So I am lawful now and I can't get angry?


Pathfinder First Edition General Discussion

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Grand Lodge

We'd have 'Holy Raging' Paladins and 'Insane many fist' style Monks.

Its up to 'house rules' to determine that.

The WHY of it? To be honest part of it is 'legacy' - Monks had to be Lawful since the orginal Advanced Dungeons and Dragons book. Barbarians have been chaotic (will get to that later) since the 3rd ed but it MAY even go back to the Unearthed Arcana of the original AD&D as well (don't have a copy on hand).

Much of what we play is legacy (whether we understand it or not - for instance, why can't we have Neutral Paladins? Why must the Anti Paladin be Chaotic Evil? Why not Neutral Evil?, Heck, why can't I have a LAWFUL Bard?!) and has just been passed down, well... errr.... because.

Rage and 'Lawfulness'? Barbarians are supposed to be 'wild', 'uncivilised', 'untamed' and all that sorta crap. The 'Rage' - call it Hyper Adrenaline Surge if you will, is supposed to be tapping into the berserk crazy battle power of the old berserkers. Thats how it was 'Originally', 'Back in the day', etc - Lawful is civilisation and the rule of law - going berserk is an unrestrained joy in the drive for destruction... errr... not so civilised.

Lawful: Controlled, Civilised - Chaotic: Wild, Uncontrolled. Heck this sort of thing on Alignment goes back to the Elric style books and the battles of 'Law' and 'Chaos'. You better believe that these books had an impact on Fantasy RPG development and mindset, as much as Conan the Barbarian books and Lord of the Rings.

Pathfinder? Its a pebble thats been Polished (opinion may vary on this) as its been carried down the stream. Originally Barbarians were illiterate and HATED magic... hell, they got XP for DESTROYING magic items... they needed to be 2nd level just to tolerate clerics and (I could be wrong here) were a danger when raging because they may attack their own party.

Pathfinder has taken out the thornier aspects of it - barbarians can read now... In 2nd Ed/3.0 they didn't slay wizards on sight... Normally rage was a per day deal and you had to rage for the full period of the 'rage' and so on. Pathfinder development showed it would be more 'fun' if control was given to the player, hence the 'on-off' switch.

Somewhere along the line some of the old stuff has still stuck and at some point a Dev has said 'Barbarian Monk? - Yuck'. This could be 'balance issues' or it could be that intellectually the Dev was so stuck in the 'Barbarians have to be chaotic and Monks are Lawful!!' mindset (again, a legacy) that they just left it that way.

Its now RAW - deal with it and hope for either an update whenever Paizo do a 2nd Ed ORRRRR have alignment restrictions house ruled out.

Grand Lodge

Found this

Quote:

AD&D Character Class: Barbarian

The Barbarian is a sub-class of fighter. In addition to extraordinary fighting abilities, they have skills related to survival in the wilderness. All barbarians have at least a 15 Strength, 14 Dexterity, and 15 Constitution, and no barbarian begins with a Wisdom greater than 16. Only Comeliness may be below 6. The barbarian has no single principle attribute, and gains no experience point bonus for high ability scores. Barbarians are never anything else; there are no multiclassed barbarians, no characters who become barbarians later in life (contrary to the assertions of some females concerning male companions), and no barbarians who become something else.

Barbarians gain a special AC bonus for Dexterity. If the character is not wearing bulky or fairly bulky armor, he gains 2 points for each point of Dexterity above 14 (2 at 15, 4 at 16, 6 at 17); in such restrictive armor, his bonus is normal (one point per point over 14). There is also a special Constitution hp bonus, increased to +2 hp per point of Constitution above 14, which is double that for other character classes.

Barbarians may not be Lawful in alignment, and do not speak an alignment language. They are limited to common and their own racial or tribal language, but can learn additional languages up to the limits imposed by intelligence and race. Barbarians cannot read or write at the beginning of the game, and must learn these skills for any language for which they desire them.

Barbarians have a 15" base movement rate. They gain d12 hp/level, plus Con bonus. They fight on the fighter tables, gain multiple attacks with higher levels, and may learn to use any weapons, armor, and shield they can find. However, initial weapons will be dictated by the DM according to the tribe of the Barbarian, and will always include hand ax, knife, spear, and three others.

Barbarians fear and oppose all magic except the simplest of clerical magics (ministrations of the gods)[b]. They cannot use magic items of any sort at low levels, and [b]will always gain experience points for destroying any magic item. They will not knowingly work with magic-users at low levels, and at even the highest levels will view such wizards with suspicion even if well known to them. This chart shows the degree to which magic will be tolerated by barbarians:

Level Actions and Abilities

2 May associate freely with clerics.
3 May use potions.
4 May use magic weapons.
5 May use magic armor.
6 May associate with magic-users (and their sub-classes) if the need is great.
7 May use weapon-like miscellaneous magic items.
8 May associate with magic-users occasionally.
9 May use protection scrolls.
10 May use most magic items available to fighters.

