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Web Video / Tulok the Barbrarian

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Welcome back to Building Character, where we figure out how to play as your favorite fictional characters in Dungeons & Dragons.
— Tulok at the beginning of every episode.

Tulok the Barbrarian is a Youtuber who specializes in building all kinds of fictional characters in Fifth Edition of Dungeons & Dragons. His formula of the videos is to start by establishing the goals to achieve to capture the feel of the character. He then guides a build of the character through all 20 levels, explaining what various class features, feats or spells do and what they can accomplish for this character. He finishes off by listing the strong and weak points of the build.

Tulok has started doing videos in 2018 and has so far done over 500 videos for various kinds of characters from popculture from several franchises. Following the release of Elden Ring, he's begun creating fictional characters and characters from the game itself in that game as well on his secondary channel, Tulok and Mango.

Characters exclusive to Patreon are in italics.

    Franchises from which Tulok has made multiple characters 

    Characters who are sole representatives of their respective franchises Tulok has made a build for 

Tulok has also begun a series providing a homebrew subclass for each class in the form of a scholar examining the various heroes of the continent of Moriae after the destruction of a large portion of it.

    Homebrews with Character Examples 

Tulok the Barbrarian provides examples of

  • Adaptational Villainy:
    • It was done mostly for comedy, but his Banjo and Kazooie build involves giving Banjo Warlock levels, justified by him being an agent of Shadowfell, and Kazooie being a descendant of the Raven Queen.
    • Princess Peach was made a Necromancer, using Raise Dead on all of her Mushroom Kingdom subjects to increase her army of Toads.
  • Alchemy Is Magic: Alchemist subclass for artificer, which got used for characters like Leon and Rikku. Ironically somewhat characters from Fullmetal Alchemist do not use it, since their alchemy functionally aligns more with magic done by wizards or sorcerers in D&D.
  • Archetypal Character:
    • Franchise-limited version, in his Green Lantern, Men in Black, Pokemon trainer, Ghost Rider and Steve from Minecraft he notes this build can be used for any of the characters associated with the profession.
    • Likewise, to a lesser extent, he pointed out that a Lex Luthor build would make for a good remake of his Tony Stark build, since both are extremely wealthy leading characters of Comic Book company metafranchises that lead superhuman alliances, both of whom have opposed The Cape at some point, only real difference being moral alignment.
    • In his Legolas video he noted he gets complaints from Lord of the Rings fans who argue Fellowship members are so archtypal and influential they should each be a single class build, since they inspired these classes. He argues that it may have been the case once and still may be with some of them, like Gimli, but D&D had changed a lot since then and you need to multiclass to reflect abilities of likes of Aragorn, Legolas or Gandalf now.
    • The Speedwagon build (a Sirfetch'd build, based off his Sirfetch'd in his Pokémon Sword and Shield Nuzlocke) on his Tulok and Mango channel was made as a generic, shirtless, Greek Hoplite so that it could easily be used for King Leonidas from 300.

  • Audience Shift: The announcement of OneDnD has led Tulok to create a few non-DnD videos, such as:
  • Author Tract:
    • Played for Laughs, Tulok has a running gag to put True Strike, generally considered the worst spell in the game, on builds and justify it by ranting about whatever bigoted or reactionary comments were put under his previous videos. The joke is if you're mad about a bad spell, you should blame people who keep leaving these comments and if you're mad about his rant, you should blame powergames who are annoyed by True Strike.
    • To a lesser extent, his "I'm not your DM" asides. He tries to make the builds playable in any game (use of Unearthed Arcana aside), so will frequently give gun-toting characters other options for their ranged attacks, typically hand crossbows (though Blade accomplishes gunnery via a Warlock's eldritch blast). Comes to a head in his Rick O'Connell video, where minutely describes the Gunner and Crossbow Expert feats side-by-side, explaining that if your DM will allow Gunner and guns, go for that, if not, use a crossbow, the differences are minor and he is aware of them and you can stop bringing it up in the comments now please and thank you! This also applies to magical weapons, he frequently builds characters so they can do at least some magical damage to overcome powerful monsters who are resistant or immune to nonmagical damage. Because he's not your DM, he has no idea if you DM will supply your character with magical weapons, thus "lack of magic damage" in certain builds becomes a drawback.
    • Subverted humorously in Rick Sanchez video, where Tulok opens up by saying he had two-pages long intro to address the character's infamous fanbase, but scrubbed it because it all boils down to simply asking they won't make him regret making this video.
