Barbarian - likes and dislikes?

[Odhanan]

Likes:
Nearly everything about it

Dislikes:
Lack of focus about it. Between the d12 hit points, the good movement and so on. Where's the thread? I don't feel it as much as I would feel the focus of a Berserker in Iron Heroes. The Barbarian is a secondary warrior class, and you can *feel* it, but it's a good second to the fighter.

 

[Felon]

It's interesting to delve into what the designers intentions were when they designed a particular class (though to do so, one has to come to grips with semantical minutia like whether "berserker" would be a more appropriate label than barbarian).

While they correctly surmised that providing the fighter with a selection of bonus feats would be a widespread hit, they also knew that adding a level complexity to this most basic of classes could make it unpopular with some folks--namely, those who found that the featurelessness of 1st and 2nd edition fighters offered an appealing level simplicity. The 3e fighter is a class that's easy to pick up, but hard to master. In the hands of a player who picks his feats carelessly and doesn't plan ahead, it's mediocre. Therein lies the problem: not everyone who played fighters in previous editions wants to build a ship in a bottle. Some players want to be careless; if they wanted to plan ahead, they'd have picked a darned magic-user!

The barbarian exists primarily to offer that simplicity. Other than allocating skill points, there are no choices to make when playing a barbarian. No lists of bonus feats, spells, favored enemies, or pets to fool with.

And the emphasis on simplicity goes deeper than that, right into play style. Your typical D&D class has a sort of rock, paper, scissors design. The barbarian is actually designed so that none of those various implements will be terribly effective. Str, Con, & Will save bonuses when enraged, AC & Reflex save bonuses against traps, damage reduction, protection from flanking, nigh-immunity to sneak attack, not to mention d12 hit dice--all of that comes together to provide a character that can recklessly blunder his way through challenges while other characters are playing it slow and easy.

It's the 4 skill points a level that you really gotta love. They didn't even want the class to suffer too badly from dump-statting Int (or perhaps more appropriately, they wanted to deter the class from investing too heavily in Int), so they decided the logical thing to do was give it 4 skill points. 4 skill points + d12 hit die offers a tempting advantage over the 3e fighter. I think that the current design team realizes they went a little over-the-top.

 

[ruleslawyer]

Likes:
Nearly everything about it

Dislikes:
Lack of focus about it. Between the d12 hit points, the good movement and so on. Where's the thread? I don't feel it as much as I would feel the focus of a Berserker in Iron Heroes. The Barbarian is a secondary warrior class, and you can *feel* it, but it's a good second to the fighter.

Er, secondary?

Felon: The reason I stated that I disliked the name is because it's pretty much the ONLY thing I don't like, and yes, it's easy enough to change, provided you get rid of the baggage that comes with it (like, say, illiteracy, which lots of other posters don't like either). But yes, I agree that mechanically, the barb's about as good a class design as you get.

 

[Gentlegamer]

Everyone in this thread that has a problem with the name "barbarian" needs to read some R.E. Howard . . .

Conan was proud to call himself BARBARIAN!

 

[Soel]

The name "barbarian" just isn't a class name at all. The term doesn't sum up what they do, or are capable of. The abilities seem kind of strung together.

I had wanted to design a barbarian class for my soon-to-begin Wilderlands game that's function was to completely change over the course of its level progression (the idea being that the "savage" when exposed to other cultures would transform,) loosing its early identity to a new one. Sort of a class-within-a-class that wasn't just multi-classing. However game time draws nearer, and with the limited number of players I have, the effort may not prove fruitful enough.

 

[Bront]

While they correctly surmised that providing the fighter with a selection of bonus feats would be a widespread hit,... if they wanted to plan ahead, they'd have picked a darned magic-user!

I disagree here on several points. The fighter is considered too generic, and still fairly simple by most people, and untill the PHBII, was considered a bad class to take too many levels in, and generaly still considered one of the simplest classes to take.

The barbarian exists primarily to offer that simplicity. Other than allocating skill points, there are no choices to make when playing a barbarian. No lists of bonus feats, spells, favored enemies, or pets to fool with.

While there aren't extras, dealing with the rage effects is a fairly complex task, and in some way, the limited abount of feats available makes it so that it's harder to have less feats, as you can't make a mistake.

And the emphasis on simplicity goes deeper than that, right into play style. Your typical D&D class has a sort of rock, paper, scissors design. The barbarian is actually designed so that none of those various implements will be terribly effective. Str, Con, & Will save bonuses when enraged, AC & Reflex save bonuses against traps, damage reduction, protection from flanking, nigh-immunity to sneak attack, not to mention d12 hit dice--all of that comes together to provide a character that can recklessly blunder his way through challenges while other characters are playing it slow and easy.

Interesting take, and in some way, it makes sense, but you're again assuming the Barbarian is going to blindly charge into everything no matter what.

It's the 4 skill points a level that you really gotta love. They didn't even want the class to suffer too badly from dump-statting Int (or perhaps more appropriately, they wanted to deter the class from investing too heavily in Int), so they decided the logical thing to do was give it 4 skill points.

This is the point that made me want to reply to this. The 4 skill points represents the fact that Barbarians, as written, have training in a wide variety of skills for survival (Survival, Listen, Jump, Climb, Swim, etc), and not put in to simply allow the barbarian to not be hurt by a low Int. Fighters spend their time fighting, therefore don't get many skill points. Clerics and Wizards study, so not many skill points. Barbarians spend time doing things, which lends to them getting skill points.

 

[doghead]

I tend to agree with Felon; the barbarian is one of the easiest 'plug and play' classes. As someone who has got lost several times in that labyrinth known as feat prerequisites, this is very appealing.

