Which do you prefer, the fighter or the barbarian?

[gnomersy]

drbuzzard wrote:

williamoak wrote:

I believe we must now add "marital/martial" alongside other typography sillines like "rouge/rogue". I've been seeing it a lot lately.

But what if you have a marital rouge?

I thought rouge was makeup? On the plus side rouge is way more useful to a group of adventurers at least it can be useful in a fight and doesn't expect to get paid.

[Otm-Shank]

drbuzzard wrote:

But what if you have a marital rouge?

Applied liberally before date night?

[Atarlost]

The barbarian is better balanced and more interesting mechanically, but the flavor is terrible.

A barbarian is defined by his temper. This locks out a wide variety of character archetypes, including the original archetypal barbarian.

The fighter has more potential than the barbarian in the same way undyed cloth has more potential than an olive and crimson tartan. The latter has its place, but it doesn't exactly match every complexion and you're really limited on how you accessorize it.

[Maklak]

> marital/martial
It didn't look quite right when I wrote it, but I blame the spell checker :P

Anyway, these other classes with full BAB progression have some awesome abilities and a warrior just gets more feats, so they need to be used effectively and even then it seems underpowered.

[Quandary]

Flavor-wise, no difference, I don't associate fixed flavors with each.
Only problem there is with Fighter and lack of skill points making it inplausible to pull off some flavor.
(one or two archetypes do address that though, and give the F more skill ranks/class skills)
Each of them have options that may not fit into one specific flavor image:
For both, the answer is you can ignore what you are not actively using.
You don't have to take every Rage Power that might conflict with the image of the character.
You don't have to use every weapon and armor that Fighter grants, yet conflicts with the image/history of the character.
That mechanically you are entitled to is irrelevant, if you never use it, it doesn't impact the character.
Not much different than any and every character being mechanically entitled to take Eldritch Heritage Feats.

Barbarian is basically preferrable for anything except an Archery focus.

Re: resource management, that is something you could pawn off to the GM if they were accomodating.
Give up on Rage Cycling strategies, and just auto-rage in combat until the GM says you can't anymore.

[Skull]

I like both classes.

And I favour the one or the other. Currently I like the barbarian more. I went beast totem for the claws.

The fluff around rage can be changed to whatever you like: mythical ability to take on the savegry of nature or animals, demon possession, kai-o-ken (or the various other "push body beyond what one can normally do" that pops up in anime), bloodlust trance or whatever else you want it to be. :P

I do tend to have played more dwarves recently, and fighters feel more natural. But both classes work for that too.

[Quandary]

Fighter is also great for Crossbow-ery, since you can grab Exotic:Repeating XBow at first, or maybe Rapid Reload, and later pick up XBow Mastery which supersedes both of those (and doesn't have them as pre-reqs), and just retrain the earlier Feat. Feat Retraining can be very signifigant for Fighters. Just remember it only applies to the Fighter Bonus Feats, normal Feats can't be swapped out as easily.