    • Broadly speaking, if Tulok doesn't really like a character, his dislike tends to effect how much he invests in the character build he makes compared to characters he shows more general favoritism towards. For example; his Edelgard build, a character he comments being someone he dislikes, is a simple build with nothing really unique about it compared to the builds he makes for other characters in the same game. That said, he does at least work to make the build fit what he feels the character fits as, so even for characters he dislikes, he tries to make them at the very least something you can enjoy playing.
    • Played for Laughs in the Captain Boomerang episode where he gets annoyed that his Patreons voted for him over other characters like Gorilla Grodd.
    • On the more serious side of things, Tulok has made it clear he is anti-capitalist more often since the announcement of OneDnD. He lampshades this in Should You See the Dungeons & Dragons Movie? Or Is it Evil?, saying he discusses it every week.
    • FINALLY Getting the Politics OUT of Dungeons & Dragons examines how taken literally, the game would lose fun parts such as most combat encounters, character creation, and plot points. Tulok explains that the people who "want politics out" actually just want groups and ideologies they oppose to be excluded.
  • Automatic Crossbows: There are two ways to get them in D&D - Crossbow Expert feat or one of Artificer infusions that lets you ignore the loading property of a weapon. Whichever Tulok uses usually depends on if a character makes their own weapons or not. Or, as it was the case with Master Chief and the Mandalorian, if they look advanced enough that even using and maintaining them would require a lot of scientific knowledge and skill.
  • Awesome, but Impractical:
    • Flash and Sonic can both move incredible range in a single turn of combat. Tulok notes it is very unlikely they'll ever be on a battlefield so large to actually need to move this fast.
    • As Tulok himself repeatedly notes, dumping Constitution is never a good idea; while it's true to character for people like sans, Pennywise, All Might, and Black Widow, it leaves them extraordinarily squishy and vulnerable to spells like Power Word: Kill, as well as being prone to losing concentration at the drop of a hat.
    • Any build focusing on one type of elemental type of damage (lightning, fire, cold, thunder, acid) that isn't using the Pyromancer runs into a risk of being powerless against monsters immune to that type of damage. Pyromances have it in a minor way because they aren't immune to their own fire.
    • Pennywise, Mysterio and Scarecrow can mess with the minds of their enemies but there are many monsters in D&D that will render them useless by being mindless and thus immune to their abilities.
    • Taken up to eleven with Shaggy. While he has a lot of utility and support options, his flaw is that in a combat-heavy game he basically doesn't deal damage.
      • And then topped with Peter Venkman who has both of the last two problems at once - he has very few ways to deal damage and majority of his spells are mind-affecting.
      • Dr. Facilier has the same problem- his build is focused entirely on sleight-of-hand and general trickery, with a lot of mind-affecting spells (and Polymorph), which fits his M.O. in the films but leaves him high and dry if his opponents can't be tricked or mind-controlled.
    • Tulok himself admits a Strength-based Monk or multiclassing Monk with Barbarian is not very optimal build, but it reflects well characters who use martial arts and are known for anger issues like Raphael, Vegeta, Yang and Bakugo.
    • Jack of All Stats builds tend to be Master of None builds in practice.
    • In the Captain Boomerang video Tulok early on lists many problems that make thrown weapons a subpar option in the game and says this build is him trying to make the best out of it anyway.
    • Downplayed with Dio Brando - there is a spell that does what his Stand does, Time Stop. But it requires taking 17 levels of Wizard and has limitations almost precisely forbidding using it the way Dio does. As such Tulok suggests casting Hold Person instead.
    • His "Z Warrior" builds, which are supposed to be all kinds of Flying Brick characters with powerful forms of energy blasts - Goku, Frieza, Starfire, Captain Marvel being few he attempted it with so far. As he admits this type of build has a lot of issues: since these characters have super strength, they need Strength investment over Dexterity. This means that, since they often don't wear armor, they have a low Armor class. They also have way too low hit points pool to go into melee due to taking many caster levels. He's been experimenting at making these builds more practical, however.
    • His reason why he won't make a build for Sauron. While the perspective of playing fantasy's original Evil Overlord may sound cool on paper, in Tulok's words, "he's a skyscraper that casts scrying".