To compensate for their reluctance to use magic items, the barbarian is presumed to have the ability to hit creatures normally protected by the requirement that magic weapons be used. This is based on the power and ferocity of the barbarian's attack; it does not indicate an increased chance to hit. The level of the barbarian affects the degree of this ability:

Level:
Can hit:
1-3 No Special Creatures
4-5 Creatures hit by +1 weapons.
6-7 Creatures hit by +1 and +2 weapons.
8-9 Creatures hit by +1, +2, and +3 weapons.
10-11 Creatures hit by +1, +2, +3, and +4 weapons.
12+ Creatures hit by any magic weapons.

Certain barbarian saving throws are bonused: Poison +4; Paralyzation, Death magic, Petrification, Polymorph +3; Rod, Wand, Staff, and Breath Weapon +2. Additionally, every fourth level (4, 8, 12) the barbarian increases his saving throw against spells by +1.

Barbarians can climb cliffs, trees, and other natural vertical faces common to his tribal area as well as a thief of the same level can climb walls. This ability can be transferred to walls and other surfaces if the character has the opportunity to practice.

A barbarian can hide in any natural surroundings as well as a thief of the same level can hide in shadows. If the natural surroundings are of a type familiar to the barbarian, he hides at a rate three levels higher.

Barbarians surprise others 3/6, 4/6 in familiar terrain; they are surprised only 1/10, 1/20 in familiar terrain.

The barbarian has a 5% per level chance of detecting any effort to attack him from behind. If the attack is detected, it is automatically changed to a normal attack, and the barbarian gains an automatic counter-attack even if all attacks for the round have been used.

A barbarian can perform a standing jump of 10' forward or 3' backward or 3' upward. With a running start these distances increase to 15+d6' forward or 4+d4/2' upward. Using a step or other raised surface from which to spring enables a standing upward jump of 3+d4'.

Barbarians who focus their attention for a full minute (round) on any object which is an illusion have a 5% chance per level of determining that it is an illusion, up to a maximum chance of 75%. Any type of illusion, including illusory sound, may be recognized. With all other types of magic, the chance of recognizing it as magic but not illusion is 20% plus 5% per level, up to 90%. It does not identify spell casters, but only magical effects and items, and it will never reveal the type of magic other than distinguishing illusion from any other type.

In dealing with other Barbarians, the character's effective charisma is increased by his level; this does not affect comeliness, which is discounted in such situations.

The barbarian can survive in the wild, if it is like that from which he came or he spends a month becoming familiar with the new area.

The barbarian has special first aid skills. Such first aid will immediately restore one hit point to whoever is treated (including the barbarian). The barbarian who cares for himself (assumed) gains 2 hp/day of rest, 1hp/day if activity continues. Caring for others will double their rate of healing. He can also concoct cures for natural poisons, with a 10% chance of effecting a cure of an unknown poison. This becomes 50% plus the victim's Con if the poison is known.

The barbarian has skills of a third level druid to detect plants and animals and to predict weather as the spell, and can determine directions above ground. They can also track as a ranger, but only outdoors.

The barbarian may also have several additional skills if the referee determines these to be appropriate to the tribal background. These may include Animal Handling (usually dogs), Horsemanship, Long-distance Signaling, Running (over several days) and Endurance, Small Water Craft (canoes, rowboats, and/or small sailboats), Sound Imitation (of animal noises), or Snare Building.

Upon reaching level 8, the character may call a barbarian horde, a large number of barbarians from his native land who will come to perform a particular mission over a brief period, and then disperse. Details of this ability are in Unearthed Arcana™, page 20f.

There you go - the ORIGINAL AD&D Barbarian... warts and all. You can see the Fast Movement roots..., The chaotic alignment and so on. Rage isn't here. That MAY have been a 2nd Ed thing or maybe 3rd Ed..

Liberty's Edge

Helaman wrote:
There you go - the ORIGINAL AD&D Barbarian... warts and all. You can see the Fast Movement roots..., The chaotic alignment and so on. Rage isn't here. That MAY have been a 2nd Ed thing or maybe 3rd Ed..

That's 3rd Ed. You could play a Barbarian in 2nd Ed. as a berserker (there was a character kit and everything)...but it certainly wasn't a base part of the class.

Grand Lodge

So no rage in 2nd ed, even as part of a kit? So it seems rage is not tied to 'chaos' as much as Barbarians can't be lawful and therefore rage (being a Barb class feature) cannot be lawful. Still can see the legacy roots at play.


