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

[Chaosmancer]

I wonder if a lot of the barbarians issues come from branding.

I've never liked thinking of "rages" as getting angry, but more like "battle trances", either a mental "calm spot in the storm" perfect clarity or choosing to go into something with complete abandon and no longer try and fight "smart" and just "Fight".

It makes them a little more zen and a steps into monk flavor to a degree, but it just fits better with the mechanics.

Barbarians don't have a problem with their mechanics, they have a problem with naming, up to and including the name barbarian for a lot of people.

 

[Uchawi]

Remember, though, that the DMG says the game is balanced around 6-8 medium encounters per day (mostly 6 if you do the math on XP per day) and 2 short rests per day, which puts you into 1 short rest every 2 encounters or so. 1 rage per short rest would be equal to 3 rages per day, so once the barbarian goes over that you'd need to look into adding extra rages per day or switching over to every encounter. It would be a slight change to things, and you'd likely need to rebalance during the level range of 4 to 5 rages per day.

I feel like I'd like the notion of 1 rage per short rest over 3/day, only because I can envision the resting for an hour to recoup the rage more so then having 2, 3, or 4 per day that I then have to rest for the whole night. I know it is often described as a psudomystical thing, but that also seems to not mesh. The Monk's Ki is power from within and it recovers on a short rest, after all.

You could look at a recovery option similar to a wizard, where so many short rests a day the barbarian is able to rage again or implement very specific controlled rages.