D&D and Me: Part 6 (The Contemplative Life ... of Punching the Crap out of People)

[This is the sixth post in a new series.  You may want to begin at the beginning.  Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

[Last time I talked about more of my D&D characters and what attracted me to each one.  I had just reached the point of buying 3rd edition and thinking I should try out a new class, with my friend Tim DMing.]

Tim, ever my exemplar, had played a monk, named Edax Rarem, for many years, and I’d always admired him.  Many people hate monks in their D&D games, for basically the same reasons that they hate psionics, or dinosaurs, or guns (even very primitive ones): fantasy purism.  Get your chocolate out of my peanut butter, so to speak.  But I like mixing odd things, so I never had any hang-ups about scifi-style psychic powers in my high fantasy, nor about wuxia-style mystical monks in my solidly Eurocentric medieval-based fantasy.  Bring on the weirdness, I say.  And, as it turned out, Jin Shangtzi was probably the character that I ran for the longest amount of time.  He survived an edition upgrade (from 3e to 3.5e), he played with multiclassing into psionic classes, he spoke little and broke things a lot.  To this day, Jin is one of my fondest D&D character memories.

The thing that is awesome about D&D monks is that they are not the greatest offensive fighters, they are not the stealthiest, they have little abiltiy to sling spells and can’t heal for shit, but, when it comes to defense, they are insanely good.  They have the best saving throws in the game, their armor class scales with their level and their nearly-always-astronomical wisdom score, and they’re the fastest characters in the game.  Besides a nearly pathological desire to break things, Jin was focussed on mobility.  I kept his balance and tumble skills maxed out at all times, and his climb and jump and escape artist weren’t far behind.  I used his few psionic abilities to enhance his already impressive strengths: inertial armor boosted his already high armor class, burst briefly upped his already crazy-high speed, and catfall on top of the monk-standard slow fall ability meant that he never really worried about falling off anything.  He wasn’t the character who could take out the enemy in one round, but he didn’t really care about how many rounds it took, because he wasn’t getting hit by anything, and he was running circles around the bad guys while they tried.

A quick story, which may have been one of my favorite Jin moments ever:  We were attempting to rescue some captives who were being experimented on in this big open underground chamber which was overlooked by a large balcony thing—the way Tim described it, it sounded like the observation deck at a sports stadium or something along those lines.  But there were no stairs or ladder or anything; it seemed that you had to get to this balcony from somewhere deeper in the cave system, because there was literally no way to get from where we were up to it.  And, up there, looking down and (figuratively, at least) thumbing his nose at us, was the Big Bad (or at least who we thought was the Big Bad at that time).  So I decided to let the rest of my party handle taking out the mook guards down here and resucing the hostages: I was going go get that fucker.  You can’t reach the balcony, says Tim.  Jin jumps for it, I say.  Roll a check, he says—I make it.  Okay, but now you’re just hanging off the bottom of the balcony; you still can’t get to the railing, he says.  Jin starts climbing, I say.  Roll a check, he says—I make it.  Okay, but now you realize that the balcony isn’t just open, there’s a transparent barrier of some kind, he says.  Jin breaks it, I say.  But it’s not glass, Tim says; it’s some sort of crytsal, only fairly thin, so you can see through it, but still pretty strong.  Jin starts punching it, I say.  It might take him a while, but he’ll get through it.  By this point, the bad guy’s sneer is gone, and he’s starting to look a bit worried.  As the first cracks appear in the giant crystal window, he decides to get the hell out of there.  Patient as ever, Jin just keeps right on punching.  No need to worry: he knew he could run twice as fast as the bad guy ...

Jin was ostensibly an Asian character, but I never really borrowed the cultural aspect of that.  It was mainly a physical thing: if you’re going to play a monk character, who doesn’t want to look like Bruce Lee?  Actually, Jin was more of cross between Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, but bald.  And no shirt.  In fact, although it wasn’t exactly a vow of poverty, Jin never had any interest in material possessions, and generally travelled around wearing nothing but pants and a rope belt.  He was thin and ropily muscled; not overly strong, but very lithe and wiry.  As a child, he was the youngest of a huge family.  His parents couldn’t really deal with having one more mouth to feed, so, when a group of traveling monks passed by, they agreed to offer their young son in service, in exchange for some food and perhaps a few coins.  Yes, they essentially sold their child; but, on the other hand, he probably ended up getting a better life out of it.  Unlike the standard dark backstory of dead parents, Jin just didn’t ever think much about his family: they never really mattered to him.  The monastery was his family, and there he learned the wonder of breaking things.