It seems a to be lawful vs. chaotic thing played out in the emotional vs. rational court. So, in a rage, the barbarian chooses to embrace the emotional visceral reaction to combat and go crazy. While raging, a barbarian cannot choose to really do anything other than fight or flight. You forgo decision making in favor of quick action and reaction.
This is opposed by the inability to make checks or concentrate. Basically, the barbarian in a rage can't use reason just response. A lawful person just won't discard his ability to reason his ability to be in control. That is why they won't rage. Someone mentioned the number of seconds in a day that one is raged versus not-raged, but alignment isn't a game of statistics. It a question of how do you act when everything is on the line. A lawful character clings to his reason when his life is on the line in combat, that is what makes him lawful. He doesn't think that he can just abandon reason when it's most convenient just as good characters don't commit evil acts when they are more convenient.
This is the argument that these things don't fit with the Urban archetype, and I agree my argument doesn't hold there, but I think that's just a kind of leftover you get from the way archetype class design works in PF. You can always try to convince your DM otherwise.


I think alignment restrictions make perfect sense in many cases, they prevent mixing and matching with other classes that are hard to combine from an RP or power/mechanic PoV.

I think in a homebrew game these things can be safely ignored for advanced gaming groups, if everyone at your game table agrees you should have no problem having the restriction lifted, as a GM I do so on a case by case basis if I like the concept and it isn't just a way to metagame into greater attack bonus and the like. Someone already mentioned martial artist making it quite possible to play a barbarian/monk.

Silver Crusade

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Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

We totally need a counter-thread named "So I am chaotic now and I can't calm down?".


Gorbacz wrote:
We totally need a counter-thread named "So I am chaotic now and I can't calm down?".

+1


1 person marked this as a favorite.

The limitation doesn't seem to make sense to me. Why do the powers choose not to activate if your view of the world changes? That just doesn't make any sense. Unless barbarians access their power from some chaos warp. Then we need to reflavor what the barbarian really is.

Grand Lodge

Then house rule it.


Robespierre wrote:
The limitation doesn't seem to make sense to me. Why do the powers choose not to activate if your view of the world changes? That just doesn't make any sense. Unless barbarians access their power from some chaos warp. Then we need to reflavor what the barbarian really is.

I agree with those above who cite the "reason" as being legacy issues.

.
However, I suspect the deeper cause is the perenniel problem D&D has always had with explaining what the chaos-law axis of alignment is supposed to represent. Although good-evil is a relatively straightforward moral calculus (conceptually, if not in detail) it's not really clear how law-chaos fits into a moral scheme. It seems to me people often define this axis based on personality traits - "lawful people are methodical, calculated, reasoned people and chaotic are unpredictable, emotive and irrational". That's not my preferred take on alignment, but it's relatively common.

As such, the 'no lawful berserk ragers' could be seen as defensible (even if not necessary) on the grounds that an essential component of 'rage' is losing one's rational control and overriding our ingrained sense of self preservation (a chaotic tendency on the above 'personality based' law-chaos dimension).


TriOmegaZero wrote:

I believe it should be renamed "warp spasm".

:)

I think I love you.

Grand Lodge

Pathfinder Adventure, Adventure Path, Pathfinder Accessories, Rulebook, Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Sir Ophiuchus wrote:
TriOmegaZero wrote:

I believe it should be renamed "warp spasm".

:)

I think I love you.

But what are you so afraid of?


Finished up a game recently, the dm did away with alignments, he never liked them much.

Didn't change a great deal, the world was not flooded with lawful barbarians. He really pushed the religion heavy though.

I had fun playing a scout that if alignment was on, would have been NE to CE. It was weird how lawful the party actually was, they followed the carrots and served those in charge. This little thief though, no, he raided, he stole, he vomited in libraries and threw books, man was crazy. Sometimes he got really angry, pursuing vendettas. Now this was good and fun roleplaying, and yep, alignment is one of the optional rules of this game that isn't exactly needed to run fun games.

Without alignment (although I prefer to have it in) you can more assuredly play archetypes or characters without worrying about how lawful you are, or chaotic or whatever. An adventurer does as they see fit, and if you are a traditionalist northern barbarian that respects laws, traditions and hates the forces of chaos, that works too.


TriOmegaZero wrote:
Sir Ophiuchus wrote:
TriOmegaZero wrote:

I believe it should be renamed "warp spasm".

:)

I think I love you.
But what are you so afraid of?

Grappling rules.

Grand Lodge

1 person marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Adventure, Adventure Path, Pathfinder Accessories, Rulebook, Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

With good reason! I am a monk/paladin after all.


TriOmegaZero wrote:
With good reason! I am a monk/paladin after all.

Hey. Pal. Don't make this weird.


TriOmegaZero wrote:
With good reason! I am a monk/paladin after all.

I can't be tied down. I'm sorry. My ring of freedom of movement will always come between us.

