One of the things I love about Dungeon World is that I feel it’s easier to role-play due of the absence of crunch. For that reason I have actually never even looked at the Barbarian playbook because I assumed it was just a big fighting machine.
I’m looking at it now and it looks like there could be all kinds of fun role-play opportunities with it.
I’m thinking very strongly about using a Chaotic Minotaur Barbarian the next time I get to play. There’s a lot of story that can be told there, and when he NEEDS to fight he’s gonna’ bust some skulls!
What are some good stories your Barbarians have been involved in?
Not entirely on topic but wanted to touch on something you said: that it is easier to role play in the absence of crunch. In general I would agree but that has more to do with what crunch classicly entails. If you have crunch that drives role play then it is good and useful. I am generally anti crunch for your noted reason, the one exception though is Burning Wheel. It is a super crunchy game but all of the crunch drives the role play and the character development (and I don’t mean being able to kill more things by character development).
Shane Liebling I understand what you mean. I should mention that the games I played previous to DW were a single session of a D&D 3.5 game, and a single session of a D&D 4e game. I literally said to my friend the GM “If I want tactical combat I’ll play Final Fantasy Tactics” after the 4e experience.
“Everything begins and ends with the fiction” is what makes DW so great (for me) and when I GM’d for my son I didn’t even tell him the names of the moves (Hack & Slash, etc.), I simply told him to tell me what he as doing. He learned the names eventually, but I trained him to tell me with fiction rather than “I want to do a volley”.
Brian Holland Word. If you want more info on Burning Wheel, I highly suggest starting with this video: https://youtu.be/E79DDGdX62I
I have heard a lot about it from most YouTube channels I’ve subscribed to, and this is one of Adam Koebel’s videos, so I’ll check it out. Thanks!
Wasn’t in my game, but I remember someone posting about a “barbarian” who’s homeland was actually super civilized, like 16th century feudal Japan, traveling amongst the backwater fools of Europa Fantastica. I always thought that was a nice twist.
Yeah that’s interesting… Outsider only means “not from here”, and I’m sure the West felt that “ritual suicide in response to failed honor” was “Barbaric”. That’s a really cool twist that I would have never considered!
You’d be surprised how many people pick barbarian, insist on coming up with something original and all of them make exactly the same character. It’s a fun character, but it’s the same one every time.
Eg: we have a chaotic minotaur in our group 😛
Of course! I want to make mine as a cross between William Wallace and Maximus from The Gladiator (and I’m sure that’s been done 100 times too LOL!)
Now I’m going to see if I can make a completely different one!
The barbarian is easily one of my fave classes, I’ve actually seen it played differently almost every time – Horse Lord, Conan, An Alien, One time I had someone play it as a a kind of french noble-man stereotype, given that our world was all mud and blood, it fit really well
Barbarians in my games have done some fun stuff. I still remember when the party went looking for the barbarian and found him naked in a stable with a bar wench. He ripped off some random cloth somewhere and tied it around his waist. That became a running gag for him (tearing random cloth for his clothing, not waking up in a stable lol)