Creating an adventure for your players inDungeons & Dragonsis not a simple task at all. Even running a pre-established adventure comes with its challenges. Among all the story, worldbuilding, and characters, you still have to verify the game offers nice doses of challenges, having easy, medium, hard, and deadly combats spread throughout their journey.
Still, sometimes, a player who knows their way into the stats and rules makes a character that is a bit of a beast in combat, making difficult fights end with ease. Thus, we’re here to analyze Barbarians, known for being powerhouses right at level one, and make sure you can still offer a good challenge for your player with entertaining fights.
Keep in mind that while the goal here is to increase difficulty for them, going too hard here with tricks or countering all their abilities could make your player not have fun or even kill their character. We don’t recommend using these tricks constantly or using many of them in the same fight.
6Use A Bigger Barbarian Or Creature
Fight Fire With Fire
The first tactic that can be used in more than one way is using numbers. D&D is a bunch of math, all things considered, and if your Barbarian player has a big health pool and causes a lot of damage, you just need another character that has a bigger health pool to endure this damage and hurt your player character hard enough to take a lot of hit points.
A great solution is simply making a Barbarian of your own but more powerful. They’d challenge the party, resist damage, and take big chunks of damage from the Barbarian, even if they’re using Rage. With two tank characters fighting one another, this could be a long fight, but you’re essentially locking the Barbarian player into dealing with this enemy while the rest of the party can worry about whatever other enemy is in the fight.
The same also appliesto using monsterswho have resistance against slashing, piercing, or bludgeoning damage, so they can tank the Barbarian.
5Use Lots Of Minions
Fight Fire With Numbers
Inverting the process also works here. You can flood and surround the Barbarian with a lot of enemies. Barbarians don’t tend to have area-of-effect tactics, so their choice would be to attack one of them at a time and possibly attack two to three of them on their turn at best.
Even if some of these minions die, there will be enough of them to cause serious damage to the Barbarian, making this a difficult fight for them while also giving them a proper tank opportunity, with the player getting the attention of a multitude of enemies at once (this also may stop spellcaster players from using area spells out of fear of hurting their friend, or even have them use it and also hurt the Barbarian). Plus, they’ll get the satisfaction of enduring and killing a legion of enemies, making your player very happy in the end - if they don’t fall.
4Have Ranged Enemies
And Make Sure You’re Far Enough
Another simple trick that can be combined with the previous two is to have ranged enemies, preferably in a scenario that benefits them, with covers and specific routes to reach them, or abilities such as flight. Barbarian’s range tactics involve mostly thrown weapons, which don’t have a lot of range and don’t cause nearly as much damage - unless you give your player a powerful, magic weapon that they can throw and summon back to their hands.
By overwhelming themwith ranged attackswhile they can’t reach these enemies - you can also use the previous examples to block their path to the ranged ones - the Barbarian will have to choose which enemy they’ll have to focus on. It’ll fall to the rest of the party to defeat the remaining enemies, giving your players excellent opportunities for teamwork and strategizing.
3Rely On Magic Damage
Especially Psychic
Unless we have a Bear Totem Barbarian to deal with, Rage will only give your player resistance to three damage types: bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing. In other words, if you want to hit them hard, magic is the way to go, as you have many damage types to go here, such as fire, cold, radiant, necrotic, thunder, and many, many others.
All that said, there’s one detail about your spells you need to be careful about: which ability score is used on the Saving Throw? Most spells ask for Dexterity, followed by Constitution. Barbarians are usually good at both of these (along with Strength), and their feature Danger Sense will even give them an advantage in Dexterity Saving Throws.
This means your best bet is spells that force them into Wisdom, Intelligence, or Charisma Saving Throws, causing damage such as Psychic - which is also the only damage type Bear Totem Barbarians are not resistant to, so not even they are safe from this damage. you may also use spells that rely on your Attack Roll, such as Inflict Wounds or Guiding Bolt.
2End Their Rage
Not Hitting Them Can Be Your Greatest Hit
If you want to make the Barbarian less resistant, give them a time-out. Unless their level is a bit high - 15 or more, to be specific - their Rage will end earlier if they take no damage or cause no damage for a full round of combat. And there are a few ways to ensure that.
Byrestraining, stunning, paralyzing,enchanting them to not attack the enemy or even something as dreadful as petrifying them, you may verify the Barbarian will lose at least more than one round, with paralyzing being the better option, as spells like Hold Person will demand a high Wisdom score for an easy escape, something they’ll likely not have. Plus, if the paralysis lasts for a while, you can always just attack and get free critical hits.
1Use Mind Control
Turn Them Into Your Greatest Weapon
If we continue with the magic route a bit longer, we’ll get into enchantment spells, a neat trick against martial powerhouses like Barbarians. While a simple enchantment to make them see the enemy as an ally is already helpful, something stronger like Dominate Person can force the rest of the players to deal with the Barbarian instead of you.
If you have a player who’s a good sport about it, they can even use this for a fun roleplaying opportunity and actually do tactical strikes against the party, or you can just tell them who you want them to attack and let them go for it. Illusions, where the character can’t determine who is friend or foe, are also a fun gimmick to throw at them and the whole party, to be fair.