As for the name, it does what is needed. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with Conan will have an fairly good idea of what the class is about.

thotd

 

[Felon]

I disagree here on several points. The fighter is considered too generic, and still fairly simple by most people, and untill the PHBII, was considered a bad class to take too many levels in, and generaly still considered one of the simplest classes to take.

You state you disagree, but in fact your statements are very much in sync with what I was saying. To summarize: the fighter was intended to be easy to learn and hard to master, and people who weren't able or inclined to make the attempt to master it wound up with mediocre fighters. The "easy to learn" part correlates with what you say above about its genericness and simplicity, and the "hard to master" part meshes with your claim that some considered it a bad class to take too many levels in.

The place where we're not connecting is that you're not truly talking about shortcomings with the fighter class or the feats available, but with folks who picked up on the "easy to learn" bit, but didn't get a handle on the "tough to master" aspect. Instead, some people want the fighter to be "easy to learn, nothing to master". Rather than finding combinations of feats that synergized with each other, they favor prerequisite-guided feat chains that provided a clear-cut path for turning a fighter into a powerhouse.

Which was what they ultimately got in the PHBII; a fighter made barb-simple. I'm cool with that, and I like the new feats, but the class didn't need that stuff to be effective. The folks who derided single-classed fighters were just deriding the class for not providing straightforward paths.

While there aren't extras, dealing with the rage effects is a fairly complex task, and in some way, the limited abount of feats available makes it so that it's harder to have less feats, as you can't make a mistake.

In relation to the game of D&D, rage is not complex. Adding +2 to hit and damage is not particularly challenging, nor is gaining two hit points per level, or a Will save bonus. D&D is all about racking up bonuses, nothing special there.

As for picking feats, a player who's keeping it simple has a two-handed weapon. Now, where are you going from there? Power attack, almost de facto. There's a nice little prereq-guided feat chain to go down.

Interesting take, and in some way, it makes sense, but you're again assuming the Barbarian is going to blindly charge into everything no matter what.

No, not at all. What I'm saying is that the barbarian is equipped to be simple--plug and play, as Doghead aptly puts it. You can go in other directions if you wish (wanna be a 2WF barb? more power to thee) it's very friendly to the players who just want to smash things with a really big sword.

This is the point that made me want to reply to this. The 4 skill points represents the fact that Barbarians, as written, have training in a wide variety of skills for survival (Survival, Listen, Jump, Climb, Swim, etc), and not put in to simply allow the barbarian to not be hurt by a low Int. Fighters spend their time fighting, therefore don't get many skill points. Clerics and Wizards study, so not many skill points. Barbarians spend time doing things, which lends to them getting skill points.

Well, let's see how disparate the fighter and barbarian skillsets are:

Fighters get Climb, Craft, Handle Animal, Intimidate, Jump, Ride, and Swim.

Barbarians get Climb, Craft, Handle Animal, Intimidate, Jump, Listen, Ride, Survival, and Swim.

OK, who amongst us really sees a gaping chasm between the two skillsets? I find the arguement that a barbarian spends more time taking classes in jumping, intimidating, and riding than a fighter because barbarians just don't spend all that much time beating things up to be rather specious. And not just from a logical or intuitive standpoint (though that's certainly there), but from the more objective perspective that skill-point allotment is largely a function of class balance. It relates to how many class skills the class has (in this case, 9 to the fighter's 7), and the sum of its total package of modifiers--skill points, hit dice, BAB, and saves. The barb is compensated more handsomely than the fighter, and the reason for doing so certainly isn't because the class needs to be a skilmonger in order to pull its weight.

 

[Bront]

In relation to the game of D&D, rage is not complex. Adding +2 to hit and damage is not particularly challenging, nor is gaining two hit points per level, or a Will save bonus. D&D is all about racking up bonuses, nothing special there.

While I would agree with you. Some of the people I game with... *sigh* I've met too many people that have trouble doing things like reading the right line on their character sheet or remembering what something did even though they used it last round.

Fighters get Climb, Craft, Handle Animal, Intimidate, Jump, Ride, and Swim.

Barbarians get Climb, Craft, Handle Animal, Intimidate, Jump, Listen, Ride, Survival, and Swim.

OK, who here really see a gaping chasm between the two skillsets? I find the arguement that a barbarian spends more time taking classes in jumping, intimidating, and riding than a fighter because barbarians just don't spend all that much time beating things up to be rather specious. And not just from a logical or intuitive standpoint (though that's certainly there), but from the more objective perspective that skill-point allotment is largely a function of class balance. It relates to how many class skills the class has (in this case, 9 to the fighter's 7), and the sum of its total package of modifiers--skill points, hit dice, BAB, and saves. The barb is compensated more handsomely than the fighter, and the reason for doing so certainly isn't because the class needs to be a skilmonger all that badly.

The fighting was a mispeak on my part, I ment training. Fighters training focuses on fighting more than a barbarian does. Basicly, there are things I think are wrong with the barbarian, but the skill points is not one of them, and I don't think the skill points were though out in the way you suggested they were. And for some reason, I thought Barbarians got KN: Nature as well.

As for being a skill monger, well, I'm very partial to skill points (I rarely play any of the 2 skill point per level classes, because I find myself pidgeonholed too much).

Anyway, to each their own

 

[Felon]

As for being a skill monger, well, I'm very partial to skill points (I rarely play any of the 2 skill point per level classes, because I find myself pidgeonholed too much).

I too like a character with well-rounded skills. However, in light of their roles in the party being more-or-less the same, a barbarian just doesn't mandate more skill points than the fighter.

Anyway, to each their own

Well-put.