D&D: New Barbarian Playtest Rules – Now You Can See Things With Your Strength
The new playtest rules touch on Barbarians. And the Playtest Barbarian can see, not with their eyes, but with their muscles.
Look I don’t get it any more than you do. But the fact of the matter is, in the new playtest packet, the playtest Barbarian we get to play with, can, at 2nd-level, see with their Strength. Now, of course, the designers of D&D would have you believe that this “represents primal power coursing through and around you.” But we all know that that’s what Wisdom is for. Power coursing through someone comes from one of the three mental ability scores.
You don’t do that for fifty years and suddenly turn things around. Nope, Barbarians have muscle sight. And several other changes as well. In fact, the Berserker might be something worth actually playing this time around.
Playtest Barbarians – Musclevision and More
Let’s start with a quick overview of what’s different. Rage gets tweaked, but only a little. It no longer auto-continues when you take damage, so no more slapping yourself to stay fighting mad. But it does keep going if you make an attack roll, cause an enemy to make a saving throw, or take a Bonus Action to keep it going.
Some class features get shuffled around, but for the most part, the Barbarian has about the same sort of stuff to look forward to. There are a few new features. Starting with Weapon Mastery. Where the Fighter gets three weapons to use with Weapon Mastery, the Barbarian only gets two, and can only pick from melee weapons. But that’s all you were going to use anyway, so it’s no big limit.
At 2nd level, Primal Knowledge aka Muscle Vision lets you use your Strength score in place of the normal ability score for Acrobatics, Intimidation, Perception, Stealth, and Survival. So you can use your mighty thews to be extra quiet too, especially since you’ll have advantage on these checks because Rage grants advantage on Strength checks.
Other features, on the other hand, get nerfed slightly. For instance, Brutal Critical no longer adds an extra die, it just adds flat damage equal to your Barbarian, which caps the maximum damage you could do by a significant chunk. But might be more consistent overall.
Honestly though, the Barbarian as a base class isn’t too terribly different. It just sort of gets shuffled around. What is different though, is the new version of the Berserker.
Barbarian Berserker – Now Worth Playing
The Berserker has been a much-maligned Barbarian subclass in vanilla 5E. And one simple change seems like it’ll actually make it playable. Frenzy, which was the main problem because it let you super rage, making an extra attack as a bonus action, which was good, at the cost of exhaustion, which was bad, works differently.
Now, when you Frenzy, you just deal extra damage to the first target you hit on your turn with a Strength-based attack. You roll d6s equal to your Rage damage bonus, which starts at 2 and climbs up to 5. Which is pretty spicy.
Berserkers also gain Retaliation early and Intimidating Presence later, which is ultimately a win. Retaliation is the other big feature of the Berserker, so it’s great to actually get access to it before the campaign fizzles out or finishes.
And that’s the new playtest Barbarian. What do you think?
