Thought i'd bring this up again. I'm sure someone else has mentioned it between page ten and page thirty in this folder but I stopped reading after ten.
My thoughts on a guild of this type (not even necessarily named the monk guild) is that they would require an advanced knowledge of the game or at least some experience. Why? The following suggested reasons:
1) You can only use bare handed attacks. The use of a weapon other than your hands will result in a penalty wherein your special capacities are weakened to the point of non-existence until you go on a training trip to cast away such knowledge and find yourself again.
2) You can wear no armor except for cloth. This guild has skills that emphasize the body mind and spirit in perfect harmony and utilizable as a weapon.
3) You can learn to use neither a shield or the parry skill. Evasion and a skill that functions similar to parry but that works with the special skill on the guild might be used for blocking.. otherwise simple evasion will have to suffice.
3) You would need to gain a certain amount of skill as a commoner before you could join just as a roleplaying stand point. Probably several weapons skills solely so you can give them up as part of learning to rely solely on yourself.
4) Since I envision this to be a cross between a barbarians inner fire and the empath's style of life mana in regards to how monk special abilities work.. this wouldn't be a guild any old body would join. Only people willing to train to a minimum of say forty ranks in appropriate skills.. and is willing to toss those forty measely ranks (in weapons and non-cloth armor only)
5) This guild would obviously be extremely hard to play as for the first few circles until the special capacities began to develop.
Beyond these thoughts.. here is sort of how i'd envision it going in regards to bells and whistles.
The four paths:
Valor, Serenity, Mountain, and Stream.
Each of these paths has a specific skill set and the monk character would have to learn from all of them up until twenty or thirty. Once they reached minimum knowledge in all of them they would be able to focus on only two of these paths.. ever.. because each path has an opposite.
Valor is the raw combat path.. all the cool butt kicking attacks skill. It would be counter to serenity.. which utilizes the unique combination of inner life force and life mana to generate defensive abilities that can be used on yourself and others.. including resisting poisons, toxins, stopping bleeding, and curing disease. They wouldn't be able to transfer injuries from themselves or others though. They aren't empaths.
Someone that chose to focus on valor could not follow the serene path and vice versa because their aura/chi.. etc.. has to be augmented through special training to advice in a given path.
Also.. the same is true of the mountain and stream paths.
Mountain would make one as "strong and enduring as the mountain" basically giving them increased endurance, stamina, and the capacity to develop their aura into a harder more focused power capable of mimicking armor. At the highest level (late hundreds) they can walk around butt naked but have a natural defensive aura so strong that ti mimicks the finest plate armor or better. However, they lose some of their evasive bonus for this benefit.
The stream path is all about flowing like water. always on the move and never in the same place twice. It is the counter to the mountain path and focuses solely on evasion and counter defenses. You can't learn both this path and the mountain path due to the augmentation of the inner life force.
Personally i'd see it more as a spiritual skill so using special abilities (not the intrinsic ones that would be automatically granted once learned just to make this guild playable) would draw straight on the soul to empower them.
They can use life mana to improve their waning spiritual strength (soul) but if they run out.. they die.. which would be the natural counter to all this skill. They are only as strong as their spirit will allow.
This is just a concept running through my mind today. I doubt it would get implemented exactly like this but I COULD.. see a few barbarians in the past deciding that they wanted to use nothing BUT their hands and bodies as the ultimate weapons.. seeing weapons themselves as crutches just as other barbs see magic.
I could see them pushing themselves far beyond what anyone dreamed and discovering facets of the inner fire that none of their guild had before. So much so that they had to go their own lonely way in the world since they were so changed.
This wouldn't be a "magic" guild.. it would be more like a guild that branched from the barbs and discovered how to use their INNER FIRE in a dynamically different way that also touched a little on the life mana.
It's not magic tricks so much as utilizing their body to its fullest without external aids other than what the nature of existence provides (the life force in all things).
I could also see this being an advanced guild option solely because you'd have to hunt down a wandering master and convince them through various means that you are a true student that desires their knowledge.. they wouldn't really have a guild hall perse.. since the entire world would be their guild.. sort of the Elanthian version of walking the earth.
Throw in some stuff like split form techniques where they seem to move so fast there are more than one of them.. the ability to leap into battle at melee range from pole or even ranged range.. etc..
add in some eastern flare.
This is a fair start on a guild idea. Needs major fleshing though.
