Or, I’m saying Barbarian is a silly name for a class unless all the classes are so broad as to be meaningless… i.e. “I’m playing the Greek class.”
Well, hey, I agree. that it's a silly name for a class. I lean towards it being a silly class period. I still think it's worth doing a minimal amount steel-manning by finding a sense in which calling it "barbarian" makes sense.
I wholy agree with those who say the class should be called a Berserker given it’s central feature is building themselves into a frenzy before attacking their opponents.
I'm the one that kicked off this branch of the thread by stating that the barbarian was the berserker (from 1E MM) made generic, and that doing so created problems.
And a huge part of why is because arguably the most famous fantasy barbarian, Conan, shares NOTHING in common with what WotC-era D&D has called the Barbarian. Conan is, if anything, a multiclass fighter/rogue, in D&D terms. His culture is considered to be barbarian.
Yes, the Barbarian as it appears in UA I believe is an attempt at having a Conan class, right down to its weird hatred of magic. I have my doubts how applicable the thief or rogue class is to Conan. I think what thiefly or roguish activities he does falls under fair use ability for all characters. Ultimately I'd say the problem is that Conan is one guy, one unique character. If I thought making berserkers generic created some problems, you can imagine what I think of making a specific person into a generic class.
As I outlined above, Barbarian makes far more sense as a background which filters how the basic classes are perceived. What you say must be called a Barbarian I’d call a Barbarian Fighter. A ranger might also be Barbarian Rogue, a druid a Barbarian Wizard, and a shaman a Barbarian Cleric.
Yeah. Background makes perfect sense to me. This sort of thing is actually handled in core 1E. Or at least you have examples on how to handle it. Because it's a culturally-specific approach, and your fantasy world could have completely fictional cultures. Surprisingly few old-schoolers even know about it. But it's right there in print in Deities & Demigods.
For instance, under American Indian mythos, clerics are given an additional constraint--that in order to control something, he or she must have a part of it already. And it gives examples like to summon rain, the cleric must sprinkle water on the ground in the process of casting the spell. Or to cast a quest spell on some being, you need a piece of hair, article of used clothing, or something along those lines of the being.
On the flip side, a warrior can make a sacred bundle. It requires a certain series of quests, but once you have the sacred bundle you get +2 on all saves, only surprised 1 in 6, has a (natural) AC of 2, and one point is subtracted from each die of damage you take in battle. That eliminates the need for a d12 hit die, double CON bonus, or the double DEX bonus given to UA barbarians. Or for 3E, the d12 hit die, damage reduction, and uncanny dodge. No need for a special class at all.
There’s another thread about whether their are too many classes. I tend to say ‘yes’ largely in the sense that if you want more defined mechanics then the system needs another layer to it. One of the main reasons for why “fighters can’t have nice things” in later editions of D&D is that too much what formerly made up the fighter’s toolkit/conceptual space got yanked off into various classes that could be best summed up as “culturally specific fighters.”
So by the end of 3e there were the “barbarian”, the knight, the ranger, the samurai, the marshal, the paladin, and probably more I’m forgetting that all really belonged under the heading of fighter who because it was again a broad archetype could actually have things like a wide range of skills and various special abilities based on the broad areas of competence that professional warriors were generally expected to have (instead of not being able to know how to even do more than two of climb, jump, swim or ride a horse because all the cool skills “belonged” to classes split off from the fighter).
Sure. Or one thing I often bring up is, if you keep the number of classes small, to the level where a DM would naturally come to memorize them just through regular play, that means when writing up stat blocks, you don't have to spell out all the class abilities. One of the great strengths of old school D&D is you can put "C6" into a stat block and that instantly imparts a massive amount of information. Too many classes, and even before you run out of letters in the alphabet, you get to a point where the DM would have to stop and look it up, and so at that point you're better off just putting the info into the stat block, bloating it to the high heavens. It's not a good thing.
No, Barbarian as a class is not only a bad name for a class centered around going berserk, it is also at the start of WotC D&D’s greatest failures as a system.
Well, who's to say what's the greatest or where it started. But I agree, it's not a good thing.