D&D 5E Barbarians: Why Rage per Day?

[Xeviat]

Hi everyone. I'm not here to debate the balance of the barbarian; I think the barbarian (berserker even) is fine compared to the fighter when feats aren't in the equation. This leads me to want to rebalance the berserker simply by making their Frenzy attack not a bonus action, but that's for a different thread. This thread is to discuss why Rage has been an X/day thing for the last several editions (I have no idea how it was in 1e or its equivalents in 2e).

To me, having X/day Rages always made me envision a top hat and monocle wearing barbarian who carefully chooses when they are going to rage.



Barbarians rage. To quote Magic the Gathering: "He raged at the world, at his family, at his life. But mostly he just raged. - Raging Goblin." Fighters fight with training and skill, with superior armor, and with techniques. Barbarians get mad and pour all of their adrenaline into simply being better.

So why are our barbarians choosing when to rage? Are there other ways to do a rage mechanic? Pathfinder uses rounds per day. The 4E Berserker used rage at half hp (sort of).

I have always envisioned rage kicking in automatically when a barbarian is reduced to half hp (a vision that I held even more strongly during 4E). If a barbarian wanted to rage before that, I imagined them spending a round working themselves into a rage. I imagine rage to be a net damage boost and a net defense penalty, so that there may be times when a barbarian player wouldn't want to rage, and not just to conserve the rage for another fight.

If you could change how rage works, how would you do it? I'm not worried about fully balanced alternatives at this moment, because I firmly believe almost any flavor can be balanced with some work (except tank cutting uranium katanas). Or if you wouldn't, why do you support the existing way?

 

[Minigiant]

Barbarian Rage isn't normal anger. It's a special sort of primal emotion who must tap into within oneself.

That's why everyone can't rage. You oddly enough must train to do so. Some use meditation to create a link to that emotion. Sort use an animal spirit to gift themselves with it. Others are born with the link to the rage feeling open. Some even bind themselves with spirit of rage via a tribal shamans ritual.

A barbarian must choose to rage. And that rage consumes somethimg mentally, physically, or spiritually that only a long rest can restore.

Rage makes great sword strikes into dagger stabs. It's not getting really mad.

 

[Marandahir]

Rage is a different state of being, a primal state of being. I don't think it's necessarily training. I think Barbarians are more akin to Sorcerers than anything else, in that respect. Certainly some are more thoughtful about it. But you can't do it too many times in a day because you just get too tired spiritually to do it, whether you consider it spiritual or not. It's a hidden reserve within you, just like a Sorcerer's spell slots are. Once they're used up they're used up.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Fighters fight with training and skill, with superior armor, and with techniques. Barbarians get mad and pour all of their adrenaline into simply being better.
[...]
If you could change how rage works, how would you do it? I'm not worried about fully balanced alternatives at this moment, because I firmly believe almost any flavor can be balanced with some work (except tank cutting uranium katanas). Or if you wouldn't, why do you support the existing way?

Skill is not a finite resource. Adrenaline is. There needs to be some restriction on how often you can go above-and-beyond your natural limit, or else your new maximum becomes your baseline and you can never exceed that.

From a game mechanic standpoint, if a barbarian could rage all day, then the rage mechanic would need to be toned down to the point where it was boring. Instead, it's something that you can only turn on some of the time, and you're better-than-average while raging but worse-than-average while not-raging. It's a decent-enough design, so I don't really feel any need to change it.

 

[Marandahir]

Adrenaline is a great way of putting it.

We can do extreme things in extreme circumstances due to adrenaline and other neuro-chemical hormones, but if adrenaline was "always-on" then we'd die – our bodies would break from consistent, on-going over-usage.

 

[The Grassy Gnoll]

I think of it like Slaine from 2000ad who goes into a "warp spasm" which is an ability granted to him by the Earth goddess Danu. His body physically warps into a huge lumbering shape and while in the throes of the warp spasm is capable of dealing massive damage and shrugging off damage taken.



With the 5e archetypes this can work well, I think, and barbarians are meant to be connected to the land, being nomadic hunter/gatherer tribal types, so this gives it more of a "reason for being" than just "I get really mad".

