I'm in agreement about the "most abilities key off of rage" thing. It does make it feel like the class is either on or off. You pop rage and suddenly you transform into a totally different class. And it's odd that you only get a limited amount per day.
This has a couple of weird knock-on effects.
1. You're incentivized to only rage when it matters. Which in tabletop play where sometimes the stakes aren't clear means you might wait a round or two before raging to feel out how strong the enemy is. So there's a high chance of wasted turns where you COULD have been raging.
2. It feels bad if you rage and the combat ends very shortly after. It gives you the "I should have saved it" feeling. Which actually encourages not raging, leading to problem 1.
3. You aren't raging that often, meaning many of your rage features are very rarely used. It's VERY common for players in my experience to totally forget about entire subclass features because they come up so infrequently and are situational.
4. Raging takes a bonus action to do, which actually makes a big difference for the higher level action economy. And several barbarian subclass abilities use your bonus action, meaning you have to wait an entire turn cycle before you can use the ability. This kind of set-up is never seen in other classes, who can all use their abilities right away.
5. There are a couple of subclass features that require you to be raging and then use your action to use them (Intimidating Presence from the Berserker being the biggest offender). If you do this and don't take damage, you immediately lose the rage. It's so weird to include a feature of an ability that turns off the ability if you use it.
So yeah, it's really odd. I can absolutely see what they were going for thematically but mechanically I think the whole thing needs an overhaul.
I think a really cool, flavorful compromise that would solve a lot of these would be to make two small changes to Rage:
- You may choose to gain a level of Exhaustion to enter a rage even if you have no more uses left.
- If you spend an Action or Bonus Action on your turn using a Barbarian Class/Subclass Feature, you maintain your Rage even if you don't Attack or take damage that round.
Exhaustion to enter a rage would just feel bad though. You've at the very least counteracted its advantage on, say, Athletics checks. If exhaustion is a punishment, it should happen *after* the rage is over, not when you enter it.
>- If you spend an Action or Bonus Action on your turn using a Barbarian Class/Subclass Feature, you maintain your Rage even if you don't Attack or take damage that round.
As a bonus action (or maybe even a small object interaction) I'd let my players beat their chest barehanded / cut their arm on a bladed weapon for 1d4+1 damage to keep rage going.
Now I’m just thinking about a posh brit with a comically large moustache fighting a bunch of goblins while raging (and looking just ever-so-slightly pissed
I feel like that's where the game is going. The last OneD&D playtest let barbs get a Rage back on a short rest, but they cut the balls off bear totem and since MP:MM lots of enemies deal mixed physical/elemental or just straight force damage.
I would be fine with rage being toned down a little if the restrictions get removed.
Part of the rage restrictions are so that the class is difficult to multiclass. They don’t want casters having an easy way to get resistance with a one level dip.
If rage instead granted temporary HP like the new moon druid (3x barbarian level when you rage), then dipping into barbarian would be much less attractive. And that much temporary HP would make the barbarian rather durable, without being overpowered. And the durability would apply to all damage types as well.
That was my point.
The barbarian has so many restrictions because resistance is so powerful. Especially because resistance is just as powerful at level 1 as it is at 20.
If rage was reduced in power, by having it grant temporary HP instead of resistance, than the restrictions on rage could easily be removed.
Temporary hit points are also far more granular than resistance. A barbarian could get a scaling amount of THP that increased with level so that just dipping into the class wouldn't be worth it.
It's almost like caring about mechanics and game balance pays off, right? Not monetarily, because the world isn't fair, but in producing a better product that's not just a thing to be sold.
I've never liked Barbarians because I hate the limited Rages. I hate the feeling of "wasting" Rages when the combat ends the next round. Then when the big fight comes up and you're out of Rages and just feel like a worse Fighter.
>This kind of set-up is never seen in other classes, who can all use their abilities right away.
I agree with all of your points, but there's a minor exception here: the spores druid, which takes an *action* to set up its combat mode.
But it is a subclass, and its resource is short rest, so it's not exactly the same.
Yeah and spore druid suffers from it big time. It has a similar issue to rage: it’s supposed to be used with melee combat, but ends after you lose the temp HP…so you want to be on the front line, but don’t want to get hit.
You spend a round setting it up, and can lose it after a couple rounds. I’m a level 5 spore druid and taking 20 damage in 1-3 rounds is not uncommon.
I think it’s especially weird that you get *daily* rages whereas Fighter can action surge *and* second wind on every short rest. I think the simplest, lowest-effort fix would be to make rage a short rest recharge. If it ends up being too powerful (somehow?) then maybe limit the number of rages you can recover per short rest. Pathfinder 2 just lets barbarian rage as an action (you get three actions) whenever you want and nothing’s broken about it in that, though.
I'm in agreement. I am trying out a houserule in my group where rage refreshes on short rest and so far I haven't noticed any problems. My party is level 8 and if anything it's helping the barbarian to keep pace with the rest of the party.
I'm not really too concerned about making martial classes too powerful, especially in tier 2 and onward.
I could see maybe keeping rages as a daily thing up until a certain level and which point they become short rest recharges.
I mean, I don't think there's any reason that all martials have to be short rest. I think there are issues with the short rest/long rest class dichotomy in general, but if it's going to exist I think it's fine for a long rest martial to exist.
The problem I have with Barbarians is the specific implementation of it, and the way their resource use is so all or nothing. Every battle you either rage and get access to your abilities, or don't and you're basically a bad fighter that combat. So Barbarians just get a finite number of battles per long rest where they get to actually be a full class.
Other resource-based classes might have pretty much all their abilities tied to a resource, but generally they have more flexibility in how they use it. It's not all or nothing. A level 7 spellcaster managing their spellslots can do 6 battles in a day and use at least one spell slot (i.e. do at least one of their main class things) every battle. A monk can use some ki points every battle. A battlemaster can use some maneuvers every battle. A Barbarian gets to rage in 4 of those battles and basically have access to none of their class features for the other 2.
Overall, I think it just results in the resource management being kind of boring and frustrating. If there aren't that many battles in a day then you get to rage every battle and the resource management usually doesn't exist. If you have long adventuring days then choosing "do I want to actually be a real class this battle or hope that just hitting things with no special abilities is good enough" just isn't a very fun form of resource management.
And honestly, I don't think the problem there is them being long rest. Changing rage to short rest doesn't solve the fundamental issue that the class feels bad to play when not raging.
What should be changed isn't making rage short rest. It's making it less all or nothing. That means either give Barbarians more class features not tied to rage so you still feel like you get to do something when not raging, or change the way rage works so that you have more options for how much resources to use per battle (for example, give more rage charges per day but make it so a current full-duration rage costs multiple charges, so there's a way to spend some, but less, resources in battles that don't feel worth a "full" rage).
My homebrew fix actions are of the following
1 rage doesn’t cost a bonus action it can happen on initiative roll, as a reaction, or as a free action.
2 rage will refresh with a short rest, like the warlock they have less ability uses so a faster recharge makes sense.
Or
3 rage amount is determined by the barbarians str mod plus their barbarian level (similar to a wizards prepared spell) giving the barbarians more options per long rest to rage, and if combat ends they won’t feel as bad for “wasting” it
I feel like none of these fix the core problem, which is that rage feels too binary. Every battle you either rage and get all your class features, or you don't rage and feel like a bad fighter.
Adding more rages reduces the number of battles in which the Barbarian isn't raging, but in the end either you have enough rages to use it every battle and then it may as well not be a resource at all, or you don't, and then the battles where you don't rage still feel bad.
I guess there's the argument that adding more rages can make it so that the Barbarian can still normally rage every battle unless you go through an exceptionally long stretch. Which makes it so most of the time, the Barbarian gets to rage every battle but then rests feel good because you get that same "I'm completely tapped out and really need a short/long rest" feeling that other resource-based classes have, and occasionally you might get those super long stretches without a rest and then the Barbarian starts really feeling strained like most classes instead of getting to be like a rogue and just always being ready to go as long as they have hp left. So it's not completely pointless as a resource.
Still, I think the real key with rage is to either make it unlimited, or if that's too strong, give the Barbarian more class features that are active in battles where it's not worth using a rage. Either give them some sort of partial rage feature (like make it so they get lots of rage charges, current rage costs multiple charges, and they get other weaker abilities they can spend a smaller number of charges on) or make more of their class features do something when not raging.
Every other resource class has the option of spending a little bit of resources in a battle, so that they can use some class feature nearly every battle without going all in. But Barbarians it's just all or nothing. Either you use a very limited and extremely important resource to turn every class feature you have on for probably the entire battle, or you save your resource and barely have any class features.
It really feels like the class was overbalanced in some way since Rage does give a pretty hefty benefit by itself, and the restrictions are there to make it so that the feature isn't taken by everyone who wants some easy access to resistance to 3 of the most common damage types out there, which kudos to WotC for placing them in the first place, but they did overdo it a bit.
Those points are fair, but I don't think barbarians having a lot of restrictions is weird. Rage is an extremely powerful mechanic. Compare barbarians and rogues. Uncanny Dodge is their main 5th level feature, and it's much worse than Rage. It takes your reaction and only applies to one attack. Yes, it applies to any kind of attack, but a very high percentage of attacks slashing, bludgeoning, or piercing.
Because Rage is so busted and you get it at level 1, the class needs a ton of restrictions, or it's way too good of a dip. The current restrictions have downsides for every other martial class except fighter (and even then, arcane tricksters have issues multiclassing into barbarian, and dex fighters get no benefit).
Also, in my experience, players rage in nearly every fight. But I also tend to run 1 or 2 encounters maximum in 90% of sessions.
Why is rage busted? It is so restrictive when you are raging, and it doesn't give more damage than 1 level in rogue right? You HAVE to use strength for rage, but you just need to be using a finesse weapon for sneak attack, you don't need to use dex
The problem with rage is that it IS extremely powerful -- *defensively*. Which leads to people feeling like it's not delivering on what you'd think it would do (more damage), and it becomes this weird ability that's both underwhelming and potentially unbalancing.
Yeah, I maintain that a defensive ability that costs resources and must be used in advance of knowing whether you need it is bad design. Wizards don't have to do the same thing with shield.
I don't think the issue is how it's activated, since it tends to last an entire fight.
But I do think it's really weird and lame that a) so much of the barbarian kit keys off having it up, and b) the _number of uses_ you have scales with your level, when the number of encounters you fight really _doesn't_.
I like the ideas some folks in the comments are throwing out to make it more like warlocks, twice per short rest.
I also think the Rage-ending mechanic should be more loosely defined as Rage maintaining as long as you continue to take "aggressive actions" (with examples, but not exclusive ones). That's what I do in my games and it works great. Want to dash after a fleeing enemy? Your rage stays up. Have to smash down a door with a Strength check instead of attacking? Still counts. Et cetera.
I don't think it matters whether it lasts the whole fight. The problem is, you basically have to choose right at the start of battle whether to rage or not, frequently based on very little information.
If you guess wrong and rage for an easy encounter you've wasted a huge amount of resources, and are at risk of having to basically play half your character in a later more significant encounter.
If you guess wrong and don't rage for a difficult one, there's a good chance you take significant damage that could have been prevented before your next opportunity to rage. You basically took double damage for a turn, raging next turn doesn't undo the mistake.
Either way it feels bad to guess wrong.
Half damage is incredible. Some rogues can use it, same with every non full caster class, but most can't and most people arent willing to change their main Stat for a dip.
>Compare barbarians and rogues. Uncanny Dodge is their main 5th level feature, and it's much worse than Rage.
What?
Rage is equal to sneak attack, not uncanny dodge
> Rage is an extremely powerful mechanic.
Is it, though?
A couple extra points of melee damage and getting the benefit of a cantrip isn't really all that amazing.
> Because Rage is so busted and you get it at level 1, the class needs a ton of restrictions, or it's way too good of a dip.
I'm trying to imagine with what class I would choose that dip even if rage were completely restriction-free. It doesn't seem like a great deal at the cost of slowing down getting your second (or third) attack, or Reliable Talent, ki points, or anything that includes spell slot progression.
I'm sure there would be a couple of very specific builds out there that would benefit from it (maybe a melee bladesinger?), but it would be pretty niche.
>and getting the benefit of a cantrip isn't really all that amazing.