    • He really finds higher-level abilities of an Assassin, Infiltration Expertise and Impostor, to be subpar for having such narrow use, and Infiltration Expertise requires you to spend a week of in-game time in prep work. The awesome part is that NPCs are not allowed to make Insight or Investigation checks against the Rogue-Assassin once they finish preping; they will believe the Rogue-Assassin is who they say they are, no Deception checks needed. This makes it superior to a disguise kit (which Rogue-Assassins also have) and the Actor Feat, but because it takes so long to set up, it is mostly useful for The Heist. Or if you want to be Count Olaf, since that's usually how much time it takes for him to menace Baudelaire kids under a new identity.
  • Badass Family: Tulok wonders if in a world where these builds are canonical Kratos is Wonder Woman's brother. The topic does not come back when he discusses building Hercules or Loki for that matter.
  • Berserk Button:
    • He seems to abhor media that has excessive violence and sexual assault towards women. He took down his Guts video, and refused to do either Escanor or Goblin Slayer after being unable to stomach watching either series due to elements he found uncomfortable.
    • He also doesn't like it when viewers bash his choice of dump stat, because not every stat can be great and some stats are mechanically necessary for certain builds, especially when they don't say what they would replace it with, since he has to work within the rules.
  • Boring, but Practical:
    • Champion is considered the most boring Fighter subclass, but it works well for characters who fight with brute strength. Tulok was previously using Brute, which is generally accepted to be doing Champion's thing better, but complaints from people who dislike Unearthed Arcana material made him give up on using it, since the two are too similar but only Champion is official.
    • Variant Human isn't flashy, nor does it give a lot in terms of cool and unique racial bonuses, but getting a feat at level 1 is a practical reason to pick it when making unique character builds. This allows Tulok to use the ASI's to improve each character, as well as helping the character he makes avoid being too weak early on.
    • Tulok himself noted his fans are extremely bored of Kensei Monk and it ends up being used often because it is perfectly suited for many characters, especially ones who are known for their skill with weapons, martial arts, speed and lightning reflexes, and heightened senses, all things that the class excels at.
    • After he gave up on Kensei Monk for a while a similar thing happened with the Unarmed Fighting style - it is perfect to emulate characters who don't use weapons and focus on strength over dexterity.
    • Lots of comments in the videos remark on how often he uses the standard point array instead of point buy, even though he always includes the "roll for stats if you want" line. Standard array is the fastest way to create a character, and most fictional characters have stuff they are really good at and stuff that they are really bad at, so it is convenient too.
    • After Tasha's Cauldron of Everything was released, he's utilized the Custom Lineage "race" multiple times. It's basically Variant Human above, but much more versatile, not requiring the character be a human to be used (only humanoid, which many playable races are). A good example is with his Robin Hood build - which uses clips from various Robin Hood films, including the Disney version - the build is good to go, either as a human, or as a foxperson. Another good example is Shovel Knight, whose race, aside from being humanoid, is unknown, due to them always wearing a helmat, and they come from a world that has humans and various types of animalfolk - hard to reskin an existing race to fit when it's unknown what the character actually is.
    • Some of his straight monoclass builds are this to be true to the character. For example, his Beast Boy build doesn't really recommend all that many spells, in lieu of just Wild Shaping. That said, Pure Druids are infamous for being immortal, since their Wild Shapes' HP replaces their own health pool, and Arch Druid allows for unlimited Wild Shapes. Similarly, his Edelgard build is just a straight Battle Master Fighter build, citing that it allows her to be a powerful frontline unit.
    • Customizing Your Origin variant rule from Tasha's — used so far with Inuyasha, Lion-O, and Tia Lung, it allows one to move stats around, alter languages, change inborn skills, as well as any inborn proficiencies with weapons, armor, or tools. Inuyash's base Tabaxi Race was altered to make him a strength-based Ranger-Fighter multi-class. Lion-O's Leonin race was altered to make him Charsmatic for a Warlock-Paladin Multi-class. Tia Lung's Tabaxi race was altered to be a Strength-based Monk/Barbarian Multiclass — although, the version of tabaxi used for Tia Lung seems the Volo's Guide to Monsters' one instead of the Monsters of the Multiverse's one, despite being made after the release of Monsters of the Multiverse. Thus, it's useful for altering races and subraces printed before Tasha's, especially those not reworked in Monsters of the Multiverse.
  • Bribing Your Way to Victory: Most of his builds are from the comments in his videos, but, if you can afford it, he offers commissioned builds for a price. The first of which, far as can be seen, being Kazuma Kiryu.
  • Cat Folk: In the Blake Belladonna video, Tulok notes there are currently 3 ways to build one in D&D:
    • Tabaxi are the ones that were there first and he ends using them most often, often for other animalistic characters like Sonic or Sly Cooper.
