Agreed. Look at the Ostiarius Kyton page:
Kyton Rhetoric
Ostiariuses are infamous for their half-truths and honey lies. As the reputation of the kyton race does not lead most mortals—even those with the most stained souls—to embrace the pain-tasters’ cruel mortal enlightenment, it falls to ostiariuses to turn minds against their own bodies, encouraging philosophies of suffering to take root and override their natural fear and revulsion of kytons’ so-called "gifts." To such ends, ostiariuses claim absolute openness with those they court, and deftly—supposedly candidly—answer even the most pointed questions about their insidious natures. The following are just a few of the questions commonly put to kyton ostiariuses, and their well-rehearsed answers to each.
Kytons are evil. Why should I trust you?
“Evil? Such a small word to sum up my people, our culture, and our millennia-old dogma. I have little belief in the concept. I've seen holy men sacrifice innocents and be called saints. I've seen mothers who stole only to feed their children go to the gallows. I perceive evil to be an artificial construct, a mere description created by frightened clerks so they can determine whether one’s actions fall within or outside their narrow visions for what reality should be. But am I evil? I believe in potential. I believe that some creatures are without significance and not worthy of my hand raised to save them. Conversely, I believe the multiverse blesses some beings with extraordinary traits, with the potential to do—to be—great things. The fact that I exist to seek out such potential and help it flourish means that regardless of what you believe about such small words like ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ inarguably the cosmos has guided me to you, and as I believe in the power of that cosmos, I believe in you.”My magic says you're evil. Why shouldn't I slay you?
“Pause to consider the source of that information. Something has told you that I am evil, and why wouldn't it? I seek to enlighten. To reveal secrets of reality, rebirth, immortality, and divinity that no creature that calls itself ‘good’ would wish to see revealed. Surely my words are heresy in every faith where the blind follow the sighted, for I promise to reveal wonders inherent in every worthy soul, wonders the deities claim are theirs alone.”Your race hails from the Plane of Shadow. Why do you dwell in such a terrible place?
“My people seek to escape form, to escape prejudice, to escape all restrictions that wantonly encage us. To this end, my people voluntarily migrated to the one place in all existence where the body becomes muted, and voices, philosophies, and sensations are amplified. My people are ascetics, the darkness our endless meditation.”Your people originated in Hell. Care to explain?
“Surely you know there are angels as well as devils in Hell. In the home of the righteous, there must be a single law. All who refuse to bow to that law are rebels in the eyes of the empowered, and so must be outcast. Those who refuse to bend to righteousness—or worse, who hold their own visions of righteousness—are exiled to the burning hinterland. But, were my people prisoners of Hell, were we truly damned, could we have left so easily? My people have been pilgrims in many lands, and have come to understand many truths of the cosmos. Hell was merely the last of many realms through which we've passed.”Your methods indulge in fear and suffering. Why would I embrace such destruction?
“Pain. Sorrow. Fear. These are not emotions. These are instincts of animals, of lesser beings. Do you think the rat feels contentedness, the snake either love or lust, the sow ecstasy? We are without the vestigial mental reflexes of mortals. Yet such enlightenment is not our purview alone. We would teach all with minds to understand how to be more than what an evolution of meat and tears would constrain. We offer possibility and revelations of enlightenment, states your kind are predisposed to distrust, to view as revolution, but which those with the potential for greatness clasp as rungs upon the ladder of exultation.”
Evil people can be aware of what Detect Evil says of them but not think it valid. A Drow, who has to deal with the boot of Demon Lords on their necks and monsters at their doorsteps every day, might think differently about the evils of selfishness and murder. They would frame it in terms of survivalism and doing what they have to and not be entirely wrong.
As for the Monk thing, remember that monks aren't entirely mundane even removing Golarion from the equation. They do supernatural things with their body by unlocking ki. This requires not just discipline in the moment but near superhuman discipline at all points in their training. They may remember how to do what they've done after they master it but they can't advance while non-lawful because they can't summon that same discipline to unlock more ki abilities.
To be fair, I will bring a counterpoint: the ninja. It also has a ki pool without the need for superhuman discipline. I personally headcanon this as them being more magical in their abilities whereas the monk kinda cheats his way to the supernatural like Irori did.