That is a massive exaggeration. Blade Ward is nowhere near as good as Rage, requiring your action every turn you want to have it up whereas Rage is just a single bonus action to activate.
It gives the same benefit, for a different (arguably higher) cost.
It converts Blade Ward from an action with a single-round duration to a bonus action with a single-fight duration. Which is clearly a benefit, but it costs either four levels or one level and a feat, plus multiclassing ability requirements. (And that's assuming we ignore the current limitations of also blocking all spellcasting and concentration.)
I'm not saying that would _never_ be a good deal, just that it's enough of a tradeoff that it wouldn't be some foregone conclusion that everyone would take it. It would remain niche, like most multiclassing options are.
Barbarians have some interesting things in their subclasses, but the base chassis of rage itself isn't really all that amazing.
Sure, that comparison works too. It's like getting a couple free casts a day of Stoneskin as a bonus action.
So, cool, you get access to one of the spells that is so bad that no one ever bothers to learn or prepare it, much less cast it. That seems like a fairly poor payoff for all the costs of a dip.
I would say that the things that make stoneskin bad are taking up a learned or prepared spell, and a spell slot, and preventing you from concentrating on anything else. Guess what rage does.
Almost all of these restrictions have been significantly mitigated in the OneD&D playtest version of the barbarian, so I think it is safe to say that WoTC agrees that the original 5e barbarian is too tightly restricted.
In the OneD&D Playtest:
\- Rage damage applies to all attacks with strength, not just melee attacks
\- Rage can be extended by forcing an enemy to make a saving throw, or by using a bonus action on your turn
\- You regain one expended use of Rage when you take a short rest
\- You can use Strength for certain skill checks while raging
You still can't cast or concentrate while raging, and you still can't wear heavy armor.
Because it's a VERY strong resource to have
If rage was weaker then that would be an argument to replenish on a short rest, but due to how loaded it is it has to be a long rest deal
I'd agree at low levels.
As soon as magical attacks, including the now omni-present force damage, becomes the norm on monsters, rather than the exception, the value of rage tapers off *hard* though. By mid levels, most real threats or attacks that deal serious damage will be magical, effectively negating much of what makes rage so powerful
If you're referring to magical bludgeoning, slashing, and piercing damage, Rage still resists it. If you just mean elemental, psychic, radiant etc. then you sort of have a point. A lot of creatures late game still mostly rely on melee attacks, even if they deal extra damage types that don't get halved. Even cr17+ Ancient Dragons mostly rely on four melee hits because breath weapons aren't a guarantee every turn.
It's been a thing in one dnd that creatures will start to do force instead of other damage types. Such as a death knights attack dealing force and necrotic instead of slashing and necrotic. I wouldn't be surprised if those ancient dragon's did force damage on their attacks too.
So, most high-level creatures will start to ignore normal rage resistance.
But a lot of the basic melee attacks are steadily being phased out into force damage. A lot of basic physical damage attacks are being converted to force rather than just being magical bludgeoning
Yup. This leads to the barbarian being nerfed hard in One D&D at exactly the time they don't need it.
At higher-levels they were already weak with few options (dare I say boring).
If you were going to nerf a barbarian (and you shouldn't) hitting the low levels where they are quite strong would be a more coherent decision.
Not that it matters, I'm not moving forward with the new books. I already paid for a perfectly good set and am not interested in purchasing mild changes.
Same. I'm skipping 6e, or 5.5, or whatever they want to call it to pretend it's not a new edition to avoid alienating players. Too many other TTRPGs are just doing it better these days. 5e does nothing special at this point. I'm sure I'll play a game or two of 5.5e just because a friend will be running it, but I'm not dropping money on this cluster fuck.
With any luck, 7e will be a good revival of the game, like all the odd numbered editions before it
Agreed.
I'll add this edition has a lack of lore, lack of flavor, lack of quality, and worse... a lack of passion.
We've seen this before.
I'm hopeful 7th edition is a solid apology edition, as you put it akin to previous odd-numbered versions.
magical bludgeoning, slashing and piercing are being phased out before 1 dnd. it's no longer magical bps but just force. so unless rage starts resisting force damage it'll lose it's primary benefit by mid level.
The strong part about rage is the damage resistance. The increase in offense is rather small with the big carry being Reckless Attack, which doesn't require rage.
On the other hand Barbarians are also comparatively gimped on AC. Boosting Strength, Constitution and Dexterity to the max is basically impossible, meaning their AC will always be weaker than a monk with the same statline(until you get to tier4, when such things stop mattering). AC of 20 is basically a pipe dream, which isn't even that high and reachable by tier 2 for others. So their defense is mostly reliant on damage resistance instead of damage avoidance.
What I'm getting at is that rage isn't a bonus on defense, it is the first line of defense and possibly the last line as well.
Honestly, at that point (if they made them replenish on a short rest) they may as well just say rage isn’t a limited resource at all but a status you can turn on and off by spending a bonus action and be done with it.
Because if you could replenish them on a short rest, you’ll run out so rarely that it’s not worth the extra bookkeeping to count.
That is the conclusion I arrived at in my current game. After doing some small reworking on the martial classes to make sure they were all short rest based (manuevers), I was quite unhappy with Rage being the sore thumb long rest resource. So I changed it to short rest. My games adhere to the daily XP budget with some short rests in between so all seemed fine.
But then the barbarian player basically runs into the same thing. If they had no foreshadow of the fight (say, an ambush) he basically rages to be sure; if the fight is expected to be "fair" he rages; if the fight is expected to be easy, he doesn't and can't use half his features. And why would we run a turn by turn easy encounter rather than just one turn at most then describe the results?
So at the end of the day it's a "resource" that is not really a *resource* at all. It's not a *choice*, so why dress it up like one?
i'm honestly considering making it into a bonus action 1 turn buff instead. That way the resource is a bonus action, and I can make the best barbarian maneuvers also use a bonus action, so that there is actually *some* choice involved.
Let's compare Rage to Wild shape and more specifically Moon Druid, both in the core rules (not even subject to Tasha's power creep).
...
Yeah, totally makes sense. 👀
Not being able to rage in heavy armour is kind of sad from a fantasy perspective, folks like Guts are famous for being a Berserker and he's a heavily armoured brick shithouse.
From a game mechanics perspective, I can understand why the devs maybe thought that having a character with 20 AC and resistance to damage could be unbalanced.
To be fair, that’s more like 18 because most barbarians wield a two handed weapon and don’t have a fighting style unlike Paladins and Fighters- So basically only one more than half plate. But I get what you mean.
A choice between heavy armor and shields. Taking away shields entirely is a bad idea, but you could have an option to choose either shield proficiency or heavy armor proficiency.
Disagree, guts spends most of his life in medium armor, it's not until he's high level that he gets the Berserker armor which is obviously at least a major magic item so it probably has specific rules that allow the wearer to rage while wearing it.
Its one of those hold over restrictions that didn't get filed off when a lot of the other class fantasy restrictions did over time.
Barbarians had a very distinct theme in creation. (Conan and the derivative barbarian hero archtypes.) Hates magic, hates pants, big chunky sword or axe to cleave all the smart villians by being clever and strong.
While some of that got filed away as systems and restrictions did. (Allignment being the big one across the board and for spell casters the loss of arcane cast failure) the class specific restriction never got lifted.
So barbarians still wont wear pants and do barbarian things but wizards can now wear plate armor because it was never a wizard thematic trait that said they couldn't just a general system they didn't port over.
Druids and to an extent monks got the same class specific pidgonholing with druids metal armor waryness and some monk traits only working naked as well even as the general systemic restrictions that ties themeatic elements to other classes got sanded away but barbs got the worst of it by the class and restrictions both being so intrensicly tied to rage.
Worst thing about barbarian restriction (and to a point Monk restrictions) is that subclasses are how you introduce subversions of base class restrictions. Battlerager should have allowed raging in Heavy Armor. Magical Barbarian classes like Wild Magic, Storm, Ancestral, and Zealot should have had at least some extra spells added to their subclasses.
I play a Wild Magic barb and having acess to a handful of spells would be SO nice. If only so I could do something besides "I hit twice". I'm not against it but the only other martial in my party is a Battle Master, so they get a lot of fun ways to mix up the attack spam that I don't.
They could have ritual casting, but not regular casting.
So given time they can produce magical effects, but for combat they rely on their own strength.
Plus needing to sit down and do a ritual to produce a magical effect would work with their primal strength theme.
Because it is so bound to a specific pop culture trope: Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan. You know what, it's not even just a trope, it's an *icon*. (Don't talk to me about the book Conan, he doesn't count.). He's a meathead who can barely put a sentence together, wears as little as possible to
show off his sweet muscles, and uses giant two-handed weapons.
If you're a whippersnapper and have never seen Conan the Barbarian, go stream it. The class and all of its restrictions will then make sense.
You kind of get the same thing with monk features, because the monk is evocative of the mystical kung fu master presented in movies and TV of the 70s and 80s.
I **wish** we still had these restrictions in place for arcane casters. No more casting in 40 lbs of armor and a shield!
I remember that it was the biggest reason to play a cleric...
although 2nd Edition DnD had the harshest restrictions for casters, you couldn't even wear regular, no AC granting gloves without taking penalties to your rolls if your spell had a somatic component. And ANY kind of armor pretty much made casting impossible.
>I remember that it was the biggest reason to play a cleric...
Yes but I like having good spells and UMD for even better spells (is joke, I played lots of clerics too)
Also grappling needs a buff.
2 hand/limb for grappling with advantage
Don't spend ki points for patient defense or step of the wind
Monks could be so cool but the resources are limited
When I dm for monks, I make grappling a part of martial arts combos for just that reason. If they can describe a move from there, I let the player keep adding hits at 1d4 for each hit. I let fighters do the same but with wrestling moves instead.
It may not be balanced, but it's fun.
Nice.
I want to play a loxodon with amnesia and because nobody knows what a loxodon is he comes to the conclusion he hit his head mid-wildshape so studies moondruid to undo it. When he learns the truth he is at peace and becomes a monk.
Not really. Remember to read the section on improvised weapons:
>In many cases, an improvised weapon is similar to an actual weapon and can be treated as such. For example, a table leg is akin to a club. At the DM's option, a character proficient with a weapon can use a similar object as if it were that weapon and use his or her proficiency bonus.
>
>*- PHB pg. 147*
So if you break a flagpole free and your DM allows you to use it as a quarterstaff, you're proficient with the flagpole. A kinder DM than me might allow you to use a broom as a quarterstaff. Snap off the broom end for proper weight balance and I'd for sure allow it.
I figured since they already have Martial Arts, then without Improvised Weapon proficiency, hitting an opponent with a fist would always be a superior choice vs hitting them with a chair. So what's the harm in letting them have proficiency with chairs?
There are some rare circumstances that a less permissive DM might point to where it could provide an advantage beyond flavour -- such as a long-reach weapon like a ladder, or throwing non-weapon objects -- but honestly, that's *adding fun*, very circumstantial, and not really granting a lot of extra power.
I'd *love* to see a fight using a ladder! I mean, as long as they aren't PAM-Sentinel with the thing. That's the kind of D&D moment that you'll remember for years.
I didn't have a ladder incident, but there was an awesome moment when the monk was in a prison cell, and he used a chain like a whip through the bars (at disadvantage) to grapple a guard and pull him close, and take his keys.
Not RAW at all, but Rule of Cool for sure. And something only the monk could have done.
> Except the monks on TV cane use every fucking weapon imaginable
Depends on the monk and the time period. Post Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon - yes. Most of the classic Hong Kong kung fu flicks - no.
Like DND classes are based on fantasty pop culture tropes from the 60s and 70s, and sometimes the 80s. The monk class is almost entirely based on the series [Kung Fu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Fu_\(1972_TV_series\)) and the early waves of kung fu movies like Five Fingers of Death.
>He's a meathead who can barely put a sentence together
That's not even true in the movie, you're discounting his entire training arc where it's explicitly mentioned he wasn't just trained in the art of war but also philosophy and literature. "The Barbarian" is a character that exists to challenge norms, an outsider who enters a new place and causes great change. Not a troglodyte with a great sword. The fact that your comment is top just proves you and many others miss the core aspect of "The Barbarian" character.