    • Shifters he reserves for characters who are only a Little Bit Beastly, like Blake herself.
    • Had Leonin come out earlier it could have been used for characters like Scar, or melee-focused Tabaxi like Catra or Incineroar.Thankfully, he's finally used one in his Lion-O video.
  • Closest Thing We Got: How his builds work. He takes the classes and features that best fit a given character, and tries to make a build that roughly fits the character as much as can be. In some cases, it fits relatively well because of the abilities matching up fairly decently (Naofumi for example), while others are very much a case of "Well this is literally the ONLY way this works so I'll use what I got". This extends to his use of reskinning certain races to fit various fictional characters — Sly Cooper, for instance, despite being a raccoon, is a Tabaxi, a cat-like creature. Donkey Kong and Banjo, a gorilla and a bear respectivly, are both bugbears. This is true for others.
  • Composite Character: Several characters take traits from different versions of themselves, but there are instances where he averts that and sticks to a specific take.
  • Confusion Fu: One of the Pros of his Mario build is that he's unpredictable, having so many options, it's unquantifiable.
  • Crippling Overspecialization: Some of the builds, as discussed under Awesome, but Impractical, but also builds that really do just one thing like dealing damage or, in Mercy's case, healing. Tulok notes that if the player doesn't like doing the one thing this build does, they'll probably get bored quickly.
  • Critical Hit:
    • How Tulok justifies his frequent use of Champion in Catra's video - "crits are fun".
    • King Bradley is built to maximize an ability to score a critical hit as often as possible. This is how Tulok decided to include his Ultimate Eye ability.
  • Cursed with Awesome: Tulok didn't make Kraven the Hunter a Hexblood due to this tope.
Tulok: His only curse is that he cannot be killed by anyone except Spider-Man. How is that a curse? The only person who can kill you is a superhero with a clear no-kill policy.''
  • Darker and Edgier: The Ice Climbers being an Echo Knight was justified by a darker take on their story, that Popo or Nana is helped by the ghost of their fallen counterpart.
  • Decomposite Character: He made separate builds for Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader. To be fair, even this very wiki had to split them in two separate character articles due to how different they are.
  • Developer's Foresight: For his Izuku Midoriya build, it's part of why Deku was made a Bard. For anyone who wants the manga version, who has multiple quirks, aside from "Super Power," from One For All, from its previous Torchbearers, they can use the Bard's Magical Secrets feature to take spells from any class to match.
  • Even Nerds Have Standards: Tulok is a guy who makes D&D builds for fictional characters but, as he says in one of his builds, arguing over the difference between andriods and cybords is too nerdy for him.
  • Expy: Tulok had a running joke that an upcoming sourcebook in the vein of Xanathar's Guide To Everything will be called Xanathar 2: Electric Xanadu. Once the book was announced as Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, he ran a one-shot which featured a Beholder crime-lord named Xanadu, allegedly Xanathar's twin brother.
  • Fantasy Gun Control: Tulok avoids guns because many Dungeon Masters won't allow guns in their setting - this is why even after an Unearthed Arcana with a Gunner feat came out, Tulok stuck to instead giving gun-toting characters Automatic Crossbows. This is also because of how easy it is to re-flavor a crossbow as a handgun, especially a handcrossbow.
  • Flying Brick: Generally, his Captain Underpants build in a nutshell. A pure Berserker Barbarian with Unarmed Fighting that has massive Strength and Constitution, and, as an Aasimar, can fly.
  • Foil: In his Doomsday video Tulok notes that he and Stich have nearly the same origin story, except one of them found friends and the other didn't.
  • Forest Ranger: Ranger shows up rather often on his builds and he has used pretty much every single version of it (even Player's Handbook's Ranger, for Nightcrawler). His favorite version was Ranger with variant class features from Unearthed Arcana and was disappointed when the official class variants in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything were not as powerful.
  • Sliding Scale of Gameplay and Story Integration: Essentially the main difficulty of his builds. Tulok has to make sure that the builds he makes feel like the character's personality, lore, and powers as much as can reasonably be done. For this to work, he often has to bend the rules a bit in terms of what fits best. As an example; Dimitri in his home game is just a powerful warrior, but because of the mechanics of his game, him being part Paladin was done to make sure he references the mechanics of the character, and his lore.
  • Good Old Fisticuffs: A lot of characters use Unarmed Fighting as their Fighting Style. Tulok noted to fans who complain about it that they are the ones who vote for which character he builds next - and people consistently vote for ones who don't use weapons.
