Spartans RISE!

[Rasman]

Let's see

a night-unkillable (except on a crit) warrior using a shield (not tower, those are roman legions) and a spear

how about this

Race:Human
Alignment: Lawful Good (actually Lawful Crazy imo)

STATS (32 pts buy)
STR 14
DEX 16
CON 14
INT 8
WIS 16
CHA 8

1 Ranger Shield specialization: lightshield, Shield and Pike Style
2 Ranger Armor of the senses
3 Paladin Serenity Aura of Good
4 Paladin Divine Grace,Lay on Hands
5 Paladin Aura of Courage,Divine Health
6 Kensai short haft chosen weapon: Greatspear, chosen weapon +1
7 Kensai Combat Reflexes
8 Kensai
9 Kensai Power Attack, Leap attack
10 Kensai chosen weapon +2
11 Kensai Improved sunder
12 Kensai Combat Brute,
13 Kensai weapon focus: Greatspear
14 Kensai
15 Kensai Weapon specialization: Greatspear, greater weapon focus:Greatspearchosen weapon +3
16 Kensai
17 Kensai Greater weapon specialization: Greatspear
18 Kensai Melee Weapon Mastery – Piercing,Driving Attack
19 Kensai
20 Kensai Improved Critical Greatspear chosen weapon +4


moonwarded ranger variant, 2nd level substitution gives you armor of the senses (you get your Wisdom bonus to AC even while wearing light armor and using a shield)

logic: Spartans were really hard to hit despite not wearing a full-plate and they were trained to survive in the wild at a young age

Shield and Pike Style (use a light shield while using a 2 handed polearm with reach)

Shield specialization/shield ward : get the most out of your shield and even get high touch attack AC (Dex, Wis+ shield is starting to be hard to hit)

logic: should be obvious

immunity to fear and bonuses to saves both help against spellcasters and using senerity greatly reduces your Mad , now you can just pump your Wisdom without wasting it

logic: well Spartans were really stubborn and difficult to deal with, much like a paladin

Kensai is a fighter variant, grants you 1 exotic weapon proficiency for free with which you get scaled bonuses (+X to hit and damage), otherwise it's very similar to fighter and it has flaws that don't affect this build

Honestly at the end I just had too many feats to choose from so this is not optimized but it does respect the flavor. In a real build I'd pick every mageslayer feat and probably use Horizon Walker.

wow...that's pretty damn awesome actually, although the Mage-Slayer feats would be awesome in there, I'm a huge fan of those to begin with, because causing casters to have massive headaches is always fun

the only two feats I'm not sure about are Short Haft (The feat where you can attack with the blunt end of a weapon for bludgening damage?) and Combat Brute (know I've seen it, just don't remember it and don't have access to my books atm)

I'd hate to ask for anymore, but...how exactly would you gear him? Obviously with a greatspear and Light Shield, but what other items would you let him have?

So you either want D&D's model of a historical spartan, the same for a 300-style Spartan, or you want a Spartan-style character.

1. Historical spartan.

I tentatively agree with Awa on the broad strokes, although I still think Spartans made some professional soldiers look like militia. Plato, an Athenian who wasn't a big fan of Sparta, pretty much goes out of his way in Laches to imply that the Spartans know courage in a way other Greeks simply couldn't. And while Plato's probably full of himself and/or male cow waste products, other, slightly more reputable historical accounts also point to Spartans being a superior group of professional soldiers, if not the most tactically-minded.

- Herodotus' account of the events of Thermopylae point to a level of skill and bravery beyond mere soldiery.
- There are a variety of famous quotes, but this one is my favorite (ripped from wiki): "[Phillip II of Macedon] proclaims claims "You are advised to submit without further delay, for if I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city." The Spartan ephors sent back a one word reply: "If."[17] Subsequently, both Philip and Alexander would avoid Sparta entirely."
- In 272 BC, far after Sparta's zenith, Pyrrhus attempted to take Sparta while its regular army was campaigning elsewhere. A fraction of Sparta's army along with Spartan civilians, including women, outnumbered, fought off an experienced mercenary army led by one of the best tacticians of the Hellenistic age.

All that said, they're probably a bunch of Warrior 3s with improved stat lines, phalanx-related feats, and a regional bonus to morale-based conditions. They're human, and they're very vulnerable to D&D magic (good ol' Fireball has its uses, 'yknow). Not the unstoppable killing machines Frank Miller may have led you to believe. Speaking of which...

2. 300-style Spartans

Level 7+ warblade, relatively unarmored, maybe with some swordsage, crusader, knight, or marshal thrown in. Very cheesy in all senses of the word. If the enemies' arrows will blot out the sun, you'll Iron Heart Surge the sun away first so you can fight in the shade forever.

3. Spartan-themed D&D warrior

Warblade is also appropriate for Spartans whose main power isn't making your fellow players roll their eyes (will negates). If you really just want to be a relatively immobile bulwark of defense, you could go Crusader or Knight or Fighter or Barbarian or some combination; note that getting reach on that spear of yours and grabbing the various crowd control feats is close to a necessity in this case, and in any event makes sense in the context of the D&D world.

Here's the thing. You could build this out in so many ways it makes my mind boggle. All you really have to do to fit the Spartan mold is as follows:

- Be not only brave, but eager to face fights against enormous odds. Sounds pretty standard for a D&D adventurer. The Spartan standby "with this shield or on it," or in other words refusing to flee a battle, is non-standard... aaand you might want to bend this one. Greeks did tend to make use out of false-retreat tactics, and refusing to be routed was in the context of a large-scale battle, defending or conquering for your home.
- Own/carry on you only what you can use to kill someone or to facilitate killing someone. Again, sounds pretty standard for a D&D adventurer. Of course, a Spartan probably isn't in the adventuring game for treasure, which is the standard #1 reason to do it. He's probably in it for reason #2, killing things.
- Sharpen that laconic wit. This is the most important part of playing a Spartan. You could be a bookish batman wizard and still play a Spartan if you make those short, sweet responses at the right times. Wait, there's one thing that's more important in being a true Spartan...
- Calisthenics before battle. That's right, if you're expecting a fight, do those jumping jacks. Doing them OOC as well heightens the realism.

Good luck in your fight against those decadent Athenians and hubristic Persians.

I guess Spartan is really more of a mentality than a build, because there really are a LOT of ways to do it, make for some really good use of flaws and traits though, those apply in most of the games I play in, so extra feats abound sometimes.