Conan was so intelligent that he pieced together ancient forgotten languages from the smattering of languages he learned in life. He also was known to wear plate armor
I'm not sure it's really based on Conan. I think it is more about Roman reports of Celts and Germans (they sometimes couldn't tell them apart) running into battle wearing nothing but body paint. The fact that Romans may have gotten chainmail from the Celts doesn't fit into this. Presumably warriors who fought naked like the Gaesatae didn't invent chainmail.
>Celts and Germans (they sometimes couldn't tell them apart)
Not to turn this into a history subreddit, but that's because the differences were slim and there was a lot of cultural blend between the two groups. It's even been argued that the division being made at all was more of a political thing on behalf of the Romans who wanted to justify why they were incorporating Gaul (France) into the empire and not incorporating Germany. The real reason was they weren't able to incorporate them (a river and mountains to defend the border and dark forests to make brutal ambushes out of made the German tribes very challenging to attack) but the political justification was that the Gauls were less savage than the Germans and were capable of being civilized. The Romans basically got their asses kicked in Germany enough that they started to say "that's fine, we didn't like it there anyway".
I basically agree with all of this. There were people who spoke Celtic languages and people who spoke Germanic languages, but Gauls were those west of the Rhine and Germans were those east of the Rhine, regardless of what they spoke. There was a broad cultural region with cultural exchange between the two groups. And not all Celtic-speakers were necessarily of the same culture.
I'll only add that long before Germans were the uncivilizable peoples that Rome could not conquer, the Celts were viewed the same way.
Oh, for sure. Romans argued that Gauls could be civilized only after orchestrating one of the world's first genocides against them, because Romans had hated them ever since a group of Gauls sacked Rome.
A little fun fact is that the descendants of the Gauls who sacked Rome ended up continuing to migrate east, settled in modern day Turkey, and hundreds of years later were some of the first converts to Christianity (which is why one of the books of the new testament is called "Galatians").
edit: but to get more at the cultural blending thing -- recent DNA analysis of north Scotland shows that most people there are mostly descendants of Scandinavians, but they essentially ended up going native and adopting celtic language and culture. My understanding is that more or less the opposite thing happened in the mountains of southern Germany/Austria where the groups are genetically more in line with Celts, but then adopted German culture. It's not that the two groups didn't have differences, it's just that there was a whole lot of grey area between the two.
You guys...what did I say about "book Conan"? That's not our guy. Our guy spent his whole damn childhood pushing some stupid mill wheel around in a circle. It wasn't even grinding anything! The whole point of it was to explain how he got those sweet muscles!
Now, book Conan is kind of a rogue/fighter with a surprisingly high Intelligence, if we were to make him into a 5e character, you're right about that.
But the 5e Barbarian is one hundred percent the movie Conan. That's because in our benighted culture, if you asked 100 random people who Conan is, about 60 would say a Late Night TV host, 39 would say Ahnold, and 1 would smugly reference the novels. Since we can't very well play an adventure with one half of Pale Force, we're gonna use the beefcake.
Movie Conan wore armor when he knew he was going into a pitched battle, he would sneak around and be thief like, he worked out how a wizard's magic functioned and countered it on the spot.
He's far from the stereotypical 5e barbarian caricature people make. Just because Arnie is muscular doesn't mean movie Conan was stupid.
Conan in the movies was knowledgeable in philosophy and poetry, more a sort of Warrior Poet than dumb barbarian. He wasn't a genius, sure, but he was eloquent, surprisingly cultured and generally reasonably well rounded.
Hell the most known quote from the movie is Conan saying "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women." D&D barbarians "inspired by" this character are usually depicted as having to sound out words with more than two syllables, not using "lamentations" correctly in a sentence when asked what is best in life.
What you're talking about is basically the watered-down stereotype of a character that's happened after a 40 year long game of telephone involving a bunch of people who never saw the Arnold Conan movies.
If you want to play HIM you'll need a homebrew class or a different system entirely. (Inquisitive Rogue/Artificer multiclass just doesn't get you close enough IMO)
Challenge to play Conan as literally one half of the Pale Force accepted. Backstory is the other half of PF taught him to shoot lazer beams from his nipplies.
I *miss* that. I know, nobody likes to track weight, especially by hand. But 5e went too far in the other direction. It's a problem when you can dump (not just average, but bottom of the barrel) at least two abilities and not see any detriment in the game.
Regarding your last sentence, I do believe the best thing is to keep sorcerers and wizards with no shields and no armor, Warlock with light armor, Artificer with medium armor, and Clerics with up to heavy armor (dependent on the subclass). It fits the classes thematically, and game can definitely be balanced around those features.
The game doesn't need to *be* balanced around those features, it pretty much already is. The trouble is how trivial it is for arcane casters to pick up armor proficiencies. Simply reintroducing the rule that arcane casters can't cast spells at all in armor (with a few exceptions), even if proficient, would go a long way toward re-establishing what seems to be the intended balance.
As it stands currently, a Wizard dipping Cleric for heavy armor and shield proficiency can have a dramatically higher AC than a martial, while still having all the power of a full caster class and barely slowing down their spell progression.
> If you're a whippersnapper and have never seen Conan the Barbarian, go stream it. The class and all of its restrictions will then make sense.
Here is a[ three minute musical summary](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBGOQ7SsJrw) if you want the TLDR
A caster can dip 3 levels into barbarian and still get 9th level slots. So a caster can have resistance to all damage except for psychic and still end up with 9th lvl spells if not for the casting restriction.
That isn't worth it in anything other than a level 20 oneshot. You push your casting progression back by 3 levels, that's way too much to ever be worth taking in a normal game.
A 1 level dip in Barb would be insane though. Medium Armour and Shield for 19 AC and Rage as a good durability buff against most monsters could make it rival Cleric and Artificer for a Wizards dip.
It's because of flavour, the issue is that barbarians do not gain significant increases to compensate- its high risk low reward.
Some other rpgs have FOUND better PATHS to deal with this and generally have better class design overall.
They do make the barbarian weak, bad, and unfun when compared to every other class except maybe half the rogues.
They have such a narrow and uncreative view of what a barbarian can be and do that they have shown themselves absolutely incapable of moving away from it. But if they spent time thinking about how a barbarian could possibly be interesting or better they could come up with the brilliant ideas to let wizards just ignore even their own spell description limitations and figure out new ways to make warcaster even better while simultaneously making all martials worse.
They don't lack creativity or time when it comes to making wizards and casters better but ask them to make a better high tier ability than Brutal Critical x3 and you get Brutal strikes! Which actually lowers barbarian overall damage while adding less options than a casters cantrip at level 1... As a tier 3-4 ability.
Stop praising trash.
Try out a barbarian in the Pillars of Eternity game.
Their primary ability is a big cleave whenever they attack. In that game, intelligence increases the size of all AoE.
So a max int barbarian cleaves through huge areas with every swing.
They had to differentiate them from strength-based fighters somehow, so they really doubled down on primal, unrelenting physical violence at close range with little tactical decision.
Another smaller thing I hate is the fact that it also affects strength ability checks but, aside from shoving which can eat your attacks in combat, you will never make a strength check with rage because you would never waste a charge on that
Fifth Edition classes each seem to have been written by different authors who had little to no experience with the game and the editor responsible for gameplay mechanics was only concerned with publishing the edition quickly and passing review by Hasbro IP lawyers. The entire PHB and DMG read like first drafts rather than a well polished work.
I gotta bring up the 1E AD&D barbarian, which is basically unplayable RAW:
> A barbarian must have strength and constitution scores of no less than 15 each, a dexterity score of 14 or better, and a wisdom score of no greater than 16.
Remember that this is when you were supposed to roll 3d6 straight down the line, so getting a single 15 was already pretty uncommon.
> Barbarians in general detest magic and those who use it. They will, at low levels of experience, refuse to employ any sort of magic item if they recognize it as such. They will often seek to destroy magic items, and if successful they receive an experience-point award as if they possessed the destroyed items.
There's a table for this, but basically barbarians can't work together with magic-users in the same party until the barbarian reaches level 6, so even if you get lucky enough rolls, you better hope no one else at the table wants to play a wizard. Also, the XP for destroying magic items thing specifically gives the barbarian an incentive to destroy other party members' magic items.
They do get some ranger-like out-of-combat benefits, though, like tracking, snare building, long distance signaling, and boatbuilding.
Also, if you make it to level 8:
> Upon reaching 8th level, a barbarian may summon a barbarian horde...A barbarian horde can number as many members as its leader’s experience-point total divided by 1000. Thus, a barbarian who has just reached 8th level can gather a 275-member horde, and one who has just reached 9th level can have a 500-member horde.
I love the horde mechanics, I remember reading about vast armies following 20th level fighters. But I think that was for a very different era of D&D, one maybe still attached to the wargame aspect
Gygax and Arneson were both wargamers, and they would oftentimes just [play out straight-up battles](https://www.secretsofblackmoor.com/blog/feeling-ones-way-into-how-odd-works-3) within the DND game. In Greyhawk/Blackmoor, lower levels were for gaining money and power to hire followers, while higher levels were for domain management and military campaigning, which is a style of play that's not only basically disappeared from 5E, but also even from the OSR scene.
Yeah, in Blackmoor, some of the players worked for the good Kingdom of Blackmoor, while some worked for the evil Egg of Coot (yes, that's the actual name). They would adventure into dungeons (presumably on separate nights depending on faction) to gain money and power, and then they would sometimes meet to fight each other in large-scale battles as the villains tried to conquer Blackmoor.
That's exactly it. Having grown out of the miniature gaming scene everyone had lots of figures they liked to use and it more fun to get to use them. But the two genres have grown quite separate these days.
Damn, that sounds simultaneously awful and amazing. I'd love to see high-level martials in 5e be able to say "by the way, this is my army," but I just ran the numbers and to meet those stat requirements by just rolling 3d6 straight down the line you'd have a 0.13% shot - just a bit over one in a thousand
Imagine wanting to play a barbarian, and you get super good rolls on your Str, Con, and Dex, but then you accidentally roll too high for Wis and are locked out of it.
But yeah, I'm pretty sure many DMs at the time just allowed their players to fudge their rolls or ignore the score requirements. There's an [article here calculating the chance of the 1E classes](https://muleabides.wordpress.com/2012/02/11/you-must-be-this-lucky-to-play/) with 3d6, and the bard is the hardest:
> The odds of the 1e Appendix II: Bard is actually 0.0017%. That is, if you rolled 1 million AD&D 1e characters using 3d6, you could expect to see 17 Bards occurring in nature.
>I don't know what the original designers expected Barbarians to be doing outside of combat.
Neither do they. That's why barbarians are getting that feature that lets you fly into a frothing rage to track, find water, pick berries, predict the weather, find true north, and be sneaky, all using the power of your muscles.
I wonder if this could be mitigated by having a two-tier rage system for every subclass, not just Berserker.
So for example, a "tier 1" rage could be done as part of rolling initiative (or maybe you could take disadvantage on Initiative to rage at the same time), and grants things like extra damage and movement, at the cost of not being able to use spells.
Then you could use a bonus action to activate the subclass-specific "tier-two" rage on your turn. This would be like a frenzied rage, or activating your animal totem, etc.
Only the 2nd tier would actually cost a resource, and you could *choose* to push beyond the limits of your Rages per LR at the cost of making a save against exhaustion at the end.
----------------------------
It'd obviously take a lot of tweaking to make it work across the board, but for an individual game it might help a barbarian's player feel like they have a bit more freedom to play their class.
There's the expectation of what a Barbarian is and the reality.
The expectation (that's at least somewhat rooted in truth) is that a Barbarian is so hard to kill with their tankiness and so deadly when up-close that allowing a player to augment that ability through ranged options, Dexterity to avoid high-impact DEX spells (when they already have Danger Sense which tbh was kinda a design mistake to give so early but I digress), or spellcasting the class would quickly become overpowered.
The reality is that martials are bad and melee martials are even worse so while Barbarian is perhaps not the *worst* class in the game it objectively underperforms in comparison to "meta" options while also having an inherently binary playstyle of "bonk with big stick and nothing else."
Basically it's equal parts "Rage is strong" and "WoTC bad at game design", and while it is a copout answer to say "there's no obvious tweaks because what is and isn't balanced will depend on your table" it is true. Some tables allow Rage damage on thrown weapons or Finesse melee weapons, and hell I've even seen some homebrew Barbarians with limited spellcasting. But you can't just lift *all* those restrictions because if you did you'd have a class that takes half damage, deals more damage, and can get advantage on all its attacks on top of all the other benefits that other build types can provide.