Good vs. Evil for most characters should be judged more like this than as a one-strike rule. Alignments describe general actions and philosophies not every waking moment. Just like Country alignments describe a general mindset of its rulers and/or majority, not every single citizen in the whole country.
Things are different for paladins, yes, but that's because they are granted special powers by their gods. The fall thing, in my mind, is there as a protection against traitors and mind-control. Think of Superhero comics for a second. How many times has even the most noble of heroes been mind-controlled or tricked into doing something bad? What if their powers could just be shut off whenever that happens? It would prevent a lot of harm for everyone involved. That why I support temporary falls in the cases of mind-control. The length would only be for the length of the spell. For mistakes, it would be a lowered cost. For willful falls to outright evil, the price would of course be very steep, probably a righteous quest or something else narratively satisfying. I know these aren't exactly the rules for paladins but it would alleviate a lot of the problems with them.
So, when the character concept is "disciplined, but otherwise not lawful", having to be lawful doesn't fit the character. At which point, I was sold on this game on being able to play the character I wanted to play, but I can't play that character, so why did I bother to waste my time with this?1. That character concept doesn't require being a monk.
2. That character concept is fine and works in the game as is.
3. If you did mean "disciplined but not otherwise not lawful who can increase in enlightenment in the same way as a monk despite that not being enough to increase in enlightment in the way monks are described in this game" maybe you shouldn't come to the game with concept? I mean, people don't complain that the game is being cruel and pulling a "gotcha" on you that can't play otters.
1. No character concept requires anything specific, but when some people's concepts end up being represented in-game by a class or career or profession or ability list or what-have-you that does not have strings attached but other people's concepts do due to arbitrary whim, someone somewhere screwed up. You don't want to fight an uphill battle to play a Fighter who uses swords rather than axes like someone else thought they should be limited to. I don't want to fight an uphill battle to play a non-Lawful Monk rather than a Lawful Monk like someone else thought they should be.
2. Except when aspects of the game interfere.
3. No, no. There's a difference between "we haven't made an otter race yet" and "we've filled all the design space that a theoretical otter space could have enjoyed with something completely different, so everyone who wanted an otter race is SoL". And when the game is setting-neutral the way Pathfinder bills itself as, that inherently means that I shouldn't expect to come up with a concept that gets me turned away because it's unusual in one specific setting of the many myriad settings that this game billed itself as able to be used for.
I advocate you check what the game actually has in it before you declare it's pulling a Gotcha on you. Not all character concepts are applicable to every RPG.Do you habitually envision a character you'd like to play and then slog through playing something else that you had no desire to play? If not, then why would you advocate I do that?
Take a look at the Gamemastery Guide. There's a lot of material in there about creating your own setting. Its peoples, its geography, its nations and history, and how the world works. If we're supposed to treat Pathfinder as just "Golarion: the Game (Oh, and if you absolutely have to use this game system for your own setting rather than ours, then go ahead but don't expect anything in the game to facilitate your efforts)", then why the hell is that in there? "Hey, here's a bunch of stuff to consider if you thought our game system worked for your own setting; God help you if you use any of it, though"?
The Golarion setting and material written specifically for it has no onus to be useful anywhere else other than in Golarion as envisioned by the developers. If anything else does work for another setting, then it's a happy coincidence. That's fine. I don't expect to see stargates or Vulcan nerve pinches in Star Wars Saga Edition, either.
But you don't get to declare the use of lightning evil before you answer what setting the game is set in. Lightning is evil in Star Wars; it's not evil in the Marvel universe. But following Pathfinder's logic, if we had a hypothetical RPG meant for multiple settings, one Star Wars, one Marvel, as well as the invitation to use it for anything else, it would be an iron-clad rule that lightning is evil across the entire game; never mind that that doesn't fit Storm or Thor or anyone else in a setting using this RPG's rules but not sharing Star Wars' assumptions.
Are Storm and Thor evil for using lightning just because Palpatine is evil and uses lightning? If not, then Golarion's assumptions about the level of discipline necessary for a Monk are exactly and only that: Golarion's assumptions. And they need to apply and only apply to Golarion. They can certainly be suggestions for anywhere else, but the Monk's alignment restrictions represents that aspect of the game overstepping its bounds.