  • Half-Human Hybrid: This being D&D, there are quite few and Tulok uses pretty much all of them.
    • Half-Elf often pops up for characters that look human but the lore adds some inhuman aspect to them, like Storm, Jean Grey or Cloud Strife.
    • Aasimar mostly shows up for characters who have some sort of divine origin like Kratos, Wonder Woman, Hercules, or Van Helsing. Protector Aasimar, who can fly for a short period of time, had also popped up for flying aliens like Superman and Vegeta. Fallen Aasimar seems a go-to option if Tiefling doesn't work, as was the case with Dante.
    • Tiefling, of course, shows up if a character has some sort of demonic heritage, regardless if they look the part, like Hellboy, or don't, like Raven.
    • Half-Orc so far has shown up for Thanos, since he canonically is a deviant form of Eternal, through Tulok did list it as one of the alternatives for Blanka.
  • Healing Factor: The Dwarven Fortitude feat allows a character to heal themselves during combat and it's one of the reasons why both Wolverine and Andersen ended up as Dwarves.
  • Heroic RRoD: Some of his builds involve Tenser's Transformation, or Berserker Barbarian, which pose a risk of the extremely debilitating Exhaustion mechanic (via failing a Constitution Save for the former, or using the Frenzy feature for the latter) in exchange for more power.
  • Hobbits: Tulok likes using Halflings for small characters like sans (who, due to being a short skeleton, uses a Revenant Halfling) or children like Vanellope. And of course, Frodo is one.
  • Jack of All Stats: As noted, characters with moderate stats or little ability across many skills often turn out impractical. This led Tulok to eschew such builds in favor of prioritizing what a character is most known for. He likes to joke that to make an appropriate anime character you would need a 20 in every single Ability Score.
  • Kicking Ass in All Her Finery: Characters like Princess Peach, Princess Zelda and the Sailor Guardians have levels in Monk for Unarmored Defense. Because high DEX and a high WIS modifiers lead to a high total AC, these builds can totally stride into melee while wearing elaborate gowns or frilly sailor suits and avoid damage.
  • Little Bit Beastly: Shifters are used for characters with minor animalistic traits like Geralt, Blake or Beast Boy.
  • Loophole Abuse: Tulok encourages this for fans wanting remakes of previous builds; he won't directly remake characters, but he'll create a psuedo remake if a new character is basically the older character, but only slightly different. Most notably, he pointed out that a Lex Luthor build would make for a pretty good Tony Stark remake, since Lex is basically Tony, but serious, bald, and evil.
  • MacGuffin: Discussed in the Thanos build. Tulok uses the Wizard class to give the Mad Titan powers to emulate Infinity Gems, but JoCat argues they are things for him to collect over the course of the campaign and builds him as a Fighter instead. Either way, the Thanos build is "perfectly balanced, as all things should be."
  • Madlibs Catchphrase: Tulok has several phrases that change based on whose build he is creating:
    • "Like and subscribe for (something pertaining to the character) the next you play...maybe."
    • "Roll for stats if you want, just keep [(insert stats) high because (character reason)] OR [multiclassing minimums in mind]."
    • "True Strike enables you to (joke about viewers/players who overfocus on optimization and/or powerbuilding). It also gives you advantage on your next attack, but that's bad, just attack twice."
  • Magic Knight: There are a lot of those. From Sephiroth and Weiss, who are using the Bladesinger subclass to fight in melee, to frontline fighters who use magic to boost their combat prowess like King Bradley.
  • Master of All: His Master Chief build has been noted to be so bereft of flaws that one of the only ones Tulok could think of was "can't kill Poison Ivy." You know a build's powerful when one of it's only flaws is that it can't kill one that's effectively immortal.
  • Master of None: Jack of All Stats builds, such as Superman, Banjo, Thanos, and Jonathan Joestar, tend to be more this than their superpowerful canon counterparts, since their relatively balanced stats can make it very difficult for them to hit, do damage, avoid damage, take damage, or maximize the power of spells.
  • Metaphorically True: Some of his builds rely HEAVILY on flavoring, due to the class and level combination not being exactly the character in canonical Forgotten Realms lore. Most notably, his Jotaro Kujo one combined Ancestral Guardian Barbarian (a Barbarian aided by ancestors), Open Palm Monk (the most Martial-focused Monk), Battlemaster Fighter (a tactical weaponmaster), and the Tavern Brawler feat for Star Platinum's many punches (with Star Platinum itself being the Ancestral Guardian summoned with Rage), as well as its Star Finger special move (with Battlemaster's Lunging Attack Maneuver). This was all before Way of the Astral Self came along and simplified things, being basically a massive JoJo's reference.