Silver Crusade

Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

Paladin/Monks of Irori ftw.


3.5 Loyalist wrote:

Finished up a game recently, the dm did away with alignments, he never liked them much.

Didn't change a great deal, the world was not flooded with lawful barbarians. He really pushed the religion heavy though.

I had fun playing a scout that if alignment was on, would have been NE to CE. It was weird how lawful the party actually was, they followed the carrots and served those in charge. This little thief though, no, he raided, he stole, he vomited in libraries and threw books, man was crazy. Sometimes he got really angry, pursuing vendettas. Now this was good and fun roleplaying, and yep, alignment is one of the optional rules of this game that isn't exactly needed to run fun games.

Without alignment (although I prefer to have it in) you can more assuredly play archetypes or characters without worrying about how lawful you are, or chaotic or whatever. An adventurer does as they see fit, and if you are a traditionalist northern barbarian that respects laws, traditions and hates the forces of chaos, that works too.

I think this is my point, form a rules perspective It doesn't break anything. why restrict just this one class, we has a society have grown, the druid does not need to be neutral now....


Welllll, the druid's philosophy is very neutral, they are attached to natural forces that are neutral, so they should probably be neutral.


Robespierre wrote:
Why do the powers choose not to activate if your view of the world changes?

Alignment isn't your view of the world- it's part of the core of what you are. If it was just a matter of how you view the world, then certain spells wouldn't hurt you more or less based on it. Your alignment can change your view of the world- but it's who you are.


TriOmegaZero wrote:
Sir Ophiuchus wrote:
TriOmegaZero wrote:

I believe it should be renamed "warp spasm".

:)

I think I love you.
But what are you so afraid of?

I'm afraid that I'm not sure of a mummy rot there is no cure for.


Druid alignment restrictions are just bizarre, in love with their own cuteness. (Much like the "what sort of pretty picture can I make on the alignment grid by coloring in some of the squares. That looks pretty" method of generating alignment restrictions used with many latter-day 3.5 classes.) With a barbarian, you can at least say "Alignment restrictions may not make total sense, but if there have to be alignment restrictions on this class, non-lawful makes sense." Druids are held to one of five alignments that aren't even the five alignments I would pick as the most appropriate five for an archetypical druid. The justifications for why they have to be "any neutral" are even more ludicrous. Druids have to care about a balance between law and chaos, or they have to care about a balance between good and evil (the latter notion itself totally idiotic), but just one or the other. That's good enough. And caring about this balance has to be manifested in druids actually having an alignment with a neutral element. It's not like the game treats "affinity for nature" as consistently a neutral thing - all sorts of nature-y stuff has other alignments. Dang dryads are CG by default. The fact that druids can be LN and NE but can't be CG is pretty silly. I'm not saying that druids shouldn't be able to be LN or NE, just that those aren't particularly high on the list of "ways I'd describe the archetypical druid" - just like I think that rogues should be able to be LG, but if I were slapping alignment restrictions on the rogue I wouldn't say "rogues can be LG, but not CN."


Helaman wrote:
Heck, why can't I have a LAWFUL Bard?!

You can.


Guess what it boils down for to me is, I am okay with the barbarian being non lawful I am not okay with them not being able to rage, once they are lawful that to me is the part that makes no sense. feel free to say they cant go barb again till they go back to non lawful like the monk.

Grand Lodge

Deadmanwalking wrote:
You could play a Barbarian in 2nd Ed. as a berserker (there was a character kit and everything)...but it certainly wasn't a base part of the class.

The Barbarian as a class wasn't even a part of 2nd edition...

TSR's reasoning was that to be a barbarian was a philosophy, not a choice of career or profession (which is what classes were in 1st/2nd edition)

The "Complete Barbarian's Handbook" (the 14th book in the series) didn't even come out until 1995 (and 2nd edition came out in 1989)...

And even then, it was the "Fighter Barbarian" or "Shaman" and not a "true" class unto itself...


Digitalelf wrote:
Deadmanwalking wrote:
You could play a Barbarian in 2nd Ed. as a berserker (there was a character kit and everything)...but it certainly wasn't a base part of the class.

The Barbarian as a class wasn't even a part of 2nd edition...

TSR's reasoning was that to be a barbarian was a philosophy, not a choice of career or profession (which is what classes were in 1st/2nd edition)

The "Complete Barbarian's Handbook" (the 14th book in the series) didn't even come out until 1995 (and 2nd edition came out in 1989)...

You also had Barbarian as a kit in the Complete Fighter's Handbook. The only mechanical abilities they had was that they got Endurance as a free NWP, and that they got more extreme results on reaction rolls on account of being "impressive".

There was also a Berserker kit, but it kind of sucked. The Berserk ability took a full turn (10 minutes/rounds) to activate, and had some pretty serious drawbacks as well.

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