Welcome to Guidance, Private Sanctuary’s source for tips and techniques for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, written by Everyman Gamer Alexander Augunas. Today, we’re going to be looking at a Barney the Dinosaur build.

As a toddler, I absolutely loved Barney the Dinosaur. As an older child, I chimed into all of the “Barney-shaming” rhymes and songs along with all of the other older children. So, you might ask, “Why are you doing a Barney the Dinosaur build, then, Alex?” Well, my readers, the answer is simple: I take solace in the fact that one, maybe two of you will ACTUALLY try this build and I’ll get a big laugh out of the whole thing!

Let’s move on with the article.

Background

From Wikipedia:

Barney & Friends is an American children’s television series aimed at children from ages 2 to 7. The series, which first aired on April 6, 1992, features the title character Barney, a purple anthropomorphic Tyrannosaurus rex who conveys educational messages through songs and small dance routines with a friendly, optimistic attitude.

Build Concept

Alright, let’s talk about what we’ll need for our Barney build!

• Nagaji: You may all commence with the snickering now.
• Bard (Duettist): What else would Barney be if he wasn’t a bard? Also, we can all have a good laugh about how this archetype trades all of the Knowledge abilities of the bard class for FRIENDSHIP. That’s right, no real educational value in this bard, just songs!
• Oracle: I’m only dipping into oracle for the cold-blooded curse, because again, hilarious. That said, the nature mystery actually offers a pretty awesome incentive for doing so: if I take the friend to the animals revelation, then all animals within 30 feet of you gain a bonus on saving throws equal to your Charisma modifier. That’s pretty excellent for our familiar.

With all this out of the way, let’s look at what may very well be the absolute silliest build that I have ever done on Iconic Design: Barney the Dinosaur!

Early Levels (1–7)

• Classes: bard (duettist) 6, oracle 1
• Feats: Spell Focus: enchantment (1st), Extra Revelation: nature’s whispers (3rd), Divine Expression (5th), Intimidating Performance (7th)
• Abilities: bardic performances (countersong, distraction, fascinate, inspire competence +2, inspire courage +2, suggestion), familiar (compsognathus, dinosaur), oracle’s curse (cold-blooded), nature mystery, performing familiar, revelations (friend to the animals), versatile familiar (sing), well-versed
• 2nd-Level Bard Spells Known (3/day): any four of your choice
• 1st-Level Bard Spells Known (4/day): any four of your choice
• 1st-Level Oracle Spells Known (3/day): cure light wounds, summon nature’s ally I; any two of your choice
• Bard Cantrips Known (at will): haunted fey aspect, know direction, lullaby, message, prestidigitation, summon instrument
• Oracle Orisons Known (at will): guidance, mending, vigor, stabilize

So I’m going to be leaving a LOT of room for creativity in this build, notably in the “what spells do I know” department. Mostly because we’re going to be focusing on enchantment magic and buffing with Barney, and the class we picked (the bard) is the master of both of those things, so you have a LOT of options to choose from here.

Feat-wise, Barney’s got Spell Focus: enchantment to help him pull off charm spells, hideous laughter spells, and more. All of the best crowd controlling bard spells are enchantment spells, so this goes a long way towards making your purple dinosaur a purple nightmare. This build takes a level of oracle at 3rd level, and so it also picks up Extra Revelation then too. Honestly, I want the oracle level so Barney can have the cold blooded curse. The curse’s benefits are decent enough, but I really like being able to tell people that Barney is a cold-blooded nagaji, which is the real reason I took the dip: for the LOLs. That said, the nature mystery has some AWESOME revelations for our build, particularly friend to the animals (a very Barney ability) and nature’s whispers. Nature’s whispers is going to give our big, hulking dinosaur some defensive power in that it allows Barney to use his Charisma bonus as his Dexterity when determining his AC and CMD. That’s a pretty powerful benefit, if I do say so myself. Furthermore, friend to the animals has the side effect of granting all animals (for friend or for foe) a bonus on saving throws equal to Barney’s Charisma, so long as he’s within 30 feet. That can be as big of a bonus as it is a penalty, but giving his familiar a nice saving throw bonus is pretty awesome, as we’ll soon see. If your party has hunters, druids, cavaliers, or paladins, they’ll absolutely love you for this revelation. If they don’t, this may not be the build for you. Worse to worse, you could always run away; inspire courage doesn’t have a range!