No, being undisciplined contradicts the fluff that the Monk is based on. Being otherwise chaotic doesn't bear one iota. Being undisciplined and chaotic does contradict the D&D and PF Monk, but only because of the artifacts introduced by the addition of the alignment restriction. Remove said restriction, and, while behaving undisciplined may contradict the fluff of the Monk, acting otherwise chaotic has no bearing.
You interpret the fluff of the Monk as having such discipline as can only be expressed by requiring a completely lawful alignment. As such, you would only have your Monks with a lawful alignment, whether the game had "Monk alignment: any lawful" or "Monk alignment: any". "Monk alignment: any" does not take away from your capacity to play a lawful Monk. If you can play a Fighter who only uses axes without requiring that all Fighters across all of human imagination played by every other player of the game to also only be able to use axes, then you can play a lawful Monk even if Monks could be any alignment.
You want to play your Monks your way. I want you to play your Monks your way. I'm not selfish to insist on the same courtesy.
Ugh.... You're really not getting this. No. It's not just "being disciplined". It's defining your entire lifestyle, doctorine and state of mind to discipline. You cannot have that and be chaotic. Okay, to get this example across better, I'm going to change axis. You're complaining that your character concept of "paladin that goes around murdering innocent orphans" isn't allowed. Actually, monk is less restrictive that paladin since you don't lose any powers for not being lawful. It is not just "Lawful, chaotic, chaotic, chaotic, chaotic" = lawful. It's "lawful, lawful, lawful, lawful" = lawful, since if you don't dedicate your lifestyle and your way of thinking to fit into a disciplined manner you don't get your monk powers, that's what the CRB says. If you are disciplined but otherwise you are chaotic, then you aren't disciplined enough to become a monk. Your discipline must consume and infuse every aspect of your being.So the first then. Fine. Play your Monk the way you want under whatever interpretation of how extensive a Monk's discipline goes on the law-chaos axis you believe. English doesn't have words to express how happy I am for you. As a fellow human being worthy of respect who has not spent the last five years kicking puppies, why am I not warranted the same respect?
That may be how you see the delineation between a Monk's discipline and the whole of the Lawful alignment, but as I've already shown, the whole of the Lawful alignment concerns itself with things that the Monk does not give a damn about. Not centrally, not peripherally, not even things that what you call the Monk's all-consuming discipline incidentally bleeds into.
*Looks at barbarian, bard, druid, cleric, paladin, monk, hunter, warpriest...* No, there are other classes where you are limited in character concept by fluff.And you're clearly not grokking my main objection. No class, not the Fighter or the Rogue, not the Wizard or the Bloodrager, and not the Monk, no matter what its fluff, needs its concept adhered to in a manner that involves the looming Sword of Damocles that is the potential to lose the ability to express whatever character you wanted to play.
So my claim was that no class needs its concept adhered to via the implicit threat of losing class features or so forth because this is presumably supposed to be a less stressful part of the player's week. And your rebuttal was to point out a whole bunch of classes that have those implicit threats.
That... doesn't serve as a rebuttal. If I make the claim that elephants shouldn't be hunted for their ivory, pointing out that it presently does happen does not refute that it shouldn't happen.
I think you just have to look at what the game allows you to play and accept you cannot play every concept you come up with, since that's impossible for rules heavy game.This is a game. It should be looked forward to, not dreaded. It should be enjoyed, not suffered.
The concept requires a developer to expand his imagination enough to envision a non-Lawful ki-using Monk, or failing that, envision that other people may not be so hindered in what they can envision. That's it. We already have the Monk. We already have "not being Lawful". We already have non-Lawful people using Ki and, with the exception of Ki Strike (Lawful) that I've already demonstrated could've been handled better, every other class feature of the Monk that the Martial Artist had to trade out. All we need is the game to step off.
