn how to kick ass with bare hands or a PHB-dictated selection of "special monk weapons". The game-setting premiered in 2E, after all, and the monk class wasn't a part of the core rules at that time.
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Post by Manofevil »

Hello again everyone
I'm again picking my way through the topics.
As far as this one is concerned. I think my favorite is the old TV show stand-by as put forward in Kung Fu or The Master. Renegade member of the class flees his/her homeland and finds him/herself in the core occassionally taking a pupil while living there. That would also help with the multi-racial aspect. A school isn't completely necessary. And that wouldn't work for the Samurai, of course.
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So, gentlemen, that's how it is. Until Grissome.... resurfaces, I'm the acting president, and I say starting with this... anniversary festival, we run this city into the ground! :D
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Post by Luke Fleeman »

A note:

While discussing the WotC 3.5 Samurai, we should notice that this samurai is a poor rendering. The class has a lot of focus on using the two swords, and bonuses pertaining to it.

Classically, only a single school wielded two swords. All samurai CARRIED the two swords, but they were not generally wielded together.

A samurai was a master of using his single sword two handed; look at modern kendo.

The reason I say this is that the samurai is already de-orientalized by its design. A faithful adaption of a classic samurai would be a different creature than this one.
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