So, a friend of mine plays a barbarian.
He is a bit allergic to bookkeeping, and His Eyes Glaze Over when presented with the vast array of possible choices for feats and rage powers: The meta-game of character building doesn't appeal to him at all. Which isn't a problem at low levels, but tends to make his characters lacklustre at higher levels.
So to have fun, he needs a character that is easy to play, and he needs a bit of help building it. So I'm pitching in, but I'm trying to be tactful about it and not hijack his character... not my forté, but I'm trying...
For his first rage power, he chose Guarded Stance (yes, we're playing Core only, and I am reluctant to suggest we expand: even though my barbarian-playing friend would likely be the one to benefit the most, he would also appreciate the extra options the least).
At the time I hadn't read up on the bbn, so I kept my thoughts on the wisdom of prioritizing AC on a 19 Str (when not raging) greataxe-wielding bbn to myself: I always figured the point of the melee bbn was to "git thar fustest with the mostest"... everything else be damned. But he's free to make suboptimal choices, and it's not a bad choice. Right?
Wrong. Guarded Stance requires a move action to activate. Once activated, it (perversely) doesn't last until the end of the rage, it lasts Con modifier rounds. And to top it off, it only applies against melee attacks.
This was all too much for my friend. Even if he'd been willing and able to learn the mechanics (he hadn't two levels later), he'd still have hated the chore of keeping track of what his AC was at what time against whom.
So I petitioned the GM for a simplifying houserule on Guarded Stance, and we now have it as:
When raging, you gain a +1 dodge bonus to AC.
I think this is much better. It plays so much more smoothly. And I can't see why it should be unbalanced vs. the original. Sure it's more powerful at low levels, and maybe less powerful at high levels due to the original's scaling, but does that matter? (I note the APG Beast Totem has a similar effect, and scales with level, but that it also requires the Lesser BT and grants a nat amr bonus, which is not as good as a dodge bonus. Comments?)
Which got me thinking. The first thing I houseruled when GMing 3.0 was the Dodge feat. RAW 3.x, you had to choose one attacker each round that the dodge bonus applied against; I ruled that it applied against everything. So I cheered when I saw that PF had done the exact same.
Simplify, simplify the needless complexity!
I wondered: Why did the PF developers, who otherwise did a splendid job of simplifying 3.5, merging skills etc., introduce so much needless complexity to the barbarian?
Because, now that I have looked into building one, there's... room for improvement.
There's the silliness that is Rage Cycling. Available to all @ bbn lvl 17, when they gain Tireless Rage. Probably achieavable much sooner; not really interested in the details.
I don't see RCing so much as exploiting a rules loophole as a consequence of flawed rules implementation. The obvious (to me anyway) fix is to not have rage powers that are usable once per rage. Make them 1/rnd or 1/day instead. Not every XdY rounds, either: Needless complexity again. Simplify!
(I do see a way of effectively stopping RCing with just one tiny tweak: Make it a swift action to enter rage. I can't help but notice that most (all?) of the 1/rage RPs are swift or immediate actions to activate. But this, again, begs the question: Why the 1/rage limitation at all? At higher levels the limiting factor is going to be that swift action, anyway. If it's deemed so good it should't be usable-once-per-round-while-precluding-use-of-other-once-per-round-goodies, why not just say "once a day" and call it one?)
What? I'm ranting again? Oh.
Ehhh...
Well anyway, I think our GM will get some more barbarian-related houserule petitions soon.