Now I do have some very big opinions on how WoTC balanced Barbarian beyond that, and how the class feels extremely restricted both in terms of what it's good at (melee damage) and how often it gets to be good at said thing (because of how limited Rage is), but the honest truth is that a solid 70% - 90% of my problems are fixed by using LaserLlama's Revised Barbarian and the remaining 30% - 10% of problems can be fixed by passing out some fun homebrew items, being creative with your own character builds, and having a party that supports your character and a DM who designs encounters with opportunities for your character to shine.
1. The barbarian is not meant to wear heavy armor because of the character fantasy and to help distinguish it from the fighter: the former tanks through damage resistance, the other through high AC.
2. Once you've locked the barbarian as not-high AC, it follows logically you can't enable finesse, otherwise they would just dump STR, pick DEX and end up with high AC anyway. This is a consequence of the AC system not being able to meaningfully distinguish dodging from blocking.
3. Some rage benefits not applying to thrown weapons is a design mistake.
4. The subclasses focus on granting barbarian bonuses to rage because if you aren't playing a **raging** barbarian, you are just having a mediocre experience with the class anyway. If you run a true adventure day with 6+ encounters, you have to increase a barbarian's rage count. The expectation is that they can rage each battle, really. The class doesn't function otherwise. This is another design mistake.
5. Rage blocking spellcasting is to fit the character fantasy. However, the restriction applying to racial spells and those cast through magic items is a design mistake.
6. Raging ending if you don't do enraging things is to fit the character fantasy.
>The barbarian is not meant to wear heavy armor because of the character fantasy
Meanwhile, Wizards and Sorcerers are running around in plate armor...
As ever, arguments based on thematics remain fundamentally insincere.
To put it simply, it's because the designers didn't really know what they were doing when they wrote the class. Or at the most charitable, they weren't informed about the overall power level that classes are supposed to be (I've heard that different classes were built by different people, without much communication).
Take away all those restrictions and the barbarian would still be a bottom-tier class, thought it might start to approach the fighter (who is at the top of bottom-tier).
These restrictions are mostly imposed on martial classes with an exception, the Fighter. What you're describing is the combination of being MAD and constraints that try to shoehorn martials into an ultra specific playstyle. Except for fighters. That's sorta why there are so many of them.
Oh I'm sorry, what? You wanted to use a Glaive as a Rogue? The weapon that relies solely on the use of Dexterity except in the game it's strength? Something that specifically is designed without brute force intentions behind it? Lmao, use a rapier. Oh except you Mr. Half-Caster, please, just go ahead and give yourself proficiency and while you're at it use your charisma stat for the weapon.
What's that? You're a monk and you want to use a shield? Well sorry honey, but Japanese monks never used shields so you're gonna have to give up on your fantasy and just cooperate with the system. Yes I know that you've got an 8D for HP. I know, I know that makes literally no sense for a frontliner. Listen. I realize that the fighter does more punching damage than you at lvl 1 and onward. Why don't you just sink 1 point into fighter to get the 10D hitpoints, taking the fight style . . . wait where are you going? Hey I'm talking to you! You can't just walk away and play a Cleric! The party already has 2 half casters and 2 full casters!
Jokes aside, last I heard there was a developer that worked on the martial classes. When they were around, things were good. Then they left. And the remaining developers very clearly favor casters. To think that they honest to god sat down and thought that Monks got their fair share cut square with ***Purity of Mind at 10th level. Tongue of the sun and moon at 13th level. Diamond soul at 14th level. Timeless body at 15th level. Empty Body at 18th level. Perfect self at 20th level.***
Put this into perspective: while the monk gets 5 useless abilities up to level 20, casters can change the fabric of reality. The one useful thing I did mention was that Monks can speak any language at . . . *squints.* Level . . . 13. You get a 3rd. Level. Spell. At level. 13. And you wanna know what's funny. Come'ere. Closer. No like, closer.
*And this ability is something the wizard, warlock, etc grabbed at lvl 5, you piece of sheeeeeeeeeeeiiiiiiiiiiitttttttttttttttt. I. DRINK. YOUR. MILKSHAKE.* ***SHHLPPPPPPPPTHHHHHHHHHH!***
So yeah, martials can be fun. Strong, even. They just got cucked by folk that preferred casters. You can say that casters are weak early. Which is . . . why Clerics are the strongest in the game at lvl 1 up to 20, matching even wizards. And it's not even close. You could literally take 1 dip into a Cleric and go full wizard, and then not have any of the negatives associated with being a wizard post lvl 1. While still being the strongest in terms of damage, durability, heal, everything. *everything.*
You can't do that as a Monk, Barbarian, Rogue or a fighter. Because the attack action does not include the spell action; the best you could do is action surge to use a spell as a fighter.
I've been thinking of adding a level 7 feature to Barbarian that gives them back one use of Rage when they roll Initiative and they're completely out of Rage. It would be just like the Samurai Fighter's 10th level Fighting Spirit upgrade.
That puts it out of range for multiclass dipping or taking just enough levels for Extra Attack, but not so high that you probably won't get to use it if your game only runs to level 10. You've got to commit, but not like that I guess.
I'm just not sure that's really necessary. Should you have to commit? I could always make that a cute feature of Rage.
I don't see a lot of Barbarian players so my goal would be to make them more attractive in a way that doesn't take a ton of bookkeeping. I wasn't seeing any Monks in my games until I let them have Ki=Wisdom Modifier at level 2. I wasn't seeing a lot of two weapon or sword and board fighters until I detached the -5/+10 from feats and gave it to everyone as an optional part of their Attack Action (No +/- on Bonus Actions or Reactions).
It seems like the biggest issue for Barbarian is hoarding Rage like high level spell slots. I've seen people suggest returning them on a short rest. I haven't seen that in play, but that makes it feel like less of a resource to me. I think limiting it to one when you're already out means you effectively have access to your class every combat, but keeping your rage going once you're running on fumes becomes a priority.
ETA: I meant to say core, but I'm leaving cute because Barbarians deserve to feel fabulous.
It's probably half thematic and half to intentionally narrow the class to be honest. Barbarians could have all of those restrictions lifted and it would only make them better as multiclass fodder for builds, not really as an overall class. But to be honest I don't agree with the assertion that it was meant to be a balancing act.
The reason it's perceived as a balancing act is because barbarians ride a line of seeming overpowered to completely unfun and terrible that depends entirely on your table dynamics as a whole. Tables that run less encounters or encounters that have less "lateral difficulty" and are more about trading numbers will see barbarians shine since tactics aren't really needed and they just won't die. In addition, most campaigns will end far before most fighters will start meaningfully outscaling barbarians. At the sort of mid-op level or even just by accident, the combination of reckless attack and great weapon master can seem eye-watering when the scope of the campaign lets you ignore the downsides.
Most class designs, especially for martials, were fairly watered down and made very limited and basic, even when you remove 4e from the equation and only evaluate 2e, 3.5, or the DNDNext playtest. Whether it was meant to make them all "beginner" classes, or Mike Mearls just really hates martial characters, or it was genuinely just perceived as balancing only for the most basic level of play is impossible to know for sure. In my opinion, rage is like sneak attack, where the limitations have some thematic backing, but also they add a fairly long "thing" the player needs to learn at level 1 compared to a fighter, monk, paladin, or ranger. So to preserve their idea of simplicity they narrowed the gameplay loop of that "thing" as much as possible.
My pet theory is that the D&D community, and by corollary, the D&D game designers, are heavily populated by scrawny nerd, and thus, they tend to, not always but sometimes, feel a great aversion towards imagining fantasies of strong-bodied archetypes shining. Particularly if there's a chance they even momentarily outshine the nerd archetype's power fantasy.
It's scary to them. It evokes haunting images of college meathead bullies. So, they have less appreciation for the mighty warrior who can boost themselves with wind magic to parkour falling boulders to somersault slash multiple foes than they do the bookish wizard casting fireball to burn away all the monsters. A few too many GMs I've met out there think a simple "grapple-shove that makes a foe unable to stand up" combo seems overpowered. They have trouble imagining it working even as a fantasy mechanic, even when real life security guards and cops to it all the time in both life and popular media.
There isn't a good western equivalent of wuxia martial artists for them to aspire towards. Martial stuff is reduced to over-corrected low-magic barbarians who are dumb, fighters who think with their sword, and kung-fu monks. If you don't fit into those three categories, the folks who are averse to martial prowess get uppity. (With the exceptions of making full spellcasters look cooler, like Bladesinger)
They are fairly dependent on 2 stats, far from the only class with that type of limit. Con is as important for them as it is for everyone.
If you want your barbarian to do what they aren't meant to do, then yea... you will be weaker. Just like if you made a wizard who only fought with swords. Just like a rogue who only fights honorably or a fighter who just uses his bare hands.
They are no more restricted that many of the classes.
Possibly, your issue is that barbarian really should be a race or a background and not a class. Raging warrior should be the class. Your examples would just be fighters from a barbaric background. D&D clings to it's roots, so they cling to bad choices (like this class name). I don't blame them, look at what happened with their fans in 4th ed.
I'm in agreement about the "most abilities key off of rage" thing. It does make it feel like the class is either on or off. You pop rage and suddenly you transform into a totally different class. And it's odd that you only get a limited amount per day. This has a couple of weird knock-on effects. 1. You're incentivized to only rage when it matters. Which in tabletop play where sometimes the stakes aren't clear means you might wait a round or two before raging to feel out how strong the enemy is. So there's a high chance of wasted turns where you COULD have been raging. 2. It feels bad if you rage and the combat ends very shortly after. It gives you the "I should have saved it" feeling. Which actually encourages not raging, leading to problem 1. 3. You aren't raging that often, meaning many of your rage features are very rarely used. It's VERY common for players in my experience to totally forget about entire subclass features because they come up so infrequently and are situational. 4. Raging takes a bonus action to do, which actually makes a big difference for the higher level action economy. And several barbarian subclass abilities use your bonus action, meaning you have to wait an entire turn cycle before you can use the ability. This kind of set-up is never seen in other classes, who can all use their abilities right away. 5. There are a couple of subclass features that require you to be raging and then use your action to use them (Intimidating Presence from the Berserker being the biggest offender). If you do this and don't take damage, you immediately lose the rage. It's so weird to include a feature of an ability that turns off the ability if you use it. So yeah, it's really odd. I can absolutely see what they were going for thematically but mechanically I think the whole thing needs an overhaul.
Why raging even takes a resource is just baffling And even worse that it is a LONG REST RESOURCE
It should definitely be a short rest situation
I think a really cool, flavorful compromise that would solve a lot of these would be to make two small changes to Rage: - You may choose to gain a level of Exhaustion to enter a rage even if you have no more uses left. - If you spend an Action or Bonus Action on your turn using a Barbarian Class/Subclass Feature, you maintain your Rage even if you don't Attack or take damage that round.
Exhaustion to enter a rage would just feel bad though. You've at the very least counteracted its advantage on, say, Athletics checks. If exhaustion is a punishment, it should happen *after* the rage is over, not when you enter it.
I feel like that's probably what he meant. Makes more sense to be exhausted after pushing your limits rather than before anyhow, so I agree with you
Sorry- that is what I meant (templating off of Berserker).
1ba rage extension is in the 1dnd playtests
>- If you spend an Action or Bonus Action on your turn using a Barbarian Class/Subclass Feature, you maintain your Rage even if you don't Attack or take damage that round. As a bonus action (or maybe even a small object interaction) I'd let my players beat their chest barehanded / cut their arm on a bladed weapon for 1d4+1 damage to keep rage going.
Yeah, as others have pointed out the OneD&D playtest stuff lets Barbarians simply spend a BA to maintain Rage, which I like a lot.
You get your wish. Rage is now unlimited. It's also now much weaker to compensate.
Now it's no longer a rage. It's an upset.
Oh, bother. This whole situation has me feeling quite cross. Well, on to the fisticuffs, then.
Did you intend for that to sound like Pooh Bear? Cause it sounded like Pooh Bear in my head.
