Okay, let me expalin why I set up my berserker as different from a barbarian. A berserker isn't meant to be a regular Viking warrior, but a rare, weird, semi-supernatural psycho-killer.
I used to play Chivalry and Sorcery using their Viking supplement. All of the warriors in Viking society in that game were allowed to go "ferocious", the equivalent of D&D's rage. So I established that the typical fighting-man in the D&D version would be the barbarian. The guards of chiefs and kings in C&S were able to do "power-attack" like things and had a generally higher level of combat skill and ability--so for D&D the Fighter class fit for them. All well and good.
But then there were Berserkers, you had to have favorable birth omens to be one (something I carried over to D&D), and they were really scary professional pyscopaths. Their berserking ability marked them as different than the regular "ferocious" warriors. In literature the numbers of these "true" berserkers was quite small (a king might have a dozen in his employ).
Several of the barbarian's abilites did not seem to fit, uncanny dodge for one (berserkers don't care about defense), all of the skill points for another. Berserkers killed for a living and did nothing else.
The rage of the berserker was a divine gift, a magical power, and in literature they were very hard to kill, it usually took magic or a magic weapon to do it. So, in order to model that I went for the huge hit die. I'm still not convinced that it doesn't work. After two sessions our berserker has survived only by the narrowest of margins (reaching -9 twice).
Perhaps it just seems freakier than it is. Perhaps I'll change it to a toughness feat for free on every odd level, that was a good suggestion and makes the class seem more in line with the others. I'm more concerned about the potential of a berserker using a lot of defensive magic, I should add a prohibition against that.
I used to play Chivalry and Sorcery using their Viking supplement. All of the warriors in Viking society in that game were allowed to go "ferocious", the equivalent of D&D's rage. So I established that the typical fighting-man in the D&D version would be the barbarian. The guards of chiefs and kings in C&S were able to do "power-attack" like things and had a generally higher level of combat skill and ability--so for D&D the Fighter class fit for them. All well and good.
But then there were Berserkers, you had to have favorable birth omens to be one (something I carried over to D&D), and they were really scary professional pyscopaths. Their berserking ability marked them as different than the regular "ferocious" warriors. In literature the numbers of these "true" berserkers was quite small (a king might have a dozen in his employ).
Several of the barbarian's abilites did not seem to fit, uncanny dodge for one (berserkers don't care about defense), all of the skill points for another. Berserkers killed for a living and did nothing else.
The rage of the berserker was a divine gift, a magical power, and in literature they were very hard to kill, it usually took magic or a magic weapon to do it. So, in order to model that I went for the huge hit die. I'm still not convinced that it doesn't work. After two sessions our berserker has survived only by the narrowest of margins (reaching -9 twice).
Perhaps it just seems freakier than it is. Perhaps I'll change it to a toughness feat for free on every odd level, that was a good suggestion and makes the class seem more in line with the others. I'm more concerned about the potential of a berserker using a lot of defensive magic, I should add a prohibition against that.
I kid.
