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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 1369082" data-attributes="member: 3146">I would actually say exactly the opposite. The generic fighter is at an advantage over the barbarian in a grapple.1. The fighter has enough feats to be good at grappling without sacrificing too many non-grapple abilities. (A fighter can spend feats on Imp Unarmed Strike, and Imp Grapple and still have enough for weapon focus and specialization, power attack, and cleave by fourth level (if human); for a barbarian, even the basic grappling feats (Imp Unarmed Strike and Imp Grapple) are a very significant investment that delay other combat skills for a long time. . . .and the fighter can multiclass with monk without penalty if he wants to get the feats that way).2. Grappling significantly reduces a character's damage output making battles last longer. A grappling barbarian does d3 or d4 +str instead of d12 or 2c6+1.5(str). Assuming a raging strength of 22 to 26 (which works for up to the mid levels), that's a difference of 7.5-10.5/round to 15.5-19/round. Without considering the difference in success probabilities between winning the opposed grapple check and simply attacking (which depends upon too many variables to consider properly), that's approximately halving the damage output and making the fight last twice as long. Long fights are not in the barbarian's favor since rage has a rather limited duration.3. The fighter is more likely to be using a light weapon to begin with (a defensive fighter may very well use Imp Shieldbash and dual wield a light weapon with a heavy shield designating the shield as his "primary" weapon)--a significant advantage in a grapple since even one round of attacking with a +2 flaming wounding bane shortsword yields much better damage than several rounds of a nonspecialist's grapples.Rage bonus may apply to all grapple checks while the generic fighter's weapon focus, etc feats don't, however this is, IMO, not making best use of the barbarian's potentially significant advantage to damage (+8 strength translates to +6 damage with a two handed weapon to the fighter's +4).</blockquote>

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