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It's hard to describe him, but I'll do my best:
Kenny is the type of player that started off playing barbarians, still prefers barbarians, and can play any class as a barbarian. Oftentimes minimally invested in roleplay he perks up in combat and gets really excited about crits even if they're rolled by our opponents. Sometimes especially if they're rolled by our opponents.
He practice rolls: "Practice roll, practice roll, practice roll, practice roll. Real roll! [rolls a crit]". The central limit theorem does not apply to his characters. I've seen this in practice. One time I played his character while he was gone and completely failed until I started practice rolling. Crits galore. If Kenny tries practice rolling with a non-barbarian this also fails.
He often attacks inanimate objects in combat. If we are fighting pirates there's a good chance he's fighting the ship. If we are fighting a bronze golem on a platform suspended by chains above a pit of lava he attacks the chains. When asked why he explains that his character, a former slave, hates chains.
Since he might be moving soon we have been joking that this might finally be the week that he runs a one-shot. He finally did. And it f***ing rocked.
The Rules of the $wag Barbarian one-shot:
- Only barbarians. Level 6. 25 point buy.
- 8th level wealth but the extra 2 levels of wealth can only be spent on luxury items that don't affect combat in any way.
- 3v3 barbarian combat, we rolled randomly before the game to figure out teams.
- Arena combat, no explanation of why we were fighting each other.
How it went:
As we were finishing up our characters Kenny asks me how to calculate the CR of a challenging encounter. I explain that we take the average party level (3 6th level barbarians with a generous point buy = APL roughly 6) and he starts flipping through the bestiary looking for something appropriate. Then he asks how costs scale for magic weapons. We talk about that.
He draws a huge, perfectly symmetrical map that he explains was inspired by Super Bomberman, complete with respawning goblinskull bombs. There are chariots with unkillable horses and ejector seats, ramps, and jump pads. Everything is destructible including boxes on platforms that we later find out have potions of resurrection that you can drink before you die and have an instant resurrect effect. In the middle is the piece de resistance: A ( CR 12 taiga) giant on a bridge with a +10 great sword in its stomach. How we knew there was a great sword in it's stomach I still don't know.
My character, Swagthor the Barbarian (aka Swaggy T an urban/mad dog barbarian mounted archer*) was teamed with 69 Chains (a primal rager covered in gold chains) and another barbarian, Electra Diamond, (played by our paladin) a completely bedazzled invulnerable rager. On the other side were two breaker barbarians and titan mauler who wore a simple loin cloth and carried a great club made out of the entirety of his gold.
Combat was fast paced and fun. Our team tried to kill the giant early on, which led to the primal rager being killed. The invulnerable rager (played by the paladin) tried to heal him by lobbing a resurrection potion at his corpse but rolled a 1. The giant swatted the potion out of the air and gave her the Dikembe Mutembo finger wag. Not in his house. My archer barbarian ended up chased all around the map by two breaker barbarians in the unstoppable chariot before finally being cornered and killed. The dead players took control of the giant and combat reached a crescendo when the breaker barbarians managed to sunder it's spear. The last two barbarians managed fortunate crits that killed the giant before fighting to death for control of the +10 great sword. Presumably the winner went off and started a $wag barbarian kingdom somewhere.
* Technically you can't combine these two archetypes. Kenny's GM rulings were generous and largely uniformed. It turned out that almost all of the barbarians had some kind of minor rules issues.
I got a good laugh out of this. Well done.