So instead of slogging through what you didn't want to play and switching it to what you did want to play once, you did it in multiple instances. Um, hurrah? That you're still having to do it at all is too much. Whether the player waits nineteen levels to finally switch to what he wanted or if he plays a Monk, stops being lawful and has to continue leveling up with something else until he can hoodwink his GM into thinking he's gone back to lawful and then retraining everything not-Monk into Monk, and back and forth and back and forth, he is still having to connive and manipulate. Which is an undue stress he shouldn't have to put up with.At no point is the character I described not being the character concept they envisioned. They are a monk who's alignment is chaotic. They aren't changing their concept, it's just making a concept that works in the RPG that they are playing. Nothing manipulative about it. Nothing is hoodwinking the GM, you have to go back to
So if you wanted to play a Wizard, you would voluntarily stop advancing as a Wizard for whole levels at a time, take something else in the meantime, and then retrain that something else back into Wizard? Because that's what you're advocating. The only difference is that there's no fluff-based requirement determining when you go from Wizard to the whatever-else-it-was and back, and in the case of the Monk, there is. But that fluff-based requirement is only present in the case of the Monk because someone somewhere in the development process couldn't conceive of a different way a player might express a Monk character or couldn't conceive of such a player existing or didn't have enough human empathy to care. This is a game of imagination, of players and GMs exploring all sorts of adventures in any number of realms, only one of which is Golarion. And we're supposed to accept that lack of imagination and consideration in how the concept of the Monk could be expressed as anything other than negligence or selfishness? Hell no.
Wow.
I mean, just ... wow.
'Good' and 'Evil' are easier than 'Lawful' and 'Chaotic'; G/E is morality, while L/C is ethics. 'Lawful' as a code of ethics encompasses many things. 'Chaotic' as a code of ethics also encompasses many things. You can possess a core overriding attribute of one - 'self-discipline', as an example for Law, and 'personal choice/free will' as an example for Chaos - while possessing a great many superficial details that suggest/reflect/imply the other.
Even the books admit that alignment is something that is less in the hands of The Book and very much in the hands of the players and (especially) the GM. So instead of using whiffle bats to try to get each other to say that X means these things and only these things and Y means those things and only those things ...
... why don't y'all just leave it up to the GMs and players? Unless, of course, you want to play in a game together ... and then you'd better listen to your GM ...
You're suggesting a reasonable compromise at a point of contention. Trouble is, that's not where my point of contention is. I dispute not so much how to answer the question "is this still lawful enough?" but rather the validity and the necessity of the question itself. Answering or even acknowledging that point assumes an agreement on my part that is not for anyone to assume.
Let me phrase it another way. The Fighter class can be used to express a "knight in shining armor" concept, right? A whole lot of other concepts as well, but "knight in shining armor" is one of them. And that concept would have a few behavioral aspects in tow, like a code of chivalry and/or a lawful and/or good restriction.
But playing a Fighter as a knight in shining armor is not the only concept that can be conveyed by that class. That's something that we can empirically show by all the NPC Fighters that aren't supposed to be evocative of a knight in shining armor. Heck, you yourself may have played a Fighter that wasn't a knight in shining armor.
Now, imagine someone comes along and tells you, in complete contradiction to what you have factually seen with your own two eyes, that it's impossible to play a Fighter as anything other than a knight in shining armor. His Armor Training? That comes from the specialized training of his knightly order and cannot be replicated by any other means in-universe; he must be a knight. His Bravery? It stems and must stem and can only stem from his convictions to order and justice and everything else that the author meant to convey with his assignation of a code of conduct and/or an alignment restriction; he must be a knight.
It's utter balderdash. You know that the Fighter class has its Big Boy pants and, while it can be used to convey a knight in shining armor, can also convey whatever else you decided to use it for. Going back to your question, yes, you and your DM can certainly try to come up with some compromise on what does and does not comprise "knight in shining armor behavior". But that ignores the fact that the only reason you're even having to come up with a compromise is because of an error, accidental or malicious, on the part of whoever it was that decided that the knight in shining armor was the only archetype the Fighter class could express. Coming to that compromise excuses that error.
Well, that's where I'm at. The Monk class is capable of expressing many different character concepts. Yes, one of those is the uber-disciplined acolyte of ancient traditions. Yes, THAT could be viewed as needing to be so disciplined as to overwhelm all other facets of the character's existence, including elements that otherwise would not even peripherally touch on the character's "discipline factor". But the notion that that's as far as it goes and as far as it ever can go is something from out of left field. "Hey, you want your character to be good at fighting unarmed and unarmored with some cool Ki stuff on the side? Try the Monk. And naturally, I can totally read an implicit agreement on your part that folks that fight unarmed, unarmored, and with Ki must be uber-Lawful. Oh, ofcourse, it all makes sense."
