Dungeons and Dragons character help?

Question

Im in the process of building a level 8 Ogre Barbarian. In doing so, one of my friends mentioned that with all of the states on paper once I pick and choose my weapons, my attack gets a bonus on top of base stats. I have looked and looked and looked in the D&D players guide but cannot find anything on this. When I look under the equipment guide it only lists the weapons, the attack damage (1 d8 etc) and the critical damage. I am using Players guide version 3.5. Do I need to look somewhere else?

Answer 1

Read the barbarian class and double check to see if they get any bonuses for different weapons, if it's not there, you can always check the race, sometimes these bonuses are more racial or class oriented than weapon oriented.  You can also ask the dungeon master about this bonus, it also may be a house rule that your friends goes by in which case it may not apply.

Answer 2

Your attack and damage are determined by your base attack bonus, strength bonus, and any feats you may have.

Ogres have 4 racial hit dice (giant; 4d8) which give them +3 base attack bonus on top of the BAB gained from barbarian class.

8 levels of barbarian with 4 giant racial hit dice gives a BAB of 11, now ogres get a whopping +10 to strength so you'll likely get a fairly high strength bonus to add to that.

Lets assume a rather modest 14 strength base, with +10 on top of that and +2 from levelling up (if you choose to put those 2 points in strength that is) 26 strength gives a +8 strength bonus so your attack bonus without any feats or enchanted equipment would be +19 to hit and the damage bonus would be +8 (+12 if it's a 2 handed weapon)

It's worth noting that ogres are size large so the weapons they use are generally one size larger than usual (for example a longsword sized for an ogre does 1d10 damage instead of 1d8)

It's also worth noting that an 8th level ogre barbarian is equivalent to a level 14 character (8 class levels + 4 racial hit dice + 2 Level adjustment)

Hope this helped