My personal favorite role on the tabletop is and has been the barbarian. Named by the Romans, who mocked the tribes on the outskirts of the Empire by imitating their language as "Bar bar bar.": barbarians are outsiders.
Many players seek out the balance of being independent and powerful without turning the game into a contest of "the loneliest wolf who ever did wolf." Barbarians are a great way to do this, loyalty to compatriots is a classic trope of this archetype, and yet they can stand out by simply being foreign in a frightening way. Think Worf from Star Trek: the Next Generation for a great example of how to support your party and contribute to the team effort, while remaining an outsider. Your ways are brutal, your "culture" inexplicable to the civilized folk, and your role on the battlefield contributes to this notion of someone who breaks the mold without becoming less valuable to the team for it.
The first rule of playing a barbarian is to find a GM who throws out the alignment restrictions. You are not chaotic, you are not anarchistic; in fact, you often hold to your codes and laws more tenaciously than your more "civilized" companions. Thing is, your laws are strange and scary. Do you honor the dead by consuming them? Do you speak orcish, and empathize with these horrifying monsters? Maybe you take "honors" striking an unarmed opponent as a sign of respect for the threat they pose, even when restrained. Or perhaps your retaliation is simply out of proportion to the crime, by their standards. The gist of it is, your ways are ironclad, and foreign to the classic models of behavior. Pursue your course with dignity, even when it seems savage to people too "enlightened" to understand.
The second rule of playing a barbarian is to be outwardly fearless. Your character may not actually be fearless, but good luck to anyone trying to get an admission of that. In the absence of a good rogue, you're the trapfinder: with your deep HP pool, high constitution, and a skill set built for recklessness. When everyone's afraid to do the thing, you're the one who steps up and does the thing.
The third rule is to fear all magic, at least at first. This can manifest as animosity toward party magicians ("Milk-drinker witch" is a great term to bandy about), fear of portals, unwillingness to carry or use magical artifacts, or really anything else. As the game progresses, feel free to warm to individual magic users who've shown their mettle, but no amount of growing respect will make a magical staff in your hands anything more than a particularly glow-ey and fancy beatin' stick. I particularly enjoy making unjustified claims of magical ability: one time I decided the best way to kill a wizard was with magic, so I tackled him and hit him in the head with a magical rock we found. Good times.
The fourth rule is: DO NOT FORGET TO RAGE. This is huge. If you forget to rage, you throw away what's mechanically about the barbarian. "But it lowers my defenses." No, you don't get safe, you get angry. "But I only have so many rounds of rage per day." It only takes one to rip a kobold in half and throw out an intimidation check at his little friends.
The fifth rule, Charisma is not your dump stat. Intimidation is huge. One of the most fun things you can do as a barbarian is play bad cop when the prisoner's getting questioned. This feeds back into foreign ideas of what is or isn't acceptable behavior. Go off the rule book, or be nicer than everyone expects, just so long as the party has to reevaluate their view of you and of your culture in light of how you think a prisoner should be treated. Don't kneecap your Constitution or Strength to do it, but keep Charisma up, if you can. It's worth it. This character wasn't a barbarian, but had some very barbarian tendencies: a half-orc I'm still playing. As two players argued over one of them overpaying for a draft ox, I sliced the Gordian knot of the argument by walking up, taking the ox by the horns, getting eye to eye with it and rolling animal handling to say: "You are a 100 gold ox. You can deserve that distinction. Be worthy of what was spent for you." The ox straightened, flexed, and ended that argument. Aggressive, primal charisma has potency behind it.
Speaking of slicing through the Gordian knot: rule six, barbarians are pragmatic. When everyone argues over what a button does, you know the quickest way to get an answer is to press it and wait. When an enemy is too dangerous to leave alive, you kill it without looking back. Occam's razor will serve you in good standing here: the simplest solution is the best solution.
Next time you roll up a character at your table, consider the wonderful world of violence that is the barbarian, you'll have a heck of a time with it.
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