  • Min-Maxing: Overall defied — Tulok often makes builds that ignore optimization in favor of more accuracy or better capturing the feeling of the characters.
    • The first character who is being intentionally min-maxed is Rocket Racoon, because his lore states that he is a genetic experiment that amplified his existing traits. In other words, being lore accurate demanded min-maxing.
    • Since Rocket, Tulok has relegated minmaxing for characters who really need it to get all stats right, like Lady Maria or Izuku Midoriya.
    • He will sometimes note a more optimized option instead of the true-to-character option he's going with, for those who want to squeeze a little bit more power out of his builds. In general, his builds are pretty well optimized for the kind of character they're trying to create. . . which isn't to say that the character itself is optimized for any specific aspect of the game. Captain Boomerang is really great at thrown weapons and has a bunch of spells to replicate the character's trick boomerangs to make him a surprisingly effective character. . . but choosing literally any other weapon would make the character far more effective.
    • However, in the truest sense of the term all his builds start with a form of min-maxing. Because rolling for ability scores can yield results well above or below average, he starts most builds with the "standard array," which gives a few good scores, one average score, and one below average score. The last two are placed in stats that just aren't needed for the build, though this usually reflects the character's own weak areas in some way. Thus, maximizing the utility of what the build will be based on while minimizing the things it just doesn't do.
  • Missing Steps Plan: His evil plan in the Megamind video-
    • 1. Create an army of calligraphers
    • 2. Teach them that all stories have political or moral lessons
    • 3. ???
    • 4. Profit
  • Most Writers Are Human: Majority of the characters are Humans because the majority of heroes in fiction are humans, even some that look like they should be something else (Hulk and Blanka are both mutated humans, even if most people expected an Orc or Half-Orc due to them being green, even though the default Orcs in 5e are actually grey). Tulok often suggests alternative races and goes out of his way to give other races to characters who look human but their lore suggests anything else, like mutants or half-demons.
  • Mundane Made Awesome: There's a tool proficiency he always takes whenever possible, for he proposes it as the power of the gods, and the ultimate force within the Forgotten Realms. This proficiency is... calligraphy. The joke being that Calligraphy is actually an infamously useless skill.
  • Nonhuman Humanoid Hybrid: Simic Hybrid from Ravnica are generally used for creatures that are the result of some experiment like Stich or Shadow. It was also used for Xenomorph.
  • Non Sequitur: In his "How to Play Black Canary in Dungeons & Dragons (Birds of Prey Build for D&D 5e)" video, he gave the character the True Strike cantrip because of fans with "political positions that put [them] in opposition to basic human rights".
  • "Not So Different" Remark: Played for Laughs. A running gag in Grinch video is Tulok noting things that the character has in common with Batman.
  • Original Character: Has begun releasing homebrew subclasses.
  • Our Dwarves Are All the Same: Gimli is the most archetypical kind of fantasy dwarf you could make in Dungeons & Dragons. However, Tulok also makes both Wolverine and Alexander Andersen dwarves and they're both rather far from the stereotype, especially 7 feet tall Andersen. He also notes a revenant dwarf could be a good alternative for Jason Voorhees.
  • Our Elves Are Different: Somewhat ironically, the villainous Magneto and Sephiroth are high elves, people that oppose them like Storm, Jean Grey and Cloud are Half-Elves, while the anti-hero Riddick is a drow.
  • Our Goblins Are Different: All of the three main D&D goblinoid races.
    • Yoda and Rocket Raccoon are goblins. Tulok notes that the guidebooks advise using re-flavored halflings for mousefolk, so goblins work as re-flavored raccoons. Tulok also notes that Yang could be one as well.
    • Ahsoka is a hobgoblin.
    • Chewbacca, Banjo, Donkey Kong and Gorilla Grodd are bugbears, a race Tulok likes to use for more animalistic and hairy characters that don't fit any other race. Tulok lists bugbear as one of the alternatives for Blanka.
  • Our Orcs Are Different:
    • Tulok builds Shrek using an orc, as D&D ogres aren't green — or playable, for that matter.
    • The only thing Tulok and JoCat can agree about the Thanos build is using half-orc to reflect he is both an Eternal and a Deviant.
