When Fluff Met Crunch

[endoperez]

But that's the thing, he's extremely disciplined, but he's disciplined at punching things. That doesn't make him a monk, that makes him a Fighter with the Improved Unarmed Strike feat. He's only a monk if he's gone to an honest to god Shaolin monastary and trained there with a genuine desire to embrace their philosophical as well as their martial teachings.

I'd rather say that he's only a monk if he gets the bonus against enchantment, Ki Strike, slow fall, Purity/Wholeness etc of Body and all that. A boxer/disciplined fighter could have some of those, but Wholeness of Body at the very least is something you can't get just by wanting or training enough. It must come from some kind of a mystical source, and if the source is the same one from which Monks get it from, you need to have a similar philosophy and way of life.

At the risk of sounding simultaneously old and anglocentric, I do wonder if the attitude that your character should be able to develop any set of powers that seems useful to them is an artefact of the (rather modern, rather American) idea that anybody can do anything if they set their mind to it: the Hollywood-propogated notion that if you *want* something badly enough it *will* happen, no matter what the circumstances.

Learning to fight really, really well, perhaps even being better than anyone else, could happen in certain circumstances. Just wanting it wouldn't do it. Spending all your time in training yourself with the greatest masters you could find wouldn't be enough either if you didn't find the right masters or couldn't afford it or if you got sick and your health was destroyed or if you had broken some bone that hand't healed well enough to let you train. But we're not talking about being the best possible fighter, but being as good a fighter as a Monk. That (3/4th BAB, unarmed damage and unarmoured AC, Evasion, Flurry of Blows and perhaps some form of Ki Strike) can be reached with enough dedication, if the trainee can learn what he has to learn (being taught, or ancient scrolls of wisdom/visions from a god/having seen your master/father/brother train before you etc in a D&D world).

The mystical abilities of the monk, on the other hand, couldn't be achieved by combat training. If there was a class modeled after Monk that didn't get these mystical abilities, and had fluff about dedication and combat training, could you accept it?