Speaking of inspire courage, it sucks to lose out on bardic performance goodies because of multiclassing, so Barney is going to be a worshiper of Shelyn so he can take the Divine Expression feat. This feat allows a worshiper of Shelyn to stack his cleric or oracle levels with his bard levels when determining the effects of bardic performance, specifically rounds per day and the action needed to start the performance. This is a very helpful ability, and we actually need it to qualify for the final feat in this level range: Intimidating Performance. This feat allows Barney to make a free demoralize attempt, substituting his Perform skill for Intimidate, to demoralize one opponent. I love the idea that Barney’s music is so campy that it actually demoralizes opponents, but to make it even better a demoralized opponent takes a –2 penalty on saving throws, which makes it even more likely that one of Barney’s enchantments will affect the target.

Barney also gets some neat abilities from the duettist archetype at this stage of the build. For one, his familiar benefits from all of Barney’s versatile performances, so that little guy’ll be singing and dancing right alongside of Barney. (Sometimes.) He also gets the ability to allow his familiar to perform in his steed. Doing so costs more rounds of performance, but it can be extremely beneficial to have your familiar perform while you do something else.

Whelp, that’s enough for THIS level bracket! Let’s continue onward to the mid levels.

Mid Levels (8 –14)

• Classes: bard (duettist) 13, oracle 1
• Feats: Spell Focus: enchantment (1st), Extra Revelation: nature’s whispers (3rd), Divine Expression (5th), Intimidating Performance (7th), Weapon Focus: longsword (9th), Dazzling Display (11th), Spell Penetration (13th)
• Abilities: bardic performances (countersong, distraction, fascinate, inspire competence +4, inspire courage +3, inspire greatness, soothing performance, suggestion), familiar (compsognathus, dinosaur), harmonizing familiar, jack-of-all-trades, oracle’s curse (cold-blooded), nature mystery, performing familiar, revelations (friend to the animals), versatile familiar (dance, sing), well-versed
• 5th-Level Bard Spells Known (1/day): any four of your choice
• 4th-Level Bard Spells Known (3/day): any four of your choice
• 3rd-Level Bard Spells Known (4/day): any four of your choice
• 2nd-Level Bard Spells Known (5/day): any four of your choice
• 1st-Level Bard Spells Known (5/day): any four of your choice
• 1st-Level Oracle Spells Known (3/day): cure light wounds, summon nature’s ally I; any two of your choice
• Bard Cantrips Known (at will): haunted fey aspect, know direction, lullaby, message, prestidigitation, summon instrument
• Oracle Orisons Known (at will): guidance, mending, vigor, stabilize

So in the mid-levels, the first thing that we’re going to do is build up to Dazzling Display, because Intimidating Performance allows Barney to use his Perform skills to demoralize EVERYONE with his performances when using this feat. That’s hilarious! After getting this feat, picking up Spell Penetration is important to ensure that all of Barney’s nasty debuff spells land on his enemies.

In terms of class features, the only abilities that Barney has that aren’t standard bard abilities are his new harmonizing familiar ability, which allows Barney and his familiar to SING TOGETHER! This allows them to make their performances more effective in terms of their bonus or harder to resist with saving throws, both of which make for very potent abilities. Barney also gets abilities such as jack-of-all-trades and versatile familiar (dance). Other then that, it’s a very standard bard build.

Let’s finish this puppy off in the final levels!