Yes, it's possible to try to come to an understanding of what does and does not comprise Lawful, disciplined behavior on the part of the Monk with one's GM. But that assumes the concept of the character using the Monk class needs to be Lawful in the first place. And that is the game overstepping itself. You're telling me how to dodge a bullet or treat a bullet wound. I reject the bullet's right to have even been there in the first place.
As for the Monk thing, remember that monks aren't entirely mundane even removing Golarion from the equation. They do supernatural things with their body by unlocking ki. This requires not just discipline in the moment but near superhuman discipline at all points in their training. They may remember how to do what they've done after they master it but they can't advance while non-lawful because they can't summon that same discipline to unlock more ki abilities.
A Monk who is no longer lawful who raises his Wisdom score through ability score increases or stat-boosting items still gets additional ki points per day. He can still take style feats, even supernatural style feats, even supernatural style feats whose prerequisites he met while he was a Monk through his Monk levels. These events exist outside the Monk class and instead happen via the game mechanic vehicle of feats and so forth, so he can still get away with it, but come on. Thematically, what he is doing is still continuing his Monk training and unlocking more Monk abilities.
To be fair, I will bring a counterpoint: the ninja. It also has a ki pool without the need for superhuman discipline. I personally headcanon this as them being more magical in their abilities whereas the monk kinda cheats his way to the supernatural like Irori did.
So the Martial Artist is the Monk sans magic abilities, so he doesn't have to be lawful. The Ninja has more magic abilities, and he doesn't have to be lawful. But if we have those two meet in the middle, all of a sudden a lawful requirement springs forward? Not ripping into your headcanon, but do you get why I have a problem accepting that it's just my due that I have an uphill battle against this and not an error on the game's part?
The alignment system can be something useful if treated with care. Can leave to interesting stories.
But alignment restrictions? That's another thing, one that I hate. Back on the day, like 20 years ago on AD&D 2Ed, my first character was an Elf CG bard. I loved that character and really sold me on D&D. Some time later we find that, by the rules, the character was illegal; Bards on 2ed could not be CG (nor elfs? I'm not sure on that one). My GM then let me continue with the character. But since then I have hate that kind of restrictions; another of my best characters on 2ed was a Drow Paladin.
Actually, we can play any race as any class, but some alignment restrictions persists. I have made some Druids on Pathfinder, but my favorite was a CG one. For me, the best alignment for monks is True Neutral, "balance on all things", but is illegal, for some reason. In fact, one of the best monks you could find recently on media is Zaheer, the Big Bad of Legend of Korra 3 Season. And is an anarchist of absolutely Chaotic alignment; the only doubt is CN or CE.
All alignment restrictions on classes should banish from the game, with the possible exception of Paladin.
1. No character concept requires anything specific, but when some people's concepts end up being represented in-game by a class or career or profession or ability list or what-have-you that does not have strings attached but other people's concepts do due to arbitrary whim, someone somewhere screwed up. You don't want to fight an uphill battle to play a Fighter who uses swords rather than axes like someone else thought they should be limited to. I don't want to fight an uphill battle to play a non-Lawful Monk rather than a Lawful Monk like someone else thought they should be.
You can make that arguement for basically any concept that is inhibited by the games mechanics. Like a myth-esque warrior. You cannot play Every Character Concept You Come Up With In This Game.
2. Except when aspects of the game interfere.
I disagree that it interferes in that example.
3. No, no. There's a difference between "we haven't made an otter race yet" and "we've filled all the design space that a theoretical otter space could have enjoyed with something completely different, so everyone who wanted an otter race is SoL". And when the game is setting-neutral the way Pathfinder bills itself as, that inherently means that I shouldn't expect to come up with a concept that gets me turned away because it's unusual in one specific setting of the many myriad settings that this game billed itself as able to be used for.
"We filled the design space of a monk with a monk" it's just not the monk you want. Though I do agree the game isn't anywhere near as setting neutral as I'd prefer.
