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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6319012" data-attributes="member: 42582">Once again, I'm wondering if you're really serious.The single most controversial ability in 4e, as far as I can tell, is Come and Get It. The 4e PHB shipped with 4 alternatives to that ability.They included Second Wind as a fighter ability, I am guessing, because playtesting showed that it is popular among players of fighters. (Which, to be honest, is no great surprise.) I think most people accept that if you can recover from wounds with an hour's rest (which is how the default healing and HD rules work), then if you're a tough fighter you can do that during combat too, by finding your Second Wind.They're mechanically different abilities, exploiting design space within the D&D system. Narratively, they're not as different. But this wouldn't be the only time D&D has used multiple mechanical realisations of the same narrative (eg both DEX bonus to AC and hit points gained with levels correspond to a character evading blows).Barbarian rage is, mechanically, a power up. Second wind is, mechanically, a recovery. They play in different ways - powering up with a rage is the default option for the player of a barbarian, whereas second wind requires decent timing, especially at low levels where your second wind healing is a decent proportion of your overall hp - you don't want to go to early and waste some of your healing, but you don't want to wait to late and end up unconscious or dead before your turn comes round again.I haven't done the maths to work out whether or not they're balanced, and frankly I'm not a big fan of the whole rages per day mechanic, which requires a barbarian player to gamble at the start of a combat whether or not the combat is worth spending a rage on. But conceptually I don't see any problematic comparison between the two abilities.</blockquote>

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