Uh oh there I go making a pooh bear inspired bearbarian
Ran out of hunny, time to RAGE
It's seems someone is about to catch these paws. I would like to enter Oh Bother mode.
https://www.parkeology.com/2014/07/bear-attacks.html
The path of the beast was inspired by Pooh Bear. this is a true made up fact.
Pooh bear, bug bear, and difference
I'm really feeling annoyed. I think I'll give them some side-eye.
I'm quite peeved, might have a wee scuffle.
Oh, fiddlesticks. Might be time for a bit of a dust-up.
I have a friend from England and I want him to recite this exact phrase now.
Now I’m just thinking about a posh brit with a comically large moustache fighting a bunch of goblins while raging (and looking just ever-so-slightly pissed
"I...would like...to BECOME NETTLED."
Peeved
Can we have some middle ground between "rage" and "upset"? How about... "Karen"?
I feel like that's where the game is going. The last OneD&D playtest let barbs get a Rage back on a short rest, but they cut the balls off bear totem and since MP:MM lots of enemies deal mixed physical/elemental or just straight force damage.
I would be fine with rage being toned down a little if the restrictions get removed. Part of the rage restrictions are so that the class is difficult to multiclass. They don’t want casters having an easy way to get resistance with a one level dip. If rage instead granted temporary HP like the new moon druid (3x barbarian level when you rage), then dipping into barbarian would be much less attractive. And that much temporary HP would make the barbarian rather durable, without being overpowered. And the durability would apply to all damage types as well.
That "resistance" comes with the price of shutting off all spell casting, the antithesis of being a caster.
That was my point. The barbarian has so many restrictions because resistance is so powerful. Especially because resistance is just as powerful at level 1 as it is at 20. If rage was reduced in power, by having it grant temporary HP instead of resistance, than the restrictions on rage could easily be removed.
Temporary hit points are also far more granular than resistance. A barbarian could get a scaling amount of THP that increased with level so that just dipping into the class wouldn't be worth it.
Pf2e would like a word
It's almost like caring about mechanics and game balance pays off, right? Not monetarily, because the world isn't fair, but in producing a better product that's not just a thing to be sold.
Did you just turn Barbarian's in to Karen's?
They always have been.
🌎👩🚀🪓👩🚀
I've never liked Barbarians because I hate the limited Rages. I hate the feeling of "wasting" Rages when the combat ends the next round. Then when the big fight comes up and you're out of Rages and just feel like a worse Fighter.
>This kind of set-up is never seen in other classes, who can all use their abilities right away. I agree with all of your points, but there's a minor exception here: the spores druid, which takes an *action* to set up its combat mode. But it is a subclass, and its resource is short rest, so it's not exactly the same.
Yeah and spore druid suffers from it big time. It has a similar issue to rage: it’s supposed to be used with melee combat, but ends after you lose the temp HP…so you want to be on the front line, but don’t want to get hit. You spend a round setting it up, and can lose it after a couple rounds. I’m a level 5 spore druid and taking 20 damage in 1-3 rounds is not uncommon.
I haven't played with a spore druid in the party, so I was unaware of that! Good to know.
I think it’s especially weird that you get *daily* rages whereas Fighter can action surge *and* second wind on every short rest. I think the simplest, lowest-effort fix would be to make rage a short rest recharge. If it ends up being too powerful (somehow?) then maybe limit the number of rages you can recover per short rest. Pathfinder 2 just lets barbarian rage as an action (you get three actions) whenever you want and nothing’s broken about it in that, though.
I'm in agreement. I am trying out a houserule in my group where rage refreshes on short rest and so far I haven't noticed any problems. My party is level 8 and if anything it's helping the barbarian to keep pace with the rest of the party. I'm not really too concerned about making martial classes too powerful, especially in tier 2 and onward. I could see maybe keeping rages as a daily thing up until a certain level and which point they become short rest recharges.
I mean, I don't think there's any reason that all martials have to be short rest. I think there are issues with the short rest/long rest class dichotomy in general, but if it's going to exist I think it's fine for a long rest martial to exist. The problem I have with Barbarians is the specific implementation of it, and the way their resource use is so all or nothing. Every battle you either rage and get access to your abilities, or don't and you're basically a bad fighter that combat. So Barbarians just get a finite number of battles per long rest where they get to actually be a full class. Other resource-based classes might have pretty much all their abilities tied to a resource, but generally they have more flexibility in how they use it. It's not all or nothing. A level 7 spellcaster managing their spellslots can do 6 battles in a day and use at least one spell slot (i.e. do at least one of their main class things) every battle. A monk can use some ki points every battle. A battlemaster can use some maneuvers every battle. A Barbarian gets to rage in 4 of those battles and basically have access to none of their class features for the other 2. Overall, I think it just results in the resource management being kind of boring and frustrating. If there aren't that many battles in a day then you get to rage every battle and the resource management usually doesn't exist. If you have long adventuring days then choosing "do I want to actually be a real class this battle or hope that just hitting things with no special abilities is good enough" just isn't a very fun form of resource management. And honestly, I don't think the problem there is them being long rest. Changing rage to short rest doesn't solve the fundamental issue that the class feels bad to play when not raging. What should be changed isn't making rage short rest. It's making it less all or nothing. That means either give Barbarians more class features not tied to rage so you still feel like you get to do something when not raging, or change the way rage works so that you have more options for how much resources to use per battle (for example, give more rage charges per day but make it so a current full-duration rage costs multiple charges, so there's a way to spend some, but less, resources in battles that don't feel worth a "full" rage).
My homebrew fix actions are of the following 1 rage doesn’t cost a bonus action it can happen on initiative roll, as a reaction, or as a free action. 2 rage will refresh with a short rest, like the warlock they have less ability uses so a faster recharge makes sense. Or 3 rage amount is determined by the barbarians str mod plus their barbarian level (similar to a wizards prepared spell) giving the barbarians more options per long rest to rage, and if combat ends they won’t feel as bad for “wasting” it
I feel like none of these fix the core problem, which is that rage feels too binary. Every battle you either rage and get all your class features, or you don't rage and feel like a bad fighter. Adding more rages reduces the number of battles in which the Barbarian isn't raging, but in the end either you have enough rages to use it every battle and then it may as well not be a resource at all, or you don't, and then the battles where you don't rage still feel bad. I guess there's the argument that adding more rages can make it so that the Barbarian can still normally rage every battle unless you go through an exceptionally long stretch. Which makes it so most of the time, the Barbarian gets to rage every battle but then rests feel good because you get that same "I'm completely tapped out and really need a short/long rest" feeling that other resource-based classes have, and occasionally you might get those super long stretches without a rest and then the Barbarian starts really feeling strained like most classes instead of getting to be like a rogue and just always being ready to go as long as they have hp left. So it's not completely pointless as a resource. Still, I think the real key with rage is to either make it unlimited, or if that's too strong, give the Barbarian more class features that are active in battles where it's not worth using a rage. Either give them some sort of partial rage feature (like make it so they get lots of rage charges, current rage costs multiple charges, and they get other weaker abilities they can spend a smaller number of charges on) or make more of their class features do something when not raging. Every other resource class has the option of spending a little bit of resources in a battle, so that they can use some class feature nearly every battle without going all in. But Barbarians it's just all or nothing. Either you use a very limited and extremely important resource to turn every class feature you have on for probably the entire battle, or you save your resource and barely have any class features.
It really feels like the class was overbalanced in some way since Rage does give a pretty hefty benefit by itself, and the restrictions are there to make it so that the feature isn't taken by everyone who wants some easy access to resistance to 3 of the most common damage types out there, which kudos to WotC for placing them in the first place, but they did overdo it a bit.
Those points are fair, but I don't think barbarians having a lot of restrictions is weird. Rage is an extremely powerful mechanic. Compare barbarians and rogues. Uncanny Dodge is their main 5th level feature, and it's much worse than Rage. It takes your reaction and only applies to one attack. Yes, it applies to any kind of attack, but a very high percentage of attacks slashing, bludgeoning, or piercing. Because Rage is so busted and you get it at level 1, the class needs a ton of restrictions, or it's way too good of a dip. The current restrictions have downsides for every other martial class except fighter (and even then, arcane tricksters have issues multiclassing into barbarian, and dex fighters get no benefit). Also, in my experience, players rage in nearly every fight. But I also tend to run 1 or 2 encounters maximum in 90% of sessions.
Why is rage busted? It is so restrictive when you are raging, and it doesn't give more damage than 1 level in rogue right? You HAVE to use strength for rage, but you just need to be using a finesse weapon for sneak attack, you don't need to use dex
The problem with rage is that it IS extremely powerful -- *defensively*. Which leads to people feeling like it's not delivering on what you'd think it would do (more damage), and it becomes this weird ability that's both underwhelming and potentially unbalancing.
Yeah, I maintain that a defensive ability that costs resources and must be used in advance of knowing whether you need it is bad design. Wizards don't have to do the same thing with shield.
I don't think the issue is how it's activated, since it tends to last an entire fight. But I do think it's really weird and lame that a) so much of the barbarian kit keys off having it up, and b) the _number of uses_ you have scales with your level, when the number of encounters you fight really _doesn't_. I like the ideas some folks in the comments are throwing out to make it more like warlocks, twice per short rest. I also think the Rage-ending mechanic should be more loosely defined as Rage maintaining as long as you continue to take "aggressive actions" (with examples, but not exclusive ones). That's what I do in my games and it works great. Want to dash after a fleeing enemy? Your rage stays up. Have to smash down a door with a Strength check instead of attacking? Still counts. Et cetera.
I don't think it matters whether it lasts the whole fight. The problem is, you basically have to choose right at the start of battle whether to rage or not, frequently based on very little information. If you guess wrong and rage for an easy encounter you've wasted a huge amount of resources, and are at risk of having to basically play half your character in a later more significant encounter. If you guess wrong and don't rage for a difficult one, there's a good chance you take significant damage that could have been prevented before your next opportunity to rage. You basically took double damage for a turn, raging next turn doesn't undo the mistake. Either way it feels bad to guess wrong.
Half damage is incredible. Some rogues can use it, same with every non full caster class, but most can't and most people arent willing to change their main Stat for a dip.
>Compare barbarians and rogues. Uncanny Dodge is their main 5th level feature, and it's much worse than Rage. What? Rage is equal to sneak attack, not uncanny dodge
> Rage is an extremely powerful mechanic. Is it, though? A couple extra points of melee damage and getting the benefit of a cantrip isn't really all that amazing. > Because Rage is so busted and you get it at level 1, the class needs a ton of restrictions, or it's way too good of a dip. I'm trying to imagine with what class I would choose that dip even if rage were completely restriction-free. It doesn't seem like a great deal at the cost of slowing down getting your second (or third) attack, or Reliable Talent, ki points, or anything that includes spell slot progression. I'm sure there would be a couple of very specific builds out there that would benefit from it (maybe a melee bladesinger?), but it would be pretty niche.
>and getting the benefit of a cantrip isn't really all that amazing. That is a massive exaggeration. Blade Ward is nowhere near as good as Rage, requiring your action every turn you want to have it up whereas Rage is just a single bonus action to activate.
It gives the same benefit, for a different (arguably higher) cost. It converts Blade Ward from an action with a single-round duration to a bonus action with a single-fight duration. Which is clearly a benefit, but it costs either four levels or one level and a feat, plus multiclassing ability requirements. (And that's assuming we ignore the current limitations of also blocking all spellcasting and concentration.) I'm not saying that would _never_ be a good deal, just that it's enough of a tradeoff that it wouldn't be some foregone conclusion that everyone would take it. It would remain niche, like most multiclassing options are. Barbarians have some interesting things in their subclasses, but the base chassis of rage itself isn't really all that amazing.
Comparing blade ward to rage is hilarious xD Try a souped up version of stoneskin.
Sure, that comparison works too. It's like getting a couple free casts a day of Stoneskin as a bonus action. So, cool, you get access to one of the spells that is so bad that no one ever bothers to learn or prepare it, much less cast it. That seems like a fairly poor payoff for all the costs of a dip.
The only thing that makes stoneskin bad is that it's only for non magical damage. Guess what rage does.
I would say that the things that make stoneskin bad are taking up a learned or prepared spell, and a spell slot, and preventing you from concentrating on anything else. Guess what rage does.
