| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
Current Wording
At the end of each of your turns, you must attempt a flat check to determine whether you keep raging. The DC starts at 0 on the first round and goes up by 5 each following round, to a maximum of DC 20. If you fail, your rage ends immediately. (Because of the flat check rules, you automatically succeed at the DC 0 check without rolling on the first round.)
Suggested revision:
At the end of each of your turns, you must attempt a flat check to determine whether you keep raging. The DC starts at 5 on the first round and goes up by 5 each following round, to a maximum of DC 20. If you fail, your rage ends at the end of your next turn.
Not only is the new version shorter (it avoids the parenthetical for DC 0 checks), and there is a precedent for effects lasting until the end of the next turn (e.g. a rogue with Scoundrel's Feint critically succeeds on their roll to feint), but I see two benefits to this.
-First, in pre-1.6 rage you would always know in advance "I will be fatigued next turn" and it creates a tension between "preparing for the turn you know you will be vulnerable" and "pressing on in the last turn in which you are still hulked up" (e.g. weighing the odds of a third attack at -10 which might drop the enemy versus moving away in anticipation of being vulnerable) which no longer exists in 1.6. Certainly being able to plan for the future isn't the most barbarianey of things but I see it as how an athlete will have a sense of how long they can go at full speed and when they are flagging but can still push a little further. I don't see a reason a barbarian couldn't manage the same.
-Secondly having the DC be 5 x [current count of rounds raged consecutively] is slightly simpler than 5 x [number of rounds you have been raging minus one], in particular since you can put a die on the table when you rage and just have the DC be 5 times the face value of the die, incrementing the die 1 after every successful check. Solutions where you start counting at zero or where you only start counting after your first turn are somewhat less elegant, I feel.
Good change, but I would roll at the start of the turn if you are raging instead, saying that failing the check makes your rage end at the end of the turn.
But I'm not totally opposed to how it works now, because I don't dislike the implied risk of rage ending and leaving you vulnerable for a round.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Another thread, Barbarian Rage Fatigue Question, has revealed an apparently unintentional consequence of the Update 1.6 wording of Rage. Since rage ends at the end of a turn, the fatigued condition begins immediately at the end of the same turn. According to the duration rules on page 304, that means that the fatigue and cannot-rage limitation end at the beginning of the following turn. Thus, the barbarian is fatigued only between two consecutive turns.
PossibleCabbage's and Megistone's wording provides a good rephrasing to correct this.
At the start of each of your turns during rage, you must attempt a flat check to determine the duration of your rage. The DC starts at 5 on the second round of rage and goes up by 5 each following round, to a maximum of DC 20. The round on which you fail the check is the last round of that rage, and the rage ends at the beginning of your next turn.