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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 6755057" data-attributes="member: 1465">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 not2) 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. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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