AbdulAlhazred
Legend
I have a huge problem with a barbarian stacking 80 things on top of a charge and refusing to let me mark after a charge. I understand the logic of it, but AT MOST, a charge gets one triggered free action on it when I DM.
Well, the DM is always free to decide under what conditions a player is allowed to take a free action. However I would be careful to make sure you explain to the people playing in your game that you aren't going to allow barbarians to do stuff that any experienced player building a barbarian will expect to be able to do and will probably build their character around doing.
Free actions I don't think are immediate interrupt actions, so you have to resolve the triggering action. As such, if a barbarian reduced a foe to 0 with a charge, no other actions (other than via an action point) can be taken, thus no swift charge. Same goes for the warden marking as a free action.
This gets tricky if you had a free action that triggered on a hit or on damage. In that case you could trigger the action during the charge and it will resolve after you resolve the charge.
A foe being reduced to zero is the result of the charge action, and a barbarian can't take any non-action point actions at that point.
I wonder how this works if you use an action point to charge at the begining of your turn? Does an action point charge end your turn?
Except this entire theory of yours instantly runs into a giant iceburg and joins the Titanic as soon as you actually examine the rules carefully. Free Actions absolutely DO come within other actions. How else can things like Elven Accuracy work? Read the rule on PHB p269 and you can see that making an attack is a process which includes a number of steps, any one of which can trigger free actions which are resolved immediately. Any that haven't been resolved by the "deal damage" process of step 5 are then resolved by the "apply other effects" process of step 5 (the very last thing in the resolution process). Since we have already inarguably determined that free actions happen during other actions when they are triggered then your whole argument simply falls apart.
Just because triggered free actions are not called immediate interrupts does not stop them from interrupting other things. It simply means they don't follow the particular rules specific to immediate actions. There are a number of reasons why this is true. For one thing immediate actions cannot happen during a player's own turn (it would create various infinite loop situations) and further they have restrictions on how many of them can be used in a given period of time (1 immediate per player turn). Those limitations were put in place to restrict players ability to do things outside their own turn, but free actions are designed to work in all the situations where immediate actions don't. Thus some things need to be triggered free actions in order to be useful and work with the rest of the rules, and many of those actions MUST occur within other actions to work.