Take a look at the Gamemastery Guide. There's a lot of material in there about creating your own setting. Its peoples, its geography, its nations and history, and how the world works. If we're supposed to treat Pathfinder as just "Golarion: the Game (Oh, and if you absolutely have to use this game system for your own setting rather than ours, then go ahead but don't expect anything in the game to facilitate your efforts)", then why the hell is that in there? "Hey, here's a bunch of stuff to consider if you thought our game system worked for your own setting; God help you if you use any of it, though"?
Interestingly the Core Rules actually go against Golarion in some ways. For example Golarion setting requires Clerics of concepts to not work. Also, I'm relatively sure they just expect you to houserule and homebrew for anything that's need to be changed (and it's not exactly like removing alignment restrictions are a big houserule, I know it was the first houserule I ever made).
That may be how you see the delineation between a Monk's discipline and the whole of the Lawful alignment, but as I've already shown, the whole of the Lawful alignment concerns itself with things that the Monk does not give a damn about. Not centrally, not peripherally, not even things that what you call the Monk's all-consuming discipline incidentally bleeds into.
I suppose we'll just have to disagree on that aspect.
So my claim was that no class needs its concept adhered to via the implicit threat of losing class features or so forth because this is presumably supposed to be a less stressful part of the player's week. And your rebuttal was to point out a whole bunch of classes that have those implicit threats.
That... doesn't serve as a rebuttal. If I make the claim that elephants shouldn't be hunted for their ivory, pointing out that it presently does happen does not refute that it shouldn't happen.
I don't think I answered that well. I was trying to suggest it's present enough in the game that it's a weird thing to get all pumped up about and suggest it's out of nowhere or malicious or negligent rather than it just being part of the game.
The concept requires a developer to expand his imagination enough to envision a non-Lawful ki-using Monk, or failing that, envision that other people may not be so hindered in what they can envision. That's it. We already have the Monk. We already have "not being Lawful". We already have non-Lawful people using Ki and, with the exception of Ki Strike (Lawful) that I've already demonstrated could've been handled better, every other class feature of the Monk that the Martial Artist had to trade out. All we need is the game to step off.
I don't really see the dev's deciding to keep the monk's alignment restriction from 3.5e which fit's the fluff, equals needing to expand their imaginations. They don't Need to do it. Maybe it'd be good if they did, but they decided to retain backwards compatibility instead.
So if you wanted to play a Wizard, you would voluntarily stop advancing as a Wizard for whole levels at a time, take something else in the meantime, and then retrain that something else back into Wizard? Because that's what you're advocating. The only difference is that there's no fluff-based requirement determining when you go from Wizard to the whatever-else-it-was and back, and in the case of the Monk, there is. But that fluff-based requirement is only present in the case of the Monk because someone somewhere in the development process couldn't conceive of a different way a player might express a Monk character or couldn't conceive of such a player existing or didn't have enough human empathy to care. This is a game of imagination, of players and GMs exploring all sorts of adventures in any number of realms, only one of which is Golarion. And we're supposed to accept that lack of imagination and consideration in how the concept of the Monk could be expressed as anything other than negligence or selfishness? Hell no.
To be honest, if wizard's did require something that necessitated a retraining-thing to work. I'd probably end up being fine with that, I like wizard.
I do think you're being ridiculously unfair. I mean for godsake, suggesting the dev's might have made the decision because of a lack of empathy. You are much more invested in this than is really appropriate for something that amounts to "In PFS you cannot increase your monk level while you are chaotic".
Yeah, it's hardly "negligent and selfish". It stems from the 70s, when they were making all this stuff up and didn't really know what they were doing, followed by an organic process of some concepts developing into sacred cows while others were refined/discarded, followed by the commercial need for PF to be backwards compatible with 3.5.
People often view PF as if it were created all in one go and written by a single author with no constraints other then 'what would make a good game'. It's a patched together, complicated thing that has grown organically. It was written bit-by-bit by many different people and is based on a tradition stretching back thirty plus years with passionate advocates for and against pretty much everything. Pathfiner tries to cover lots of different playstyles - it is inevitable that there will be bits one likes and bits one doesn't. It also bears remembering just how powerful the demand for 'respect of tradition' was when it was formed. It's not immediately obvious now, but backwards compatibility was crucial to PF's success (if the forum posters at the time are to be believed, anyhow).
It's important to develop perspective - what you like is not necessarily what everyone else likes and there's almost certainly who passionately hates what you think is brilliant (and vice versa).