  • Our Vampires Are Different: Tulok uses vampires from Planeshift: Ixalan article for both Blade and Dio.
  • Power Creep, Power Seep: In his Vegeta video, Tulok cites what he calls the "Rule of Relativity," wherein, due to the scaling aspect of his builds, relatively street-level characters (such as Steve Harrington) get balanced with godlike entities (like Superman). For example, within the scale of his builds, the Ice Climbers can take down Doomsday.
  • The Power of Friendship: More often than not, he will remark on the value of teamwork after listing a character's flaws. A non-exhaustive list is:
    • The Peter Venkman build is most useful for charming humanoid NPCs to get his buddies out of trouble and then inspiring his buddies to bust the ghost NPCs.
    • The Rocket Raccoon build is really good at maneuvering and dealing damage, but if he doesn't have the other Guardians of the Galaxy tanking for him, then he is going to get squashed like roadkill.
    • The Eraserhead build is a spellcaster's worst nightmare, and even melee characters may find themselves locked down by him or unable to hurt him. However, he'll need other pro heroes (or maybe his students) to actually defeat the villains.
      Tulok: [lists the three flaws and then] but that's what friends are for!
  • The Power of Hate: He encourages people who dislike his idea of a character build to submit angry comments expressing their dislike to his videos. It becomes one of his catchphrases, "Your anger fuels the algorithms".
  • The Power of Love:In his own homebrew subclass videos, he suggests leaving a nice comment because, "Nice comments fuel the algorithms even more".
  • Pragmatic Adaptation: Many of his builds revolve around using what he can to make the character fit as close as they are to canon. For example, when he made Cloud Strife, he went with Half-Elf for the race because there isn't a race that fits Cloud's status as a Empowered Badass Normal who faked a persona around his dead friend.
  • Public Service Announcement: DC's Joker video starts with a parody of one, with Tulok confronting his player who made a murderhobo character. The moral is to like, share and subscribe to his channel.... which his player claims is what made him make a murderhobo in the first place.
  • Pungeon Master: Building Character also builds an endless stream of puns relating to each character. For instance, in the build for King Bradley, Tulok gives this advice for boosting Bradley's CON modifier, "Homoculi do not homoculdie, so homocultry to make this as homoculhigh as you can." Sometimes he will groan at his own bad pun or some particularly long reach for the sake of a pun.
  • Quirky Bard: Bards in Fifth Edition are extremely versatile, something Tulok has demonstrated when he used the class to build Ben 10, Scarecrow, and Kubo one after another, and yet each one completely different.
  • Revenant Zombie: Revenant shows up mostly for characters who are skeletal, like Ghost Rider, sans, Jack Skellington or are well known for having died and came back to life like Jason Voorhees. But not Jason Todd, since his build needed too many feats and Abilitty Score Improvements to afford eschewing Variant Human's bonus feat.
  • Rule of Three: Typically, his goals, pros, and cons, with some exceptions, all come in threes.
  • Running Gag:
    • Whenever he gives a human character the Light cantrip, he says it is so they can see "with their dumb human eyes", because humans are one of the minority of player races without dark vision. When Tasha's introduced Custome Lineage, then that became a variant.
    • During the COVID-19 Pandemic, he would include something like this whenever a character gained "Divine Health" or "Purity of Body", i.e. "Remember that your character might have divine health/immunity to disease, but you do not, so wear a mask, wash your hands, and play online."
    • A strictly visual running gag, but still a running gag nonetheless: all of his Mortal Kombat builds tend to use the franchise's usual habit of replacing c's with k's.
    • Calligraphy, the Skill of the Gods.
    • One of his friends, Maison Radius, requested an Anderson Cooper build in every video. Either his comment or Tulok's reply would include a hint to the next build. Then the build actually happened (sort of).
    • Surprising viewers by making a character's class bard, when another class seemed more obvious (like Bane, Ras Al Ghoul or Gandalf). He even has a skit with Nerd Sync based on this. Then he will joke about making a certain character a bard, but not really.
  • Scary Dogmatic Aliens: A lot of alien characters who don't really fit anything else, like Piccolo, end up as the D&D resident examples of this trope, githyanki or githzerai. An exception is the Predator who, due to shared fondness of making things out of bones, ended up as a lizardfolk.
  • Self-Imposed Challenge: In-universe example, so to speak. In the cons list for a number of builds, Tulok will mention that these cons only exist for the sake of accuracy to the character's canon, and can be easily fixed mechanically. Such examples are commonly Low AC ( Sailor Venus, who has the strength for plate mail but fights evil in a sailor suit), and dumped CON (General Grevious has a terrible cough). So only the reason to use these builds as stated in your home game is if you wanted to be accurate to the character.