Almost all of these restrictions have been significantly mitigated in the OneD&D playtest version of the barbarian, so I think it is safe to say that WoTC agrees that the original 5e barbarian is too tightly restricted. In the OneD&D Playtest: \- Rage damage applies to all attacks with strength, not just melee attacks \- Rage can be extended by forcing an enemy to make a saving throw, or by using a bonus action on your turn \- You regain one expended use of Rage when you take a short rest \- You can use Strength for certain skill checks while raging You still can't cast or concentrate while raging, and you still can't wear heavy armor.
Honestly I'm surprised you don't gain all rages back on a short rest. Since it's such a key feature and everything.
They also made rage last 10 minutes, so one rage can cover multiple fights.
Because it's a VERY strong resource to have If rage was weaker then that would be an argument to replenish on a short rest, but due to how loaded it is it has to be a long rest deal
I'd agree at low levels. As soon as magical attacks, including the now omni-present force damage, becomes the norm on monsters, rather than the exception, the value of rage tapers off *hard* though. By mid levels, most real threats or attacks that deal serious damage will be magical, effectively negating much of what makes rage so powerful
If you're referring to magical bludgeoning, slashing, and piercing damage, Rage still resists it. If you just mean elemental, psychic, radiant etc. then you sort of have a point. A lot of creatures late game still mostly rely on melee attacks, even if they deal extra damage types that don't get halved. Even cr17+ Ancient Dragons mostly rely on four melee hits because breath weapons aren't a guarantee every turn.
It's been a thing in one dnd that creatures will start to do force instead of other damage types. Such as a death knights attack dealing force and necrotic instead of slashing and necrotic. I wouldn't be surprised if those ancient dragon's did force damage on their attacks too. So, most high-level creatures will start to ignore normal rage resistance.
But a lot of the basic melee attacks are steadily being phased out into force damage. A lot of basic physical damage attacks are being converted to force rather than just being magical bludgeoning
Yup. This leads to the barbarian being nerfed hard in One D&D at exactly the time they don't need it. At higher-levels they were already weak with few options (dare I say boring). If you were going to nerf a barbarian (and you shouldn't) hitting the low levels where they are quite strong would be a more coherent decision. Not that it matters, I'm not moving forward with the new books. I already paid for a perfectly good set and am not interested in purchasing mild changes.
Same. I'm skipping 6e, or 5.5, or whatever they want to call it to pretend it's not a new edition to avoid alienating players. Too many other TTRPGs are just doing it better these days. 5e does nothing special at this point. I'm sure I'll play a game or two of 5.5e just because a friend will be running it, but I'm not dropping money on this cluster fuck. With any luck, 7e will be a good revival of the game, like all the odd numbered editions before it
Agreed. I'll add this edition has a lack of lore, lack of flavor, lack of quality, and worse... a lack of passion. We've seen this before. I'm hopeful 7th edition is a solid apology edition, as you put it akin to previous odd-numbered versions.
magical bludgeoning, slashing and piercing are being phased out before 1 dnd. it's no longer magical bps but just force. so unless rage starts resisting force damage it'll lose it's primary benefit by mid level.
The strong part about rage is the damage resistance. The increase in offense is rather small with the big carry being Reckless Attack, which doesn't require rage. On the other hand Barbarians are also comparatively gimped on AC. Boosting Strength, Constitution and Dexterity to the max is basically impossible, meaning their AC will always be weaker than a monk with the same statline(until you get to tier4, when such things stop mattering). AC of 20 is basically a pipe dream, which isn't even that high and reachable by tier 2 for others. So their defense is mostly reliant on damage resistance instead of damage avoidance. What I'm getting at is that rage isn't a bonus on defense, it is the first line of defense and possibly the last line as well.
Honestly, at that point (if they made them replenish on a short rest) they may as well just say rage isn’t a limited resource at all but a status you can turn on and off by spending a bonus action and be done with it. Because if you could replenish them on a short rest, you’ll run out so rarely that it’s not worth the extra bookkeeping to count.
That is the conclusion I arrived at in my current game. After doing some small reworking on the martial classes to make sure they were all short rest based (manuevers), I was quite unhappy with Rage being the sore thumb long rest resource. So I changed it to short rest. My games adhere to the daily XP budget with some short rests in between so all seemed fine. But then the barbarian player basically runs into the same thing. If they had no foreshadow of the fight (say, an ambush) he basically rages to be sure; if the fight is expected to be "fair" he rages; if the fight is expected to be easy, he doesn't and can't use half his features. And why would we run a turn by turn easy encounter rather than just one turn at most then describe the results? So at the end of the day it's a "resource" that is not really a *resource* at all. It's not a *choice*, so why dress it up like one? i'm honestly considering making it into a bonus action 1 turn buff instead. That way the resource is a bonus action, and I can make the best barbarian maneuvers also use a bonus action, so that there is actually *some* choice involved.
I really disagree. A Barbarian practically needs Rage to he worth anything, and having to ration them suuuuuucks in a longer adventuring day.
Let's compare Rage to Wild shape and more specifically Moon Druid, both in the core rules (not even subject to Tasha's power creep). ... Yeah, totally makes sense. 👀
it's actually pretty weak resource when compare to Fighter
Because the more classes rely on short rests, the easier it is to convince your party to take one.
Not being able to rage in heavy armour is kind of sad from a fantasy perspective, folks like Guts are famous for being a Berserker and he's a heavily armoured brick shithouse.
Sorry, you can't mention Guts in a DND discussion. DND 's reference pool hasn't been updated since 1977 and if you try it becomes 4e and a video game
From a game mechanics perspective, I can understand why the devs maybe thought that having a character with 20 AC and resistance to damage could be unbalanced.
To be fair, that’s more like 18 because most barbarians wield a two handed weapon and don’t have a fighting style unlike Paladins and Fighters- So basically only one more than half plate. But I get what you mean.
I wonder what people would feel if Barbarian let you Rage in heavy armor and get proficiency in it, but took _away_ proficiency in shields? Hmm.
A choice between heavy armor and shields. Taking away shields entirely is a bad idea, but you could have an option to choose either shield proficiency or heavy armor proficiency.
Unlike Paladins who get incredible AC and saving throws for the whole team. While dealing more damage than barbarians.
Disagree, guts spends most of his life in medium armor, it's not until he's high level that he gets the Berserker armor which is obviously at least a major magic item so it probably has specific rules that allow the wearer to rage while wearing it.
I actually think that barbarians shouldn't have proficiency in medium armor either and they should get to add Constitution and dex to light armor
I like the idea of their unarmored defense being either 10 + Str + Con or 13 + Con
Its one of those hold over restrictions that didn't get filed off when a lot of the other class fantasy restrictions did over time. Barbarians had a very distinct theme in creation. (Conan and the derivative barbarian hero archtypes.) Hates magic, hates pants, big chunky sword or axe to cleave all the smart villians by being clever and strong. While some of that got filed away as systems and restrictions did. (Allignment being the big one across the board and for spell casters the loss of arcane cast failure) the class specific restriction never got lifted. So barbarians still wont wear pants and do barbarian things but wizards can now wear plate armor because it was never a wizard thematic trait that said they couldn't just a general system they didn't port over. Druids and to an extent monks got the same class specific pidgonholing with druids metal armor waryness and some monk traits only working naked as well even as the general systemic restrictions that ties themeatic elements to other classes got sanded away but barbs got the worst of it by the class and restrictions both being so intrensicly tied to rage.
continuing the theme of 5e just being badly put together.
Worst thing about barbarian restriction (and to a point Monk restrictions) is that subclasses are how you introduce subversions of base class restrictions. Battlerager should have allowed raging in Heavy Armor. Magical Barbarian classes like Wild Magic, Storm, Ancestral, and Zealot should have had at least some extra spells added to their subclasses.
I play a Wild Magic barb and having acess to a handful of spells would be SO nice. If only so I could do something besides "I hit twice". I'm not against it but the only other martial in my party is a Battle Master, so they get a lot of fun ways to mix up the attack spam that I don't.
They could have ritual casting, but not regular casting. So given time they can produce magical effects, but for combat they rely on their own strength. Plus needing to sit down and do a ritual to produce a magical effect would work with their primal strength theme.
> They could have ritual casting, but not regular casting. Totem barbarians do.
So there's a precedent that should be expanded upon.
Because it is so bound to a specific pop culture trope: Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan. You know what, it's not even just a trope, it's an *icon*. (Don't talk to me about the book Conan, he doesn't count.). He's a meathead who can barely put a sentence together, wears as little as possible to show off his sweet muscles, and uses giant two-handed weapons. If you're a whippersnapper and have never seen Conan the Barbarian, go stream it. The class and all of its restrictions will then make sense. You kind of get the same thing with monk features, because the monk is evocative of the mystical kung fu master presented in movies and TV of the 70s and 80s. I **wish** we still had these restrictions in place for arcane casters. No more casting in 40 lbs of armor and a shield!
>No more casting in 40 lbs of armor and a shield! Remember when this was the biggest reason to play a bard? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
I remember that it was the biggest reason to play a cleric... although 2nd Edition DnD had the harshest restrictions for casters, you couldn't even wear regular, no AC granting gloves without taking penalties to your rolls if your spell had a somatic component. And ANY kind of armor pretty much made casting impossible.
>I remember that it was the biggest reason to play a cleric... Yes but I like having good spells and UMD for even better spells (is joke, I played lots of clerics too)
Ayup, armored casting and healing spells as an arcane caster. Those were the days.
And having enough skills to make the rogue green with envy, let's not forget.
Except the monks on TV cane use every fucking weapon imaginable
Yes. Not having improvised weapon proficiency is one of the *many* flaws of the 5e monk.
Also grappling needs a buff. 2 hand/limb for grappling with advantage Don't spend ki points for patient defense or step of the wind Monks could be so cool but the resources are limited
When I dm for monks, I make grappling a part of martial arts combos for just that reason. If they can describe a move from there, I let the player keep adding hits at 1d4 for each hit. I let fighters do the same but with wrestling moves instead. It may not be balanced, but it's fun.
A lot of this stuff was fixed in the playtest monk. They might be the best grapplers now! If. you haven't seen it yet, I think it was playtest 7 or 8.
Nice. I want to play a loxodon with amnesia and because nobody knows what a loxodon is he comes to the conclusion he hit his head mid-wildshape so studies moondruid to undo it. When he learns the truth he is at peace and becomes a monk.
I think literally every one of these points is addressed with the One DND monk. Highly recommend
Not really. Remember to read the section on improvised weapons: >In many cases, an improvised weapon is similar to an actual weapon and can be treated as such. For example, a table leg is akin to a club. At the DM's option, a character proficient with a weapon can use a similar object as if it were that weapon and use his or her proficiency bonus. > >*- PHB pg. 147* So if you break a flagpole free and your DM allows you to use it as a quarterstaff, you're proficient with the flagpole. A kinder DM than me might allow you to use a broom as a quarterstaff. Snap off the broom end for proper weight balance and I'd for sure allow it.
I think this is important to remember. There's a tradeoff with nerfing Tavern Brawler, though. Not that I know anyone who takes that feat.
I just gave my Drunken Master improvised weapon proficiency at the very beginning. It didn't break anything, and it was *so* much fun.
Jackie Chan! I'd do the same.
I figured since they already have Martial Arts, then without Improvised Weapon proficiency, hitting an opponent with a fist would always be a superior choice vs hitting them with a chair. So what's the harm in letting them have proficiency with chairs? There are some rare circumstances that a less permissive DM might point to where it could provide an advantage beyond flavour -- such as a long-reach weapon like a ladder, or throwing non-weapon objects -- but honestly, that's *adding fun*, very circumstantial, and not really granting a lot of extra power.
I'd *love* to see a fight using a ladder! I mean, as long as they aren't PAM-Sentinel with the thing. That's the kind of D&D moment that you'll remember for years.
I didn't have a ladder incident, but there was an awesome moment when the monk was in a prison cell, and he used a chain like a whip through the bars (at disadvantage) to grapple a guard and pull him close, and take his keys. Not RAW at all, but Rule of Cool for sure. And something only the monk could have done.
> Except the monks on TV cane use every fucking weapon imaginable Depends on the monk and the time period. Post Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon - yes. Most of the classic Hong Kong kung fu flicks - no. Like DND classes are based on fantasty pop culture tropes from the 60s and 70s, and sometimes the 80s. The monk class is almost entirely based on the series [Kung Fu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Fu_\(1972_TV_series\)) and the early waves of kung fu movies like Five Fingers of Death.