It being a rage due to making a connection with the primal forces of nature as per Slaine, it makes sense that there is a daily limit to the number you can do per day - whether from sheer physical limit being reached or from "that's your lot" allowance from a deity.

If you wanted to de-deity this flavour, remove a personage and make it a tapping into the raw power of nature and have it as more of a spiritual than a religious thing.

 

[Tony Vargas]

To me, having X/day Rages always made me envision a top hat and monocle wearing barbarian who carefully chooses when they are going to rage.

So why are our barbarians choosing when to rage? Are there other ways to do a rage mechanic? Pathfinder uses rounds per day. The 4E Berserker used rage at half hp (sort of).

They're all still in the player's hands. You can consider Rage a player decision rather than a character decisions. The player decides how his barbarian character feels about things, so when he decides the barb has gotten angry enough, he expends a use of Rage.

 

[Li Shenron]

So why are our barbarians choosing when to rage? Are there other ways to do a rage mechanic? Pathfinder uses rounds per day. The 4E Berserker used rage at half hp (sort of).

...

If you could change how rage works, how would you do it?

...

Or if you wouldn't, why do you support the existing way?

Why per day? Well, why not?

Overall, the narrative explanation of why Rage is generally not unlimited, is that because it requires to spend your energy reserves, and then you need to rest. With a game that has short rests and long rests, either of them would suffice for the narrative explanation.

As for the part about being in control of the Rage, at least partially (i.e. choosing when to start), this has a lot to do with simply the social aspects of the game:

1) the vast majority of players want to be in control of the PC, even if the 'narrative' might say that the PC herself is not
2) in the past, abilities that are potentially harmful to the other PCs have proven unpopular (not strictly a matter of being able to choose when to start, but more about the 5e Rage not having any side effects like being compelled to always attack anyone)

---

Then there are issues to consider with the mechanical design. Rage benefits are supposed to be good, or at least not minimal. This means that we don't want an unlimited Rage (I know that at very high levels it becomes unlimited, but during most of the game it is not). We want the Barbarian to be sometimes raging and therefore significantly better, and other times not raging.

If you try to design Rage as 'refreshes on a short rest', you will find that it's not so easy to make it work:

- if the Rage is long enough to last a whole encounter, then 'refreshes on a short rest' means that even if you have only 1 Rage per short rest, it could easily turn into unlimited once again, if the party can manage to rest after each encounter. In order to prevent that, the DM is forced to change the narrative and the adventure design so that most of the time the party cannot take a short rest -> this is bad, because DM shouldn't feel like they must always follow a specific adventure pacing to 'make the game work' (the DM already often has to think about this when planning the adventuring day, it would be even worse if she had to plan the adventuring hours)

- so then you're forced to have Rage last shorter than a whole encounter, but then you have more problems: if you go too short like 1 round duration, it doesn't feel like a Rage anymore but rather like a single power attack; if you go the Pathfinder way, it increases the bookkeeping IMO ridiculously (might fit with 3e, not so much with 5e)

It is just better to have Rage as 'refreshes on a long rest'. Then the DM may still have somewhat to take it into account when writing adventures, but it is more in line with the abilities of other characters IMHO.

I suppose this all means that I cannot find a better way to design Rage as it is now.

 

[Leatherhead]

Because, functionally, Rages don't have a real penalty. (For good reason, snubs to you 3.5 Frenzied Berserker) And therefore shouldn't be permanent, at least until high levels.

You would need to dissect the current mechanic, make the core functionality dynamic (in order to keep player agency) and require some impactfull trade-offs if you wanted to do something that was available every fight from the gate.

Also, I totally want to see a "Warp Spasm" Barbarian like Cú Chulainn made into a subclass where you gain temporary physical mutations while you Rage.

 

[Radaceus]

'Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a cage'< I think this sums it up, it's not that you train to utilize/maximize the ability to rage...it's that you train to harness the ability, in that you have a tendency to lose control, and knowing this, you try to mitigate it. Anger is a weakness more than a strength, and knowing she can lose her cool, the barbarian trains to keep her faculties while doing so, that is keeping it to a minimum which translates into a maximum usage per day

also, Warp spasm reminds me of Hanover Fisk from Heavy Metal, not a rage mechanic, but more akin to Metamorphosis (the psionic ability)