A publisher walks a fine line - they don't have the luxury we do of catering to a market of one in making our decisions about how things "should" be.
Admittedly, there is very little excuse for Unchained Monk to have the alignment restriction.... though unchained does also add in rules for people who want to remove alignment all together so *shrug*.
As for the Monk thing, remember that monks aren't entirely mundane even removing Golarion from the equation. They do supernatural things with their body by unlocking ki. This requires not just discipline in the moment but near superhuman discipline at all points in their training. They may remember how to do what they've done after they master it but they can't advance while non-lawful because they can't summon that same discipline to unlock more ki abilities.A Monk who is no longer lawful who raises his Wisdom score through ability score increases or stat-boosting items still gets additional ki points per day. He can still take style feats, even supernatural style feats, even supernatural style feats whose prerequisites he met while he was a Monk through his Monk levels. These events exist outside the Monk class and instead happen via the game mechanic vehicle of feats and so forth, so he can still get away with it, but come on. Thematically, what he is doing is still continuing his Monk training and unlocking more Monk abilities.
Well that's wider not deeper. He's applying what he already knows or having an insight based on his previous education and spiritual oneness. To go further in the class he must get back to that level of discipline.
To be fair, I will bring a counterpoint: the ninja. It also has a ki pool without the need for superhuman discipline. I personally headcanon this as them being more magical in their abilities whereas the monk kinda cheats his way to the supernatural like Irori did.So the Martial Artist is the Monk sans magic abilities, so he doesn't have to be lawful. The Ninja has more magic abilities, and he doesn't have to be lawful. But if we have those two meet in the middle, all of a sudden a lawful requirement springs forward? Not ripping into your headcanon, but do you get why I have a problem accepting that it's just my due that I have an uphill battle against this and not an error on the game's part?
They all have separate sources for their abilities though. The Monk's method of gaining their abilities is what requires the lawful alignment. The martial artist and ninja go about it different ways. I liken the Monk and Ninja to the Wizard and Sorcerer. Wizard and Monk require serious training and commitment. The Sorcerer and Ninja require nothing and are born with certain abilities that they can strengthen through any way they want. My admittedly narrow proof is that Monks use Wisdom and Ninjas use Charisma.
As to your point about it being an error on the game's part, it kinda is. It's an inconsistency that was compound by efforts to alleviate it through things like brawler and martial artist. I understand your problem and why you want to change it. In my mind, the Lawful requirement is good and it fits my vision of the monk (it mostly sucking mechanically doesn't but I guess you can't have everything.) This doesn't mean that your problems aren't legitimate.
I offered my headcanon as a different way of looking at it to help alleviate things a bit. This thread has gotten a bit heated like every other alignment discussion thread. Though the monk is thing is at least less common than Barbarians and Paladins to points there I guess.
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Math failure on your part.
"P implies Q"
means that if P is true, then Q must be true as well. No exceptions.So yes, it does use the word "implies."
Law implies honor, trustworthiness, obedience to authority, and reliabilityAgain, you don't have to like the alignment rules, but that's what the Core Rulebook says. You can either
a)House rule the alignment rules to be more to your liking
b)Suck it up and play with the alignment rules as they are, or
c)Leave Pathfinder and find a game with rules more to your liking.
I'm sorry but I completely disagree. First off, this isn't math but a word definition as used in the English language.
From Merriam-Webster on Imply:
1: obsolete: enfold, entwine
2: to involve or indicate by inference, association, or necessary consequence rather than by direct statement <rights imply obligations>
3: to contain potentially
4: to express indirectly
I agree. Everyday English doesn't always use the technical terms of math and science correctly. How many people use theory to mean educated guess or accelerate to mean just increasing speed.
When they say the Law implies obedience to authority and reliability, they're trying to preempt those who say that a single failure on either part means an alignment shift. If you let someone down or choose a more pragmatic course, it doesn't mean you aren't generally lawful; it means you took the right course for this particular moment which was likely an extreme circumstance anyway.
There's a reason that paladins and other LG types don't have to obey King Joffery just because he came to his throne lawfully. Obedience to authority can only take you so far. You don't have to be a slave to it if you're lawful. LG in particular is required by their conscience to disobey unjust laws just like a NG or CG person.