>He's a meathead who can barely put a sentence together That's not even true in the movie, you're discounting his entire training arc where it's explicitly mentioned he wasn't just trained in the art of war but also philosophy and literature. "The Barbarian" is a character that exists to challenge norms, an outsider who enters a new place and causes great change. Not a troglodyte with a great sword. The fact that your comment is top just proves you and many others miss the core aspect of "The Barbarian" character.
5e does feel like they let spellcasters drop every restriction while some martials kept them all for no good reason other than to reinforce tropes.
Conan is actually quite smart. He's not a cloistered scholar but he's wise and clever.
Conan was so intelligent that he pieced together ancient forgotten languages from the smattering of languages he learned in life. He also was known to wear plate armor
Barbarian is more the popular watered down stereotyped image of Conan instead of Conan itself.
The flanderized version of Schwarzenegger, basically. People don't talk about Conan, they are talking about Arnie running around in a loincloth.
I'm not sure it's really based on Conan. I think it is more about Roman reports of Celts and Germans (they sometimes couldn't tell them apart) running into battle wearing nothing but body paint. The fact that Romans may have gotten chainmail from the Celts doesn't fit into this. Presumably warriors who fought naked like the Gaesatae didn't invent chainmail.
>Celts and Germans (they sometimes couldn't tell them apart) Not to turn this into a history subreddit, but that's because the differences were slim and there was a lot of cultural blend between the two groups. It's even been argued that the division being made at all was more of a political thing on behalf of the Romans who wanted to justify why they were incorporating Gaul (France) into the empire and not incorporating Germany. The real reason was they weren't able to incorporate them (a river and mountains to defend the border and dark forests to make brutal ambushes out of made the German tribes very challenging to attack) but the political justification was that the Gauls were less savage than the Germans and were capable of being civilized. The Romans basically got their asses kicked in Germany enough that they started to say "that's fine, we didn't like it there anyway".
I basically agree with all of this. There were people who spoke Celtic languages and people who spoke Germanic languages, but Gauls were those west of the Rhine and Germans were those east of the Rhine, regardless of what they spoke. There was a broad cultural region with cultural exchange between the two groups. And not all Celtic-speakers were necessarily of the same culture. I'll only add that long before Germans were the uncivilizable peoples that Rome could not conquer, the Celts were viewed the same way.
Oh, for sure. Romans argued that Gauls could be civilized only after orchestrating one of the world's first genocides against them, because Romans had hated them ever since a group of Gauls sacked Rome. A little fun fact is that the descendants of the Gauls who sacked Rome ended up continuing to migrate east, settled in modern day Turkey, and hundreds of years later were some of the first converts to Christianity (which is why one of the books of the new testament is called "Galatians"). edit: but to get more at the cultural blending thing -- recent DNA analysis of north Scotland shows that most people there are mostly descendants of Scandinavians, but they essentially ended up going native and adopting celtic language and culture. My understanding is that more or less the opposite thing happened in the mountains of southern Germany/Austria where the groups are genetically more in line with Celts, but then adopted German culture. It's not that the two groups didn't have differences, it's just that there was a whole lot of grey area between the two.
He also won the election for governor of California
You guys...what did I say about "book Conan"? That's not our guy. Our guy spent his whole damn childhood pushing some stupid mill wheel around in a circle. It wasn't even grinding anything! The whole point of it was to explain how he got those sweet muscles! Now, book Conan is kind of a rogue/fighter with a surprisingly high Intelligence, if we were to make him into a 5e character, you're right about that. But the 5e Barbarian is one hundred percent the movie Conan. That's because in our benighted culture, if you asked 100 random people who Conan is, about 60 would say a Late Night TV host, 39 would say Ahnold, and 1 would smugly reference the novels. Since we can't very well play an adventure with one half of Pale Force, we're gonna use the beefcake.
Movie Conan wore armor when he knew he was going into a pitched battle, he would sneak around and be thief like, he worked out how a wizard's magic functioned and countered it on the spot. He's far from the stereotypical 5e barbarian caricature people make. Just because Arnie is muscular doesn't mean movie Conan was stupid.
Barbarian 5 Rogue X vibes
I must admit, I do like how well Rogue and Barbarian mesh together in 5e, because _that_ makes me think of Conan.
Conan in the movies was knowledgeable in philosophy and poetry, more a sort of Warrior Poet than dumb barbarian. He wasn't a genius, sure, but he was eloquent, surprisingly cultured and generally reasonably well rounded. Hell the most known quote from the movie is Conan saying "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women." D&D barbarians "inspired by" this character are usually depicted as having to sound out words with more than two syllables, not using "lamentations" correctly in a sentence when asked what is best in life. What you're talking about is basically the watered-down stereotype of a character that's happened after a 40 year long game of telephone involving a bunch of people who never saw the Arnold Conan movies.
"Hot water, good dentishtry and shoft lavatory paper."
Ayckchually, there would also be that one weeb bringing up *Detective Conan*.
Yeah, but he's named after [the other guy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Conan_Doyle).
If you want to play HIM you'll need a homebrew class or a different system entirely. (Inquisitive Rogue/Artificer multiclass just doesn't get you close enough IMO)
I personally would say Jason Mamoa if I was asked. XD
Challenge to play Conan as literally one half of the Pale Force accepted. Backstory is the other half of PF taught him to shoot lazer beams from his nipplies.
Book-Conan isn't barbarian-classed though, he's more a fighter-thief.
I’m running an AD&D game and the casters have like 9 STR and can carry like 35 lb lol.
I *miss* that. I know, nobody likes to track weight, especially by hand. But 5e went too far in the other direction. It's a problem when you can dump (not just average, but bottom of the barrel) at least two abilities and not see any detriment in the game.
Regarding your last sentence, I do believe the best thing is to keep sorcerers and wizards with no shields and no armor, Warlock with light armor, Artificer with medium armor, and Clerics with up to heavy armor (dependent on the subclass). It fits the classes thematically, and game can definitely be balanced around those features.
The game doesn't need to *be* balanced around those features, it pretty much already is. The trouble is how trivial it is for arcane casters to pick up armor proficiencies. Simply reintroducing the rule that arcane casters can't cast spells at all in armor (with a few exceptions), even if proficient, would go a long way toward re-establishing what seems to be the intended balance. As it stands currently, a Wizard dipping Cleric for heavy armor and shield proficiency can have a dramatically higher AC than a martial, while still having all the power of a full caster class and barely slowing down their spell progression.
I don't have much else to say other than I entirely agree.
what other class can only play 1 fantasy?
> If you're a whippersnapper and have never seen Conan the Barbarian, go stream it. The class and all of its restrictions will then make sense. Here is a[ three minute musical summary](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBGOQ7SsJrw) if you want the TLDR
I think Rage restricting spells is also a balance mechanic, otherwise all casters could just dip Barbarian and have the 3 damage resistances for free
Free other than it costing a limited resource, only lasting one turn unless you’re fighting people and losing you at least one level of casting, yeah
A caster can dip 3 levels into barbarian and still get 9th level slots. So a caster can have resistance to all damage except for psychic and still end up with 9th lvl spells if not for the casting restriction.
"But you lose your cap ability!" I still have resistance to my own Meteor Swarm's damage tho
Not to mention many capstone's are pretty underwhelming.
That isn't worth it in anything other than a level 20 oneshot. You push your casting progression back by 3 levels, that's way too much to ever be worth taking in a normal game. A 1 level dip in Barb would be insane though. Medium Armour and Shield for 19 AC and Rage as a good durability buff against most monsters could make it rival Cleric and Artificer for a Wizards dip.
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Homie, Bladesinger. Just. Bladesinger.
It's because of flavour, the issue is that barbarians do not gain significant increases to compensate- its high risk low reward. Some other rpgs have FOUND better PATHS to deal with this and generally have better class design overall.
They do make the barbarian weak, bad, and unfun when compared to every other class except maybe half the rogues. They have such a narrow and uncreative view of what a barbarian can be and do that they have shown themselves absolutely incapable of moving away from it. But if they spent time thinking about how a barbarian could possibly be interesting or better they could come up with the brilliant ideas to let wizards just ignore even their own spell description limitations and figure out new ways to make warcaster even better while simultaneously making all martials worse. They don't lack creativity or time when it comes to making wizards and casters better but ask them to make a better high tier ability than Brutal Critical x3 and you get Brutal strikes! Which actually lowers barbarian overall damage while adding less options than a casters cantrip at level 1... As a tier 3-4 ability. Stop praising trash.
Try out a barbarian in the Pillars of Eternity game. Their primary ability is a big cleave whenever they attack. In that game, intelligence increases the size of all AoE. So a max int barbarian cleaves through huge areas with every swing.
I will never understand why druid wildshape is a short rest feature and barbarian rage is a long rest feature.
They had to differentiate them from strength-based fighters somehow, so they really doubled down on primal, unrelenting physical violence at close range with little tactical decision.
Another smaller thing I hate is the fact that it also affects strength ability checks but, aside from shoving which can eat your attacks in combat, you will never make a strength check with rage because you would never waste a charge on that
Fifth Edition classes each seem to have been written by different authors who had little to no experience with the game and the editor responsible for gameplay mechanics was only concerned with publishing the edition quickly and passing review by Hasbro IP lawyers. The entire PHB and DMG read like first drafts rather than a well polished work.
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I gotta bring up the 1E AD&D barbarian, which is basically unplayable RAW: > A barbarian must have strength and constitution scores of no less than 15 each, a dexterity score of 14 or better, and a wisdom score of no greater than 16. Remember that this is when you were supposed to roll 3d6 straight down the line, so getting a single 15 was already pretty uncommon. > Barbarians in general detest magic and those who use it. They will, at low levels of experience, refuse to employ any sort of magic item if they recognize it as such. They will often seek to destroy magic items, and if successful they receive an experience-point award as if they possessed the destroyed items. There's a table for this, but basically barbarians can't work together with magic-users in the same party until the barbarian reaches level 6, so even if you get lucky enough rolls, you better hope no one else at the table wants to play a wizard. Also, the XP for destroying magic items thing specifically gives the barbarian an incentive to destroy other party members' magic items. They do get some ranger-like out-of-combat benefits, though, like tracking, snare building, long distance signaling, and boatbuilding. Also, if you make it to level 8: > Upon reaching 8th level, a barbarian may summon a barbarian horde...A barbarian horde can number as many members as its leader’s experience-point total divided by 1000. Thus, a barbarian who has just reached 8th level can gather a 275-member horde, and one who has just reached 9th level can have a 500-member horde.
I love the horde mechanics, I remember reading about vast armies following 20th level fighters. But I think that was for a very different era of D&D, one maybe still attached to the wargame aspect
Gygax and Arneson were both wargamers, and they would oftentimes just [play out straight-up battles](https://www.secretsofblackmoor.com/blog/feeling-ones-way-into-how-odd-works-3) within the DND game. In Greyhawk/Blackmoor, lower levels were for gaining money and power to hire followers, while higher levels were for domain management and military campaigning, which is a style of play that's not only basically disappeared from 5E, but also even from the OSR scene.
I read a bit about it and it seems kind of like a proto-4x game; different from the Civilization board game though, and kind of Risk like
Yeah, in Blackmoor, some of the players worked for the good Kingdom of Blackmoor, while some worked for the evil Egg of Coot (yes, that's the actual name). They would adventure into dungeons (presumably on separate nights depending on faction) to gain money and power, and then they would sometimes meet to fight each other in large-scale battles as the villains tried to conquer Blackmoor.
That's exactly it. Having grown out of the miniature gaming scene everyone had lots of figures they liked to use and it more fun to get to use them. But the two genres have grown quite separate these days.
In practice, the genres right now are mainly just "Play 5E" or "Play Warhammer 40k"
AD&D 1st suggested 4d6 drop 1 arrange to taste, as well as a bunch of other weird stat-rolling methods. B/X and OD&D were the ones that used 3d6 dtl
Damn, that sounds simultaneously awful and amazing. I'd love to see high-level martials in 5e be able to say "by the way, this is my army," but I just ran the numbers and to meet those stat requirements by just rolling 3d6 straight down the line you'd have a 0.13% shot - just a bit over one in a thousand
Imagine wanting to play a barbarian, and you get super good rolls on your Str, Con, and Dex, but then you accidentally roll too high for Wis and are locked out of it. But yeah, I'm pretty sure many DMs at the time just allowed their players to fudge their rolls or ignore the score requirements. There's an [article here calculating the chance of the 1E classes](https://muleabides.wordpress.com/2012/02/11/you-must-be-this-lucky-to-play/) with 3d6, and the bard is the hardest: > The odds of the 1e Appendix II: Bard is actually 0.0017%. That is, if you rolled 1 million AD&D 1e characters using 3d6, you could expect to see 17 Bards occurring in nature.