  • Sidetracked by the Analogy: He explains giving Samurai Jack an ability to make his sword magical by the fact he cannot know if DM will give any player using the build one. Except in instances when he is that player's DM. He then promptly goes to tell his players all characters in their party already have magic weapons.
  • So Last Season:
    • Sometimes he runs in this problem if new Unearthed Arcana or a new book revises something he has used for a build or releases something that would work great on a build he has already made. Biggest problem he had with Iron Man - he built Tony as a Wizard/Fighter only for an Artificer in Eberron: Rising From the Last War to come with a Battlesmith subclass that does the whole stick better. He built Cyborg as a Battlesmith, saying this build could be an alternative to Iron Man, only for Unearthed Arcana to come up with an Armorer subclass for Artificer, a subclass whose entire thing is being Iron Man. Tulok has said that he will likely use Armorer build as another "stealth replacement" for Iron Man if he ever gets around to building Lex Luthor. He eventually used Armorer for his War Machine/Iron Patriot build, although he notes that it isn't an exact Iron Man replacement because Rhodes fights differently.
    • A particularly note worthy example is when he made Ichigo Kurosaki, making a Oath of the Watchers Paladin / Undying Warlock. The very next day saw the release of the Undead Warlock, which he outright admits in the video discussing the subclass that it fits so much better than the Undying Warlock.
  • Stone Wall:
    • His "How To Get Naked" video involves building Funky Kong as a Barbarian/Artificer hybrid who, though Unarmored Defense, a Cloak of Protection, Shield, etc., can have up to 29 AC as a baseline, up to 36 with all applicable buffs, a capped Constitution, and the Lucky feat to increase defenses ever so slightly more. That said, since Rage was ignored, the damage potential you get from it is lost (though somewhat mitigated from the Eldritch Cannon gained from Artillerist Artificer).
    • His Ling build has mediocre damage, and has slow initiative rolls (due to low Dexterity), but was built to be invincible (even having access to the Invulnerability spell, which gives him immunity to all damage for ten minutes).
  • Stripperiffic: Tulok justifies making Fran a Barbarian because her outfit can hardly qualify as clothing, let alone armor. He notes the biggest challenge in making the video was getting footage of Fran from her game that YouTube won't demonetize by confusing it with porn.
  • Suspiciously Specific Denial: Inverted, since Tulok saying a character definitely will be a certain class repeatedly usually means they won't be such. For example, Scott Pilgrim ended up being a Fighter/Warlock despite Tulok repeatedly mentioning him having Bard levels, and explained why he wasn't a Bard. Likewise, Goku was definitely going to have more Monk levels after a brief dip into Sorcerer, then he ended up only having one Monk level, and 19 Sorcerer levels.
  • This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: Tulok has pointed out some very specific uses for certain builds. For example, due to him being walking undead-bane, should she be counted as Undead instead of human, Leon Kennedy has enough damage potential to kill Poison Ivy (who was noted to be his most powerful build). He then clarified that he didn't say Leon was better than her, just that, given that specific criteria, he's one of the few with the proper toolkit under the 5e ruleset to kill her.
  • Title Drop: Officially, the series is called Building Character. That said, the name given to one of the goals of the Grinch build is Building Character.
  • Unskilled, but Strong:
    • The April Fools 2021 joke build of Anderson Cooper has only a couple levels in many classes, but has proficiency in every skill, and has 18s in every stat (18 being the peak of normal human ability) due to alleged dice rolling (except for Constitution, which was started at 20 because of the roll, plus the Con bonus from making Cooper a Lizardman).
    • Pretty much any build that's either straight Barbarian or Sorcerer, or has either as the main class, since both are designed in the game's system as the premier Unskilled, but Strong classes in Martial and Magical variants.
  • Verbal Tic: Tulok cautions against gimmicky manners of speech potentially suggested in the built character's IP (e.g., Pokémon) or even D&D lore, which can quickly becoming annoying in an actual D&D game.
  • Weak, but Skilled: Some of his builds have low damage as one of their negatives, but make up for it with a lot of support abilities. Big offenders include whips and thrown weapon gimmicks being weak in Fifth Edition rules, as mentioned in the Captain Boomerang (a character entirely based around the latter) video.

Alternative Title(s): Tulok The Barbarian

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