The Rage of the Orcs: First Impressions

I posted a rough draft of my Orc class for DCC RPG two weeks back. Last night, we finished our first playtests of the mechanics. As it stands, they are just a little too powerful. When designing the mechanics, I imposed steep penalties for fatigue to discourage players from holding in their rage. The mechanics as written currently give too many bonuses to prevent players from accessing the higher bonuses on the rage table.


The player suggested scaling back the mechanics, but I've already done that: anyone using these rules should omit the Will, Morale, Threat, and AC columns. It's too many abilities. I think the bell curve works, but the speed and ease at which Rage builds is the issue. I have a few solutions in mind. The first one is a suggestion from a member of the Goodman Games forums. Rather than track rage at all, the player chooses to get a bonus to the rage roll for a penalty for the fatigue check. This is very simple and has far less bookkeeping than my current system. The only question is, how do you set limits on a bonus?

Another simple method is to just use your level as the modifier. This knocks the weakest entry on the table (1) off, and scales well until the last few levels. Using this method, here is the range of possible results.

Level	Rage Die	Result
1	1d3	2-4
2	1d4	3-6
3	1d5	4-8
4	1d6	5-10
5	1d7	6-12
6	1d8	7-14
7	1d10	8-17
8	1d12	9-20
9	1d14	10-23
10	1d16	11-26

My only issue is it removes the feel of the class. I like that players build rage, and I think there's something fun about watching those bonuses stack up. It does provide pretty defined parameters though and removes the headache of bookkeeping. I did find that my player often forgot to note the bonuses as they accrued.

The last solution involves keeping the mechanics as they are, but, rather than giving a bonus per each instance of a condition (players dropping to 0, killing enemies, critical hits, etc), the Orc can only receive +1 per each condition fulfilled (+5) in total, which scales as follows:

Level	Rage Die	Result
1	1d3	1-8
2	1d4	1-9
3	1d5	1-10
4	1d6	1-11
5	1d7	1-12
6	1d8	1-13
7	1d10	1-15
8	1d12	1-17
9	1d14	1-19
10	1d16	1-21

This gives the Orc the possibility to access some of the higher values on the Rage table than the second method above, but also makes it harder to hit the top results than the second method. Given the nature of the Rage mechanic, I don't necessarily view this as a bad thing, but it may just not work in practice. More reports to come.