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The theming around monk weapons is fine imo. If it's just these handful of weapons, the worst it is is just limiting to other concepts.
Another simple solution I'm thinking could just be that monastic weaponry will give these handful of monk weapons but also let you choose one or two weapons with x requirements and give those the monk trait. That would open it up while keeping the core theming, and it works with what we already know before core 2 comes out.
I would have loved it if, at the beginning of PF2, Paizo took the direction of focusing much more heavily on asceticism as the impetus of the Monk class.
"Martial Arts" is not a good basis for a D&D Class because every single martial class is a martial artist, especially with PF2's class feat system. The term "Martial Arts" in English derives from "Mars" or the god of war and is about training for war.
The monk class is not a class about training for war. When I followed the Eighteen Arms of Wushu link Teridax shared, I get a list of weapons associated with Chinese martial arts, but no discussion of history, so I followed the "Chinese martial arts" link from there and look down at the history, I see,
The genesis of Chinese martial arts has been attributed to the need for self-defense, hunting techniques and military training in ancient China. Hand-to-hand combat and weapons practice were important in training ancient Chinese soldiers.
So we are already in hot water as far as being culturally reductive and stereotyping if we try to say that the monk class exists only to replicate Chinese martial arts, and that aspects of Chinese martial arts that were originally developed by generals and soldiers to win wars need to fit within the class fantasy of Monk and not fighter. For Wushu itself to be the foundation of the monk class, you would need to really focus the entire class around being more of just "the Athlete" class, who's focus is on competitive sport, where the "rules" would be totally arbitrarily decided, but done so by specific orders or societies in world that define what tools can be used in those competitions.
The Monk class is an awkward blend of many historical concepts, and I agree the narrative description of the Monk class in PF2 is a little bit too straddled between "Martial Artist" the class, and "Ascethic" the class. But in a world where Fighters and Paladins already exist as the "Pure Martial Artist" class and the "Religious Warrior" class, asceticism, and the practice of perfecting the body through intense discipline (which came to China, and actually much of western world as well through Yogic traditions) is the better, and more unique space to base a class on, and a way to separate out "this is a Martial Art developed for war," which is a Fighter, from the very classic Fantasy (Eastern and Western) trope of developing fighting practices to resist imperial rule and support religious practices that promote ideas that might require isolation and distance from mainstream society.
I would love to see Youxia come into its own right as a class in Pathfinder that I think would be a much better fit for the kinds of weapon practicing Eastern (especially Japanese and Chinese) martial artist that is connected to the wandering knight in a way that could be mechanically different enough from a Fighter or a Paladin to be worthy of its own class...although a lot of people would probably just want that class to be called a knight and given broad enough narrative description to cover the classic western knight as well as Samurai and Youxia type heroes.
In light of a recent controversy on the subreddit that I won't talk about in any detail, I think it may be to the Monk's benefit if the class gained baseline proficiency with martial weapons and could naturally use weapons with monk feats and monk abilities just as well as unarmed attacks, with an appropriate limitation on the damage die for such attacks.
From a gameplay perspective to begin with, I think the above would give the Monk a ton more options without disrupting the class's balance, assuming the damage die limit is set correctly. Flurry of Blows means the class can't necessarily go around using FoB with a greatsword, but I can think of many weapons the Monk could put to good use without dealing any more damage than they do now. Monastic Weaponry comes off as a feat tax that tends to make unarmed combat much more straightforward on the class, even though armed and unarmed combat both have a place on the Monk. Having a broad-lines policy for what counts as a Monk weapon would avoid Paizo having to hand-pick which weapons get to be Monk weapons each time new weapons come out.
On top of this, though, I also feel the above carries the benefits of helping alleviate certain lingering concerns around the Monk and orientalism: a big problem with Monk weapons right now is that hand-selecting them is a tricky process -- throw in too many Asian-themed weapons and you end up furthering the notion that the class is specifically Asian-centric when most other classes can find examples in pretty much any real-life culture's stories, but hand-pick weapons that don't immediately correlate to wuxia movies and people get mad about those weapons feeling like a poor thematic fit. Monastic Weaponry doesn't improve things either, because specifically granting access to uncommon Monk weapons, many of which are region-locked to Asian-coded parts of Golarion, I think furthers the stereotype that Monks are so specific to certain cultures that they somehow always train with and...
While I also think they shouldn't only have access to [Monk] weapons, I don't know if blanket access to all Martial (with caveats, as you say) is the best fit. What I beleive would be a good middle ground would be to just let the player of each individual monk decide.
Much like how Rogues used to have all simple and a smattering of other weapons, we could make it so Monks start with all simple weapons and a selection (5 or 6) of Martial weapons to represent their specific training/monastery/what have you. We can still put some Ruffian-style limitations on those (but instead of being unable to Sneak Attack, you're unable to Flurry).
But I don't think we'll get either, seeing as how [Monk] is still a Trait, which makes me think this isn't going to change in any meaningful way.
