I finally broke out of my favorite characters and created a barbarian. I usually tend towards the support characters because the role playing aspect of the game is my favorite and I don’t actually care much for how much damage my character can do or treasure items he finds. I love when my bard “Justin Timberlake” woos a hostile cult member into leaving her fanatical faith to travel and adventure with me though. Or playing a cleric and ever greeting characters in game by asking them if they’ve “heard the good news.” These things bring me great joy. So a barbarian is not in my wheel house, but I found a way.

I need to own my character and the quirky nature he has in order to get fully immersed into the game. So I made a barbarian named “Leny” who loves animals, wants to “live off the fat of the land” and calls everyone “George.” It has been an absolute blast. As you may have guessed if you ever had to read “Of Mice and Men,” Leny is not bright but is exceptionally strong and has a bit of an anger management problem when provoked or scared. He also is pretty good at smashing bad guys, but that’s not why I love him.

I love playing Leny because he is so much fun! He literally spends time trying to pet any animal he comes across. This has worked out very well so far. Upon meeting a super hostile Tressym, he rolled a critical on his animal handling and the pet has not left his side since. Leny managed to teach it a couple of commands and the flying cat lead us to an exceptionally dangerous beast in our last session. Very helpful. And when a hostile group landed near us on giant vultures, Leny again rolled a critical for animal handling and pet the carrion eaters baffling the would be adversaries and eventually they left without conflict.

For any who don’t care about how many pets their character can gather let me explain why else he is amazing. When raging the barbarian only suffers half damage on physical attacks. This is extremely worthwhile because the barbarian tends to get hit. I took the path of the “Totem Warrior” and decided that a bear is Leny’s spirit animal so now he takes half damage for any attack that isn’t psychic. This literally saved Leny’s bacon multiple times. Nearly every encounter in fact and as a result he has an every growing necklace of beast incisors.

Overall a solid class to play and it has been refreshing to be able to dive into the middle of the action while also enjoying the fun role playing aspect.

Cheers, may all your rolls be criticals.