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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Don Durito" data-source="post: 7884844" data-attributes="member: 6687260">A barbarian is just a berserker.  Everything thing else is there as mechanics to hang off that.But the berserker thing is the heart of it.  (At least since 3rd edition).There are several reasons it's a class.  The first is because there was a Barbarian class in 1e (which had even less reason to exist and was completely different).  The reason it was a class in 1st edition because the idea of the conan inspired and derivative barbarian was a thing - especially in the 70s and 80s.  He-man, Thundarr etc.  This made it a recognisable enough thing that some people wanted mechanics for it - but a lot of those didn't make much sense (distrust of magic) and in any case a lot of classes had higher stat requirements in 1e making them a sort of 'elite' class, you could pick if you were lucky enough to roll well.  It certainly didn't need to be a class in 1e but people were going around making classes for everything then.The rage mechanic seems to be a later attempt to flesh out the nostalgia for a barbarian with something distinct. And to be fair - it's possible to make this distinct enough to justify a class.  You could make rage for example a feat, but it would probably be less defining for the character who chose it.  Making the berserk rage the centre of a class is probably justification enough to really flesh out that rage - make it something more than just an add on, because as a class of it's own your taking things away as well.Now 5E does weird things with this divide that don't really make much sense (such as making the Barbarian tanky and using the resistance mechanic for the character that doesn't actually wear armour and then taking the basic barbarian schtick of being the simple athletic strong guy who hits brutally hard and duplicating it in the Champion subclass for the Fighter) but that doesn't mean it can't be done better in principle.However it seems unlikely that 'Barbarian' would be a class now if it weren't for the historical nature of the 3E designers appealing to old school nostalgia by bringing things back.  We would probably have seen some kind of berserker in 3E if there hadn't been a 1st edition barbarian but it would have most likely have been done as a prestige class.</blockquote>

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