Well, this one should be easy. Lucky all those other classes' tedious analysis of roleplaying and mechanic interconnection is superfluous in the case of our next two options.
If you want to pretend you're Arnold Schwarzenegger, play a barbie.
If you want to pretend you're Bruce Lee, play a monkey.
Done. Who needs RP when you've got fad worship?
Enter the Dragon came out two years before D&D's 1975 release with the original monk, coincidentally about the same time Kung Fu was first airing. Conan three years before its '85 release; enter barbarians and supposedly a decisive retool for monks into full-on karate kids. Neither class fits particularly well into D&D's basic rock/paper/scissors late-medieval wargaming origin with its discrete armor classes and weapon proficiencies. Granted that's not a bad thing. For the game to grow, it needed some gaps and bridges in those class distinctions. Still, if latching on to the latest Hollywood craze managed to fit that need, it can't have been less than 90% dumb luck on the part of Gygax&co. But hey, D&D's a half-baked hodgepodge of pop culture tropes even on a good day (note we just had a major video game adaptation based on the notion that Lovecraftian face tentacles are trending well on Facebook) so don't expect any improvements from Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro.
It's up to their many spin-offs and imitators to make good on bad ideas.
For a relatively minor question, ask yourself how you're gonna balance the economics. If heavier armor is better and more expensive (as it sure as hell was historically) then how exactly will you insert ber-serk front-liners without obsoleting your tin can brigade? You might not question it now, but the "naked caster" problem cropped up in a big way in pre-WoW MMOs, especially with PvP (read: griefing) enabled. And if you have any interest in creating a coherent game world, then cost, bulk and solidity will have to be re-examined. If all it takes is one reagent-free cast of stoneskin for my IWD2 halfling monk to out-tank my dwarf fighter, you've got a problem.
Barbarians filled a more necessary niche for offense-oriented fighters back when the fighter was the sword-and-board heavy defending light and medium wizards and thieves, and I always liked how the rage mechanic pushed you into all-out offense, to finish the fight before your timer runs out. But if the barbarian is an offense-oriented fighter, that does raise the question of difference from a fighter built for offense... and the answer is once again the rage ability... and the class has just sort of stuck there since its inception. Moving past that requires more investment in noncombat skills and feats, but let's postpone that until we reach the ranger.
I've also never seen monk weapons truly implemented in cRPGs. Historically, there were plenty of non-military farming implements and such which could be used in battle, like pitchforks, sickles, scythes, hatchets or nunchuks (I'm'a thresh yew up, boyyy!) and it makes perfect sense to associate these with clerics, monks and other non-martial classes. Fixating on kung-fu movie slapstick to the exclusion of such options also cuts a potential vein of roleplaying continuity, of monastic communities with the villages connected to them. Does your monk's quarterstaff skill come from defending himself with a walking stick on pilgrimages? Did you learn to wield a sickle while defending downtrodden villagers from heathen raiders who chased them to your abbey? Or rather fuck that RP noise because your stun skill requires you to be empty-handed or gives you a +2 ToHit for having your middle finger free?
Really, in terms of RP, the monk's problem is the same as the cleric's: fleshing out those creeds and sticking by them. To what force is your order devoted and will that come up in the campaign? Who wrote your rule and does it entail asceticism, tithing, paid sacraments, ritual prayers (possibly working as buffs) vows of silence or nonviolence (and if so what are your conditions for breaking them) is your order apolitical or subordinate to a certain clergy or god-king, where are your monasteries, your relics, do you need to report back to your abbot, are you responsible for your party members' sins? Do you support yourselves by brewing wine or beer or hold some sort of royally-guaranteed monopoly on some trade goods, and if so will those skills show up when negotiating in taverns or let you wrangle an audience with the minister of trade? You don't need to hold yourself to every single such detail, but I'll be damned if you ever meet a monk in a cRPG with more personality than "I know kung fu" and monasteries, while frequent, tend to be explicitly disconnected from the playable monk class.
It's not like barbarians get much better treatment either. How does tribal life ever impact your gameplay? (I'm especially reminded of Dragon Age: Origins' introduction, reading all those lore entries and dialogues about the Chasind... only for none of it to come up ever again.) You will inevitably visit a barbarian village in every cRPG campaign, and while there you will just as inevitably participate in exactly one activity: a trial by combat to decide the new chief. Chief of what? Who gives a shitting bull. Again, where is your tribe from, what are your hunting grounds, do you migrate with the herds, do you harvest seasonal fruits, are you seminomadic between winter lakes and summer pastures (and will those skills come in handy in feeding the adventuring party?) do you raid other tribes or have traditional enemies (like the other barbarians you meet during the campaign) do you raid civilized outposts and are therefore a criminal, if you lack citizenship in any major political entity how does that affect your status? Remember, the law throughout history has "solved" many crimes by convicting the nearest foreigner, and as a barbarian, hey, that's you! And while we're at it, do you know how to read? It's especially funny that RPG barbarians are so often portrayed as grounded, pragmatic realists or even de facto atheists, when primitive nomads are actually superstitious as fuck! Everything, every single damn thing is either good luck or bad luck to them, either an evil spirit or a divine blessing.
Finally: the ranger, which seems to have suffered a great deal of derailment. In cRPG scripts, ranger means unaffiliated (or flatly anti-social) woodsman with a bow, but the class' original inspiration, Tolkien's latter-age Dunedain, were a deeply, multigenerationally loyal caste with specific genetics, in fact an organized (if overtly decentralized) hereditary guerilla force, and the "dour-handed rangers of the north" hacked and slashed their way through LotR's last battles with their swords. There's a lot of unused wiggle room in game writing for rangers as distant appendages of various power structures. Granted, much like barbarians' heavy melee offense, ranger range combat just fits an otherwise empty niche in core archetypes. A better spread of fighter/thief classes (as seen in more recent RPGs) picking up more range focus frees rangers from the sniper pigeonhole. But then if they're no longer "I know bow fu" then what exactly does a ranger do? Doth a ranger... range?
The basic D&D classes provided all you needed in a dungeon crawl: one to hit shit, one to disarm traps, one to heal and one to abracadabra whatever couldn't be hit to death. Every class added after that tends to devolve to yet another flavor of "hit shit" especially in computer games which are great at clicking things to death and infamously terrible at every other aspect of roleplaying. Interconnecting lore and player actions is one problem, sure, but all three of these classes require non-combat skill use to make them stand apart. You remember, moving quietly, spotting, all the myriad skills lumped under "survival" and everything else crucial to moving this genre outside the dungeon, will it ever be used? Does it matter that your barbarian can stride across the tundra if all the action takes place in a 10x10 room with an orc guarding a treasure chest? Does knowing how to build a smokeless campfire ever help the party? Or skin a deer? Or pick berries that don't taste like burning? Or train/use carrier pigeons? Or shave a bone spear or record your deeds in scrimshaw? Is there anything for your monk to grapple or balance across, or any tests of mental discipline to pass? Can your ranger track a party of kidnappers across the plains of the horse-lords and commune with said horses?
Because if the answer to "can I do anything besides hit shit" is consistently NO, then you may as well call them all fighters and be done.
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