DF Felltower: What's a Barbarian?

It came up on T-Bone's blog about what counts as a barbarian, for magic items like Terrifying War Paint that works better for barbarians.

So who counts as a barbarian?

For me, it's pretty simple. You need:

- the appropriate Social Stigma for barbarians and one of the following:

- a character built using any of the barbarian templates from Denizens: Barbarians

- a character built using Brute from Dungeon Fantasy 15: Henchmen who has chosen the barbarian Power-Ups route (p. 11).

- a barbarian lens.

That doesn't work for Power-Ups, though. For those, you need one of the first two - a lens specifically doesn't count. This is avoid the whole "Swashbuckler with a Knight lens" and "Knight with a Swashbuckler lens" munchkin route designed to pick and choose from two pools of highly effective Power-Ups for synergistic power-gaming.

Why does this matter?

A few magic items work better for particular template. So you need to know who qualifies.

So where does this leave GMs who made the judgment call to let people freely change, modify, or ignore templates? It leaves them making a judgment call about who counts as what. It's a choice you've made to get away from the built-in rigidity of DF's default approach; it's yours to make but once you've made it there will be spillover consequences. Personally I'd pick some defining traits and stick with them. Disadvantages work well - Social Stigma, for example - because generally people do not take those just to benefit from them.