I hate monks

This pasta is stale...

>Wizards exist
The literal job of a wizard is to ignore mundane reality. If you're going to tell me that wizards can exist in a setting with realism while monks can't, you're three steps short of a waltz and full of shit besides.
I am fucking done and a half with 'but muh realism' when a Wizard jumps onto his magical steed and summons a sword out of mystic energy while hurling fireballs and vaporizing people with what amounts to laser beams while the fighter stands there with 'a sharp club'.
Fuck you, OP, and shove your shitty bait up your ass -where you apparently stuck your head.
I don't even care at this point, because someone out there is idiotic enough to actually believe this, and I might as well point my white-hot rage at being reminded of the stupidity at OP.

>too sci-fi
>TOO SCI-FI FOR A GAME WHERE ONE OF THE FIRST PUBLISHED SETTINGS HAS A CITY POWERED BY NUCLEAR ENERGY AND UNDERGROUND ELVES WHO WORSHIP A NUCLEAR PHYSICIST THAT FELL THROUGH A WORMHOLE INTO THEIR WORLD
Stopped reading there.

Wait, what? Where?

>armies didn't use

Literally the worst argument. Pre-modern armies don't use things that work in one-on-one engagements, they use things that work for looking flash as fuck, for mass combats, and for looking flash as fuck inside mass combats. Compare that to an adventurer, who is preferably always ready to murder a son of a bitch, even if the city he's in bans anybody poorer than a merchant prince from carrying a sword or wearing yellow clothing. If you want to appeal to realism with your adventurers, you're better off looking at guerillas and other non-traditional combatants.

The Blackmoor Campaign, run by Dave Arneson, was the first ever full-on D&D campaign. "The Blackmoor Event" is a historical event in Mystara/the Known World setting, which was the official setting of Basic D&D when it was around.

There was a city where a strange power came from underground, and powerful people used it to get power. The Immortals (basically gods, who are all ascended mortals in this setting) got pissed and cursed the thing to suck magic out of the material plane whenever they drew upon its power. The strange power was nuclear energy from a... I don't remember if it was a nuke or a fusion reactor for a power plant, that had somehow wound up there.

Meanwhile, in some caves, Shadow Elves, Arneson's non-evil (though very bitter toward surface-dwellers in general) equivalent to drow, worship a being named Rafiel, who was a scientist that somehow wound up there. Details are fuzzy.

His home plane is basically a time machine only instead of times it travels between planes (and possibly between multiverses, such that he could visit our world if he wanted to).

> there's the fact that there's a reason why pre-gunpowder armies used spears and swords and shit and NOT fists: they have inferior range, they have no leverage to increase power, and they aren't sharp.

But in real life martial arts were created by people who weren't allowed to use spears and swords and shit and would, in fact, be killed if they had them. For characters from oppressive nations, learning how to hit hard with your fists or farming implements makes a lot of sense, because those are the only things you can use to protect yourself from criminals, bandits or the local guards (who are typically just criminals and bandits).

Presumably any setting with "monks" or martial artists would tend to follow this concept - that the hand-to-hand fighting techniques were created because people didn't have access to anything better.

So what you're saying is: "I wasn't around during the late 80s and early 90s, and don't understand the Oriental creep that occurred and why it left an impression."

Got it, OP. But don't care.

The only thing sci-fi about psionics is the names. Swap them around and its just an alternative magic system for people that prefer mana pools to spell slots.

If you're bullshit strong enough that you can kill a rock colossus with a sword, you could do it with any weapon or with your fists