A few times I can recall him getting really pissed, and hitting things harder than normal. Though that is sort of a common fight trope, it wasn't a supernatural sort of event. In a loin cloth he usually seemed to get by on luck and agility rather than soaking up a bunch of bladed attacks. But again that's all a mater of fluff. Mechanically even a high dex fighter is going to be in some poop if he's getting into fights on the semi reg without armor. So maybe the increased AC of unarmored barbarian defense he's still just dodging like a mofo. Or alternatively if he's a fighter, maybe his red rage is him using action surge.
Maybe skills are enough to represent his sneakyness. Maybe you need the one level dip into rogue to take double proficiency on sneaking.
There's a bunch of kinda good ways to do it. If I really wanted to attempt to fully capture it while staying sorta optimized. I'd go champion fighter 18/1 barb/1 rogue. That way you get a couple flavorful rages, the ability to fight lizardmen butt naked, really good sneaking, and the extra 1d6 that goes with it. I'd start with outlander barbarian (we're not taking full plate), take perception, survival, stealth, and athletics. Variant human take either alert or tough, depending on which you think is more important. Then take 5 lvls of champion fighter(great weapon fighting) to get your second attack(which you quick, we took barb first so we could start with loincloth action). Take one level of rogue to become extra sneaky, collect deception and thieves tools proficiencies. Then go back to fighter the rest of the way.
This is a progression that makes fluff sense, and captures basically everything you'd want to fairly quick, while still only being behind one level on 2nd attack. The issues are you miss out on one asi and your 3rd attack at 20. Though honestly, how often do you go to 20, and if we're MCing for flavor we're not super cocerned with maximum optimization. The only reason issue is the ability scores. Typically we want to max out our primary, and sometimes second and even tertiary ability scores. So first Conan isn't really a 20th level pc, he has maybe a 16 in strength, and he also has fairly rounded scores so we could just respect that get all our scores to +2 and +3. OR we could say "Well the highest level conan we see is like lvl 10, let's see him go to 20 and he will have maxed scores." In which case we have to make some choices. We have with 18 lvls of fighter 6 ASIs. If we assume the point buy then we can either start with sort evenish scores 13s in phys, 12s in mentals. Then buff physicals. Or kinda loaded towards physical str/con 15 dex 13 char 10 wis/int 8(which is only below average and not too bad for young Conan being more cunning than genius), and catching up our mentals down the line. Either way we can't take too many feats and hope to get nice fight rounded scores. We can get 2 or 3 feats on top of variant human, and still end up like 18/18/16/10/8/8, which is pretty okay. But prolly keep the feats down. Or simply ask DM for more budget points or roll well.
So that's a pretty chill Conan, does basically everything I'd want Conan to do, still fairly powerful. And the attribute issue has a few workarounds. Or you could just be lazy, and go pure fighter with sneak and survival trained. Up to you.
Maybe skills are enough to represent his sneakyness. Maybe you need the one level dip into rogue to take double proficiency on sneaking.
There's a bunch of kinda good ways to do it. If I really wanted to attempt to fully capture it while staying sorta optimized. I'd go champion fighter 18/1 barb/1 rogue. That way you get a couple flavorful rages, the ability to fight lizardmen butt naked, really good sneaking, and the extra 1d6 that goes with it. I'd start with outlander barbarian (we're not taking full plate), take perception, survival, stealth, and athletics. Variant human take either alert or tough, depending on which you think is more important. Then take 5 lvls of champion fighter(great weapon fighting) to get your second attack(which you quick, we took barb first so we could start with loincloth action). Take one level of rogue to become extra sneaky, collect deception and thieves tools proficiencies. Then go back to fighter the rest of the way.
This is a progression that makes fluff sense, and captures basically everything you'd want to fairly quick, while still only being behind one level on 2nd attack. The issues are you miss out on one asi and your 3rd attack at 20. Though honestly, how often do you go to 20, and if we're MCing for flavor we're not super cocerned with maximum optimization. The only reason issue is the ability scores. Typically we want to max out our primary, and sometimes second and even tertiary ability scores. So first Conan isn't really a 20th level pc, he has maybe a 16 in strength, and he also has fairly rounded scores so we could just respect that get all our scores to +2 and +3. OR we could say "Well the highest level conan we see is like lvl 10, let's see him go to 20 and he will have maxed scores." In which case we have to make some choices. We have with 18 lvls of fighter 6 ASIs. If we assume the point buy then we can either start with sort evenish scores 13s in phys, 12s in mentals. Then buff physicals. Or kinda loaded towards physical str/con 15 dex 13 char 10 wis/int 8(which is only below average and not too bad for young Conan being more cunning than genius), and catching up our mentals down the line. Either way we can't take too many feats and hope to get nice fight rounded scores. We can get 2 or 3 feats on top of variant human, and still end up like 18/18/16/10/8/8, which is pretty okay. But prolly keep the feats down. Or simply ask DM for more budget points or roll well.
So that's a pretty chill Conan, does basically everything I'd want Conan to do, still fairly powerful. And the attribute issue has a few workarounds. Or you could just be lazy, and go pure fighter with sneak and survival trained. Up to you.