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So we are already in hot water as far as being culturally reductive and stereotyping if we try to say that the monk class exists only to replicate Chinese martial arts, and that aspects of Chinese martial arts that were originally developed by generals and soldiers to win wars need to fit within the class fantasy of Monk and not fighter. For Wushu itself to be the foundation of the monk class, you would need to really focus the entire class around being more of just "the Athlete" class, who's focus is on competitive sport, where the "rules" would be totally arbitrarily decided, but done so by specific orders or societies in world that define what tools can be used in those competitions.
To be clear, this is also not the take given in the response you only partially responded to, which cited other martial arts forms and did not come close to even implying that the entire Monk class needed to be molded exclusively around wushu. The point being made is simply that the claim of weapons not fitting the "flavor" of the Monk class I think comes from a place of ignorance and reductive, if unintentional bias, and that the class would be better off accommodating a much wider range of weapons, so that we can have our athletic, ascetic martial artists draw their traditions from all parts of our settings and not just the Asian-coded ones. It would also just give the Monk more gameplay options and eliminate a feat tax, which I think is almost always a good thing.
What I beleive would be a good middle ground would be to just let the player of each individual monk decide.
I personally feel that's actually the worst-case scenario. Leaving it up to the player and the GM to decide which weapons are even valid as Monk weapons would create a huge degree of ambiguity that could lead to some very unpleasant extremes, from the GM banning all weapons on the Monk (for example, on the grounds that it doesn't fit the class's "flavor"), to the player deciding they want their Monk to swing around a Greatsword for those d12 damage Flurries of Blows. By contrast, if the rule were that all weapons under certain damage dice could work with Monk features, much like how the Ruffian gets a blanket-but-conditional interaction with more weapons, then players would be able to pick whichever weapons they'd like from that selection anyway.
Much like how Rogues used to have all simple and a smattering of other weapons, we could make it so Monks start with all simple weapons and a selection (5 or 6) of Martial weapons to represent their specific training/monastery/what have you. We can still put some Ruffian-style limitations on those (but instead of being unable to Sneak Attack, you're unable to Flurry).
The fact that both the Bard and Rogue shifted away from listing only specific hand-picked weapons, and instead both gained blanket proficiency in martial weapons, to me is a clear sign that Paizo considers hand-selecting weapons to be legacy design and has been moving away from that when they've been able to. While the implementation for the updated Ruffian isn't perfect, it gives a clear example of a blanket rule that allows a class to interact with a far greater range of weapons.
But I don't think we'll get either, seeing as how [Monk] is still a Trait, which makes me think this isn't going to change in any meaningful way.
The Monk is one of the classes that hasn't yet been updated with the remaster. Perhaps you're right, but given how we have seen some pretty significant changes in some of the remastered classes, I also wouldn't put it past Paizo to enable compatibility with the current Monk in the meantime and implement something broader when Player Core 2 hits.
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I don't think having the monk trait means we aren't going to see changes to monk weapons, because it could mean that monks now start being proficient with simple weapons and weapons with the monk trait, and then Monastic Weaponry could expand those options into other martial weapons.
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I don't think having the monk trait means we aren't going to see changes to monk weapons, because it could mean that monks now start being proficient with simple weapons and weapons with the monk trait, and then Monastic Weaponry could expand those options into other martial weapons.
That would be neat. Wouldn't mind that
I mean the more obvious approach at that point is to not give monk access to any martial weapons in class and have that come from archetypes or class archetypes.
At the point you are trying to fit weapons of war into the monk class chassis, then there is very little reason to exclude armor, as there are definitely real world martial arts that include armor use. The fantasy of excluding Armor is about excluding the paradigm of soldiers fighting wars.
I mean the more obvious approach at that point is to not give monk access to any martial weapons in class and have that come from archetypes or class archetypes.
Right, and how do you codify that interaction for the Monk's abilities? It would be a lot simpler to bake that interaction directly into the Monk's kit from the start instead of specifying an interaction that would only happen through archetypes.
At the point you are trying to fit weapons of war into the monk class chassis, then there is very little reason to exclude armor, as there are definitely real world martial arts that include armor use. The fantasy of excluding Armor is about excluding the paradigm of soldiers fighting wars.
On thematic grounds, I personally have no qualms with letting Monks fight in armor, at least light and medium armor, though on mechanical grounds I do think there are valid reasons to keep Monks to unarmored defense. Specifically, the class starts out an expert in unarmored defense, and I think having that same proficiency rank for other armor types would give the class too much AC early on. You could certainly have the class start out only trained in other armor types, and because Monk stances require you to be unarmored, that'd probably be fine, as Monks in light or medium armor wouldn't be eating the unarmored Monk's lunch.
I let monks make their weapons look like whatever they want to look like. I don't really care if a monk weapon is made to look a certain way close to what it is. A temple sword can look like any type of sword as far as I'm concerned. Martial arts swords look all kinds of different ways in the movie.
I'd be fine if they just called weapons "monk sword." I wouldn't care. Longsword is a generic idea for a wide variety of swords that look like you want them to look, they can do the same thing with a monk sword.
Most weapons fall into the "this weapon models a wide category of weapons of this type." They should do the same for monk weapons, though some of them are more precise than others. As long as the weapon doesn't get more traits or walk on someone else's schtick.