Endgame (15+)

• Classes: bard (duettist) 19, oracle 1
• Feats: Spell Focus: enchantment (1st), Extra Revelation: nature’s whispers (3rd), Divine Expression (5th), Intimidating Performance (7th), Weapon Focus: longsword (9th), Dazzling Display (11th), Spell Penetration (13th), Greater Spell Penetration (15th), Greater Spell Focus: enchantment (17th), Extra Performance (19th)
• Abilities: bardic performances (countersong, distraction, fascinate, inspire competence +6, inspire courage +4, inspire greatness, inspire heroics, mass suggestion, soothing performance, suggestion), familiar (compsognathus, dinosaur), harmonizing familiar, jack-of-all-trades, oracle’s curse (cold-blooded), nature mystery, performing familiar, revelations (friend to the animals), symphonic familiar, versatile familiar (dance, sing, string), well-versed
• 6th-Level Bard Spells Known (4/day): any five of your choice
• 5th-Level Bard Spells Known (5/day): any five of your choice
• 4th-Level Bard Spells Known (5/day): any six of your choice
• 3rd-Level Bard Spells Known (5/day): any six of your choice
• 2nd-Level Bard Spells Known (5/day): any six of your choice
• 1st-Level Bard Spells Known (5/day): any six of your choice
• 1st-Level Oracle Spells Known (3/day): cure light wounds, summon nature’s ally I; any two of your choice
• Bard Cantrips Known (at will): haunted fey aspect, know direction, lullaby, message, prestidigitation, summon instrument
• Oracle Orisons Known (at will): guidance, mending, vigor, stabilize

So the only unique class feature that Barney gets at the end game is called symphonic familiar. This ability allows Barney and his familiar to perform separate bardic performances, though doing so costs 3 rounds of performance per round. A hefty price, but incredible considering that you could have inspire courage and inspire heroics active at the same time, or some other combination of abilities that I can’t even comprehend at the moment. Feat-wise, we’re really just taking abilities that make Barney’s spells more powerful; Greater Spell Focus and Greater Spell Penetration to ensure that they land more often

Overall Barney’s build is a decent melee bard that isn’t going to ever come close to outshining a fighter, but its strength lines not only in its decent attack benefits, but also in the enchantments it dishes out and the attack benefits of Baby Boop.

Who’s Baby Bop, you ask? Why, Barney’s familiar, of course. >: )

Meet “Baby Bop”

In the TV Show, Baby Boop was Barney’s sidekick, a three-year-old triceratops. We’re not going to be able to follow that perfectly with our build, because instead of a triceratops our familiar is a Compsognathus. In addition to giving Barney a much-needed +4 bonus on initiative checks, our familiar has a special archetype from the Familiar Folio.

He’s a mauler.

Essentially, a mauler is never allowed to talk (good thing you don’t need to speak to use bardic performances), but in exchange the mauler gets a Strength bonus, plus a WONDERFUL ability that allows it to transform into a Medium creature. And going from Tiny to Medium gives a nice size bonus in and of itself (a +4, I believe). In short, this dinosaur becomes as big as a person and FAST! This isn’t an extraordinarily effective strategy without a dip into the Eldritch Guardian fighter archetype and some serious investment into combat feats, but the idea that our singing, dancing familiar can make itself as big as Barney (holding true to the characters in the show) is pretty freaking hilarious, even if the familiar isn’t very effective in combat. If mauler isn’t right for you or your group, there are plenty of other familiar archetypes to choose from, or don’t if you don’t want one. Me? I’m going for the soul crushingly bad jokes here!

And with that final, soul-crushing joke, I’m done for today. What did you think of today’s build? How badly did I crush your faith in me with this one? Leave your answers and comments below, and I’ll see you next week for … BIRTHDAY WEEK! BIRTHDAY WEEK! BIIIIIIIRTH. DAAAAAAAAAAY. WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEK!

Alexander “Alex” Augunas has been playing roleplaying games since 2007, which isn’t nearly as long as 90% of his colleagues. Alexander is an active freelancer for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and is best known as the author of the Pact Magic Unbound series by Radiance House. Alex is the owner of Everyman Gaming, LLC and is often stylized as the Everyman Gamer in honor of Guidance’s original home. Alex’s favorite color is blue, and the following was a real conversation between Alex and his not-gamer father:

DAD: “What are you working on now? “Baby Boop?”
ALEX: “No, ‘Baby Bop.’ I’m doing an Iconic Design for Barney the Dinosaur.
DAD: —Groans—
ALEX: “That’s precisely the reaction I’m going for!”
DAD: “Well son, its precisely the reaction that you’re going to GET.”