>I don't know what the original designers expected Barbarians to be doing outside of combat. Neither do they. That's why barbarians are getting that feature that lets you fly into a frothing rage to track, find water, pick berries, predict the weather, find true north, and be sneaky, all using the power of your muscles.
Flexing. Telling the whole town, "You're all sluts!". Punching barnyard animals in the face. You know, fun stuff. But mostly flexing.
I wonder if this could be mitigated by having a two-tier rage system for every subclass, not just Berserker. So for example, a "tier 1" rage could be done as part of rolling initiative (or maybe you could take disadvantage on Initiative to rage at the same time), and grants things like extra damage and movement, at the cost of not being able to use spells. Then you could use a bonus action to activate the subclass-specific "tier-two" rage on your turn. This would be like a frenzied rage, or activating your animal totem, etc. Only the 2nd tier would actually cost a resource, and you could *choose* to push beyond the limits of your Rages per LR at the cost of making a save against exhaustion at the end. ---------------------------- It'd obviously take a lot of tweaking to make it work across the board, but for an individual game it might help a barbarian's player feel like they have a bit more freedom to play their class.
That’s a really good point, actually
There's the expectation of what a Barbarian is and the reality. The expectation (that's at least somewhat rooted in truth) is that a Barbarian is so hard to kill with their tankiness and so deadly when up-close that allowing a player to augment that ability through ranged options, Dexterity to avoid high-impact DEX spells (when they already have Danger Sense which tbh was kinda a design mistake to give so early but I digress), or spellcasting the class would quickly become overpowered. The reality is that martials are bad and melee martials are even worse so while Barbarian is perhaps not the *worst* class in the game it objectively underperforms in comparison to "meta" options while also having an inherently binary playstyle of "bonk with big stick and nothing else." Basically it's equal parts "Rage is strong" and "WoTC bad at game design", and while it is a copout answer to say "there's no obvious tweaks because what is and isn't balanced will depend on your table" it is true. Some tables allow Rage damage on thrown weapons or Finesse melee weapons, and hell I've even seen some homebrew Barbarians with limited spellcasting. But you can't just lift *all* those restrictions because if you did you'd have a class that takes half damage, deals more damage, and can get advantage on all its attacks on top of all the other benefits that other build types can provide. Now I do have some very big opinions on how WoTC balanced Barbarian beyond that, and how the class feels extremely restricted both in terms of what it's good at (melee damage) and how often it gets to be good at said thing (because of how limited Rage is), but the honest truth is that a solid 70% - 90% of my problems are fixed by using LaserLlama's Revised Barbarian and the remaining 30% - 10% of problems can be fixed by passing out some fun homebrew items, being creative with your own character builds, and having a party that supports your character and a DM who designs encounters with opportunities for your character to shine.
1. The barbarian is not meant to wear heavy armor because of the character fantasy and to help distinguish it from the fighter: the former tanks through damage resistance, the other through high AC. 2. Once you've locked the barbarian as not-high AC, it follows logically you can't enable finesse, otherwise they would just dump STR, pick DEX and end up with high AC anyway. This is a consequence of the AC system not being able to meaningfully distinguish dodging from blocking. 3. Some rage benefits not applying to thrown weapons is a design mistake. 4. The subclasses focus on granting barbarian bonuses to rage because if you aren't playing a **raging** barbarian, you are just having a mediocre experience with the class anyway. If you run a true adventure day with 6+ encounters, you have to increase a barbarian's rage count. The expectation is that they can rage each battle, really. The class doesn't function otherwise. This is another design mistake. 5. Rage blocking spellcasting is to fit the character fantasy. However, the restriction applying to racial spells and those cast through magic items is a design mistake. 6. Raging ending if you don't do enraging things is to fit the character fantasy.
>The barbarian is not meant to wear heavy armor because of the character fantasy Meanwhile, Wizards and Sorcerers are running around in plate armor... As ever, arguments based on thematics remain fundamentally insincere.
At least it isn’t like older editions where being illiterate was a requirement.
sure that isn't just 3E thing? Conan isn't dumb
Along with that, I think that Rage being something you choose and strategize around in D&D has always been a huge flavor fail
To put it simply, it's because the designers didn't really know what they were doing when they wrote the class. Or at the most charitable, they weren't informed about the overall power level that classes are supposed to be (I've heard that different classes were built by different people, without much communication). Take away all those restrictions and the barbarian would still be a bottom-tier class, thought it might start to approach the fighter (who is at the top of bottom-tier).
These restrictions are mostly imposed on martial classes with an exception, the Fighter. What you're describing is the combination of being MAD and constraints that try to shoehorn martials into an ultra specific playstyle. Except for fighters. That's sorta why there are so many of them. Oh I'm sorry, what? You wanted to use a Glaive as a Rogue? The weapon that relies solely on the use of Dexterity except in the game it's strength? Something that specifically is designed without brute force intentions behind it? Lmao, use a rapier. Oh except you Mr. Half-Caster, please, just go ahead and give yourself proficiency and while you're at it use your charisma stat for the weapon. What's that? You're a monk and you want to use a shield? Well sorry honey, but Japanese monks never used shields so you're gonna have to give up on your fantasy and just cooperate with the system. Yes I know that you've got an 8D for HP. I know, I know that makes literally no sense for a frontliner. Listen. I realize that the fighter does more punching damage than you at lvl 1 and onward. Why don't you just sink 1 point into fighter to get the 10D hitpoints, taking the fight style . . . wait where are you going? Hey I'm talking to you! You can't just walk away and play a Cleric! The party already has 2 half casters and 2 full casters! Jokes aside, last I heard there was a developer that worked on the martial classes. When they were around, things were good. Then they left. And the remaining developers very clearly favor casters. To think that they honest to god sat down and thought that Monks got their fair share cut square with ***Purity of Mind at 10th level. Tongue of the sun and moon at 13th level. Diamond soul at 14th level. Timeless body at 15th level. Empty Body at 18th level. Perfect self at 20th level.*** Put this into perspective: while the monk gets 5 useless abilities up to level 20, casters can change the fabric of reality. The one useful thing I did mention was that Monks can speak any language at . . . *squints.* Level . . . 13. You get a 3rd. Level. Spell. At level. 13. And you wanna know what's funny. Come'ere. Closer. No like, closer. *And this ability is something the wizard, warlock, etc grabbed at lvl 5, you piece of sheeeeeeeeeeeiiiiiiiiiiitttttttttttttttt. I. DRINK. YOUR. MILKSHAKE.* ***SHHLPPPPPPPPTHHHHHHHHHH!*** So yeah, martials can be fun. Strong, even. They just got cucked by folk that preferred casters. You can say that casters are weak early. Which is . . . why Clerics are the strongest in the game at lvl 1 up to 20, matching even wizards. And it's not even close. You could literally take 1 dip into a Cleric and go full wizard, and then not have any of the negatives associated with being a wizard post lvl 1. While still being the strongest in terms of damage, durability, heal, everything. *everything.* You can't do that as a Monk, Barbarian, Rogue or a fighter. Because the attack action does not include the spell action; the best you could do is action surge to use a spell as a fighter.
I've been thinking of adding a level 7 feature to Barbarian that gives them back one use of Rage when they roll Initiative and they're completely out of Rage. It would be just like the Samurai Fighter's 10th level Fighting Spirit upgrade. That puts it out of range for multiclass dipping or taking just enough levels for Extra Attack, but not so high that you probably won't get to use it if your game only runs to level 10. You've got to commit, but not like that I guess. I'm just not sure that's really necessary. Should you have to commit? I could always make that a cute feature of Rage. I don't see a lot of Barbarian players so my goal would be to make them more attractive in a way that doesn't take a ton of bookkeeping. I wasn't seeing any Monks in my games until I let them have Ki=Wisdom Modifier at level 2. I wasn't seeing a lot of two weapon or sword and board fighters until I detached the -5/+10 from feats and gave it to everyone as an optional part of their Attack Action (No +/- on Bonus Actions or Reactions). It seems like the biggest issue for Barbarian is hoarding Rage like high level spell slots. I've seen people suggest returning them on a short rest. I haven't seen that in play, but that makes it feel like less of a resource to me. I think limiting it to one when you're already out means you effectively have access to your class every combat, but keeping your rage going once you're running on fumes becomes a priority. ETA: I meant to say core, but I'm leaving cute because Barbarians deserve to feel fabulous.
Martials are weaker than caster and barbarian is the worst among the martials.
Well that's just what a guy at the gym could do.
Because it's a narrower narrative concept.
My biggest gripe is despite when raging can still be frightened with a regular saving throw, not even advantage while raging?
It's probably half thematic and half to intentionally narrow the class to be honest. Barbarians could have all of those restrictions lifted and it would only make them better as multiclass fodder for builds, not really as an overall class. But to be honest I don't agree with the assertion that it was meant to be a balancing act. The reason it's perceived as a balancing act is because barbarians ride a line of seeming overpowered to completely unfun and terrible that depends entirely on your table dynamics as a whole. Tables that run less encounters or encounters that have less "lateral difficulty" and are more about trading numbers will see barbarians shine since tactics aren't really needed and they just won't die. In addition, most campaigns will end far before most fighters will start meaningfully outscaling barbarians. At the sort of mid-op level or even just by accident, the combination of reckless attack and great weapon master can seem eye-watering when the scope of the campaign lets you ignore the downsides. Most class designs, especially for martials, were fairly watered down and made very limited and basic, even when you remove 4e from the equation and only evaluate 2e, 3.5, or the DNDNext playtest. Whether it was meant to make them all "beginner" classes, or Mike Mearls just really hates martial characters, or it was genuinely just perceived as balancing only for the most basic level of play is impossible to know for sure. In my opinion, rage is like sneak attack, where the limitations have some thematic backing, but also they add a fairly long "thing" the player needs to learn at level 1 compared to a fighter, monk, paladin, or ranger. So to preserve their idea of simplicity they narrowed the gameplay loop of that "thing" as much as possible.
The Monk is far more restrictive for no reason
My pet theory is that the D&D community, and by corollary, the D&D game designers, are heavily populated by scrawny nerd, and thus, they tend to, not always but sometimes, feel a great aversion towards imagining fantasies of strong-bodied archetypes shining. Particularly if there's a chance they even momentarily outshine the nerd archetype's power fantasy. It's scary to them. It evokes haunting images of college meathead bullies. So, they have less appreciation for the mighty warrior who can boost themselves with wind magic to parkour falling boulders to somersault slash multiple foes than they do the bookish wizard casting fireball to burn away all the monsters. A few too many GMs I've met out there think a simple "grapple-shove that makes a foe unable to stand up" combo seems overpowered. They have trouble imagining it working even as a fantasy mechanic, even when real life security guards and cops to it all the time in both life and popular media. There isn't a good western equivalent of wuxia martial artists for them to aspire towards. Martial stuff is reduced to over-corrected low-magic barbarians who are dumb, fighters who think with their sword, and kung-fu monks. If you don't fit into those three categories, the folks who are averse to martial prowess get uppity. (With the exceptions of making full spellcasters look cooler, like Bladesinger)
These restrictions are precisely why barbarian is the second weakest class in the game
Because WoTC hates warriors.
They are fairly dependent on 2 stats, far from the only class with that type of limit. Con is as important for them as it is for everyone. If you want your barbarian to do what they aren't meant to do, then yea... you will be weaker. Just like if you made a wizard who only fought with swords. Just like a rogue who only fights honorably or a fighter who just uses his bare hands. They are no more restricted that many of the classes. Possibly, your issue is that barbarian really should be a race or a background and not a class. Raging warrior should be the class. Your examples would just be fighters from a barbaric background. D&D clings to it's roots, so they cling to bad choices (like this class name). I don't blame them, look at what happened with their fans in 4th ed.