See, I had decided that Jin was a monk dedicated to a deity.  This wasn’t strictly necessary, from a game standpoint—if you were a cleric, you definitely had to pick a deity, and if you were a druid or a paladin, you were encouraged to pick a deity, but monks could just be monks.  Not Jin, I decided.  Glancing through the Greyhawk gods,^* there was one clear choice: St. Cuthbert, who was, as Wikipedia puts it, “the combative deity of Wisdom, Dedication, and Zeal.” Could there possibly be a divine figure that more screams “monk!” at you?  I think not.  So I decided that monasteries of St. Cuthbert, while perhaps rare, did exist, and they would typically house two orders of monks: the Gnostics, who believed in study and meditation and concentrating on developing the mind, and the Somatics, who believe in exercise and disciplined movement and concentrating on developing the body.  The Gnostics were the majority in any given monastery, but there were always at least a few Somatics, who were the adventuring monks, the monks of action ... the ones that the D&D class was referring to.  Jin was one of those.  From a mechanical perspective, Cuthbert was lawful neutral (as was Jin), but, while he was not explicitly good, he didn’t allow evil clerics either (Jin certainly leaned more towards good than evil).  Among Cuthbert’s domains are strength and destruction, which is awesome for a monk whose primary mode of dealing with the world is to punch it in the face.

But I decided that Jin was not just a thug who liked beating people up under the guise of religion.  No, Jin (like all the Somatics, in my wholly invented history) believed that the only way to understand the universe was by breaking as much of it down as possible, and by breaking things into smaller and smaller pieces, until you could understand the nature of matter by understanding each of its components.  That the best way to break things down was by punching the living shit out of them was just a bonus, as far as Jin was concerned.  With his absolutely abysmal charisma, he was socially awkward, but not in a shy way.  You know how some people just say whatever they think, without regard for social propriety or whether it might hurt anyone’s feelings?  That was Jin.  He never lied, but not because he had anything against it, particularly: he just sucked at it.  If the party engaged in any sort of subterfuge, they quickly learned that they had to tell Jin to just shut up entirely; if they encouraged him to try to play along with the deception, he would happily try ... and fail, every time.  In any event, he never much understood the point of lying, even if he was happy to play along with whatever his friends wanted.  So much easier to just say what you mean, and mean what you say.  He was a deep thinker (middling intelligence and, of course, very high wisdom), and he was well aware of his tendency to say the wrong thing, so he often stayed completely silent, preferring action to words.  He had no interest in gold or jewels, and even magic items only interested him insofar as they could help him break things.  I’m pretty sure his only real magic item, even at the higher levels, was something Tim invented specifically for him: they were bracers, and they increased his damage against creatures a bit, as I recall, but they were especially helpful in destroying objects, which is something Jin really loved to do.  Can’t get the chest open?  Ask Jin to break it for you.  Can’t pick the lock on the door?  Jin will be happy to break it into splinters, I’m sure.  Dangerous artifact needs to be destroyed?  Jin is practically salivating over there to have at it.

Though Jin concentrated on being a monk, I still retained my fascination for D&D’s weird little system of psionics, and when the Psionics Handbook came out, with all new (much simpler) mechanics for 3e, I instantly siezed on the psychic warrior class.  Keeps the base attack and the fortitude save at appropriate levels, while adding cool psionic powers and (oooh!) psionic feats.  I’d already played a psionicist, so I was familiar with what psionics could do.  And, while many people (including my eldest child) don’t see a connection between monks and psionics, I always thought it was a natural fit: they both need discipline, they both concentrate on developing their minds, they both are just slightly to the left of “regular” magic.  So I loved adding a few psychic warrior levels to Jin’s solid monk background.  The last level I took (which I believe brought Jin up to 12th) was a variation of sacred/psionic fist, which I reworked specifically to get access to the destruction domain.  Once a day smite and an inflict light wounds deliverable via touch attack?  Well, Jin’s method of “touching” people was to punch them in the face, so, hell yeah: sign me up for all of that.

Jin was a big part of my D&D experience and, as you do with any of the PCs you carry around for a while, I began to think of him more like a friend than a fictional character.  It was definitely the only time I really enjoyed being a primarily combat-focussed character, but then Jin was always more that just a guy punching people (although he thoroughly enjoyed that aspect of it).  He was a bit of a philosopher, a bit of a mentalist, and a big believer in the orderliness of the universe.  He never wanted to be the ruler of the kingdom, but when his friend Magnus (a sorceror-cum-dragon-disciple played by our friend Marcus) ended up taking the throne (due to a series of weird circumstances kicked off primarily by his emergent draconic nature), he was quite pleased to take over the job of head of the palace guard.  Instill discipline in a bunch of raw recruits while simultaneously keeping all the important people safe?  It was perfect.

Next time: the long break, exploring Pathfinder, and coming back home to 5th edition.

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* Greyhawk was the default setting for 3e, just as the Forgotten Realms is for 5e.