A friend of mine wanted to play an improvised weapon-wielding barbarian. He was using a homebrew subclass he found online, but frankly speaking, it was terrible, so I reworked it. This is the result of 2 hours of rushed brainstorming and development. I’m not a barb main, so I’m not really familiar with how they work, but I’m satisfied with the result.
While creating the subclass, I tried to satisfy the following demands:
- Allow the player to use unarmed strikes and improvised weapons, obviously.
- Try to make improvised weapons unique and not just “reflavoured martial weapons” (achieved with the random roll and additional effects to unarmed stirkes and attacks with improvised weapons, I hope).
- More choices during combat. The person who was going to play this doesn’t like how shallow and same-y most martials in 5e play (hence the “Barbarian Exploits” feature at 6th level).
Any kind of feedback is very much appreciated!
Love it! The flavor is great, and it makes improv weapons feel like their own thing. A couple suggestions:
It looks like improv weapon damage doesn’t add your STR modifier, which means it’ll wane in relevance mechanically. I’d probably add your STR mod to improv weapon attacks.
The level 14 feature is okay mechanically, but it doesn’t have the same feel as the others to me. Instead of having improv weapons not break, I recommend you have them deal additional damage when they break. Either double the damage dice (tripling them on a crit), or something along those lines. Feels like this would be more in the spirit of the crazy barb breaking chairs over people.
My recommendation: instead of having weapons not break, give an extra damage bonus for shattering an improv weapon (deals an extra
I’m pretty sure that all melee weapons add your STR modifier by default, so there’s no reason to explicitly add that to the feature, as it would be redundant.
I really appreciate your second point though, I’ve taken it into account for the new version. Thanks a lot!