What is a Barbarian?

[Marius Delphus]

Good ideas all!

Along the same lines as Henry's idea, I also pictured a "devout" barbarian who channels divine power during "rage." Such a character enters a "combat trance" and, after it's over, needs to recover a bit from the "inspiration" experience.

 

[Celebrim]

On the subject of iliteracy, I'm more inclined to increase the number of classes that suffer from iliteracy than I am to decrease them. At the very least, commoners should be illiterate by default.

 

[CrusaderX]

Before 3e came out, some designers were hyping the 3e Barbarian as being similar to William Wallace from the Braveheart film.

 

[s/LaSH]

Tough! Capable of sudden bursts of extreme strength!

Well, there's always the idea of a psychopath. Some poor soul with a disorder that occasionally manifests itself as a bloodthirsty rage. If you load your barbar up with Knowledge skills and Profession: Mild-Mannered Pharmacist, you've got a character who's normally a timid fellow, but occasionally just snaps and lets you have it with a greataxe.

Or you could, breaking the rules a little (because of alignment restrictions), cross it with a monk and say that the rage is a temporary burst of ki. (If it weren't forbidden, how many people would play a monk/barbarian? Would that be broken?)

Finally the most bizarre non-stereotype of them all... the female barbarian. How many of these fabled creatures truly exist? (And if my reading of Gibbon's Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire is accurate, there were plenty of these sword-wielding women running around two thousand years ago, and they were pretty scary.)

 

[hong]

Geoff Watson's barbarian/shaman in my Britannia 3E game is a nice, quiet guy with a cheerful outlook on life. He's polite to everyone, and doesn't go out of his way to find trouble. Unfortunately, trouble has a way of finding him, and when that happens, he tends to get angry.

He's also LG in alignment. In the end, I couldn't really see why there should be an alignment restriction on berserkers. Going troppo is a fine, long-standing tradition upheld in many lands, and whose practitioners would often otherwise be considered the epitome of D&D lawfulness.

 

[LGodamus]

to me barbarians are just warriors who favor strength over skill

 

[FireLance]

Or, you could have a nice, gentlemanly warrior type who got exposed to some mysterious magical radiation. Now, when he gets *mad*, he gets stronger, tougher and slightly greener.

 

[LostSoul]

Change a few of the skills and drop illiteracy, and you have a nice swashbuckler.

Let the Rage be some kind of Battle Trance and you have a mystical warrior.

 

[Sejs]

I'd like to throw in another nod to Zhure's one:

Alternate Barbarian: Gutter punk with a temper.

 

[Witch Doctor]

...I believe it has an example of a non-savage barbarian for most races. I usually play barbarians off as woodsy types who aren't rangers (think Mountain Man, from America's old west)...

Funny, I've always imagined the Mountain men of the 1820's, 30's, and 40's to be the eppitomy(sp?) of what a ranger should be: careful trackers who lay ambushes, strive for relations with the local indian tribe, and generally just staying alive by sweat and wit, not by strength, but that's all IMHO.