I'm a barbarian! (Once a day)

[Draco_Argentum]

This was brought on by the WotC version of the feats thread.

Uses/day is a balls mechanic. For a start it requires a certain number of encounters per day to actually be a balence.

Second 1/day means a 1st lvl barbarian gets to do his thing once. The rest of the time hes basically a fighter.

The same applies to wizards. A wizard with no spells isn't wizarding. Since most people pick wizard for the wizarding their character isn't doing what they wanted.

Why can't the barbarian rage as many times as he wants but be tired for a bit before he can rage again?

[Absentminded_Wizard]

Because unless you increased the duration of the fatigue, it has no effect whatsoever in most game situations. If you keep the current duration--as many rounds as the barbarian raged--then it's easy to rest for a minute before going on to your next battle (unless the DM's using masses of opponents who attack in waves 30 seconds to a minute apart).

[RandomCasualty]

One way of treating rage is simply as a buff activated as a swift action. That way, the drawback is in fact using the swift action, as opposed to a use per day.

[dbb]

Uses/day is indeed a terrible mechanic. Indeed, depending on circumstances, 1/day may in fact be indistinguishable from "at will" -- or it may be radically different. There's just no way to tell except through actual play whether the DM will let you rest after every encounter or will never let you rest at all.

If you wanted the Barbarian to be able to rage more times per day, you'd have to modify the mechanic so that, say:

* Starting to rage requires some sort of trigger (you have to spend a round of actual combat chewing on your shield, say), rather than being whenever you want (sacrificing a round Right Now for your future rounds of ass-kicking being bigger).

* Rage has a radically shorter duration with a cooling down period (Rage lasts one round, say, or affects one of your attacks in a round, and then you take a penalty for the next round or the rest of your attacks, or whatever -- trading more ass-kicking Right Now for less ass-kicking in the immediate future).

* Rage has sufficient negative effects that activating it isn't something you automatically want to do (as it is now, the downsides to Rage are relatively small, and there are few situations where they outweight the benefits by so much that you wouldn't want to do it).

The present standard of "you get Rage bonuses for one combat, and then are fatigued for a while once the fight is over and you don't care" is crap.

--d.

[Username17]

I don't think it's particularly desirable for a Barbarian to avoid raging in battle because the drawbacks are high enough that he wants to save it. Raging is a class feature, you paid for it and you should do it.

I agree that the Dragonbreath method of balancing things is much more balanced for combat abilities. Cooldown times don't really work at all for non-combat abilities so it's not an effective setup for stuff like Scry and Teleport.

I'll agree that Wizards don't really do what people want them to do at 1st level. The fact that 1 round/level is pretty much the same as "instantaneous" at that point really restricts what spells are going to do anything good. A first level Wizard runs around in his pajamas with 2 mass death effects (a sleep and a color spray) and nothing else but a club. That's not what people want on either end. They kind of don't want their spells to clear entire rooms of enemies, and they certainly don't want to be completely out of juice after 2-4 castings.

But after that, a Wizard has enough spell slots that they pretty much work as intended. I don't have a problem with Wizards after 4th level or so.

-Username17

[Draco_Argentum]

Being able to teleport ambush only once every couple hours definately wouldn't actually balence anything. For rage I'd be happy if there was some chance it'd end before the fight. It'd be a bit of a gamble but the tiredness is part of the flavour, IMO at least.

One of the things I liked about the Dungeonomicon monk was that you get to do your thing right from level one. More of that and less 1st level wizards.

[RandomCasualty]

1152118975[/unixtime]]I don't think it's particularly desirable for a Barbarian to avoid raging in battle because the drawbacks are high enough that he wants to save it. Raging is a class feature, you paid for it and you should do it.

Well if you balance it out as a free action, this is pretty much the only choice you have, unless you want the barbarian to be "always raging".

If you graduate it to a swift action then the cost is at least an action and something you can just make without any real drawbacks of note.