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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 6347820" data-attributes="member: 18">That's a rather lovely picture.It's worth noting, for this thread, that as far as I know, Riverwind has never be stat'd up in an official source as a Barbarian (AFAIK!) - I brought him up as an example of a Ranger in another thread, and people with official stats for him had him as a Fighter, or Fighter/Ranger.Further, he isn't in any way a berserker or rager (generally a fairly calm figure, unless Goldmoon is threatened), so the D&D Barbarian seems like a poor fit for him. In general he seems like one of those characters slightly ill-served by D&D's class structure, who fights as well in little/no armour as those in heavy armour (which is something Barbarians do in 5E, I note), doesn't have any magical powers, doesn't have an animal companion, doesn't rage and so on. In 5E I think a Fighter sub-class which borrowed the Barbarian unarmoured Fighting deal (and ditched heavy armour training), and perhaps gave two extra skills and some vaguely wilder-ness-y stuff (avoiding treading directly on Ranger toes) would be the way to go.I have to say, I'd be pretty uncomfortable with a clearly Native American-based character like him (even if in the books it was more vague, in the art it always seems that way) being shown as a "Barbarian", given the connotations of the term and the D&D specifics. Vaguely Viking seems smart because it ties in with powers of the class (berserker rage), challenges the concept of exactly what a barbarian is (Vikings certainly got called Barbaros and the like by the Byzantines!), and avoids "othering" the Barbarian. I mean, that's precisely what the Greeks and others used the term to do, but D&D certainly shouldn't follow that lead - hell even Plato was saying that was a bloody stupid way to use the term in 262 BC!</blockquote>

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