#condition cards

Weapon Damage

The strength modifiers get a bit tricky as originally laid out. The +2 to hit is fairly consistent, but the damage varies between +1 and +3 based on the type of weapon used.

Once you hit Greater Rage (+6 strength), the bonuses for off-hand and two-handed weapons actually change based on whether your non-raging modifier is odd or even. So, yeah, I'd much rather have a flat modifier.

Saves

You get an immediate +2 to Will from raging and a +4 to Con, which gives you +2 to Fortitude. Reflex gets left behind.

I'm cutting out some other elements, so giving a flat +2 ended up being simpler and hopefully keeping balance in the same ballpark.

Restrictions

I was halfway tempted to cut out the casting and skill-use restrictions, but I think having it there helps explain why you might drop the rage.

If even this was too complex, though, I'd definitely cut that next.

Skills

A handful of skills get bonuses from raging. I just don't think it's worth tracking a +2 to climb while raging.

For a situational +2 to be worth tracking, I think it needs to come up a couple dozen times in the average campaign.

Hit Points

The bonus hit points are kind of funny from a game design standpoint. Like actual rage, they make you think you're invincible, but the real difference is that you don't realize how badly you're hurt.

It does have a little synergy with healing effects, so it's not strictly a bad thing. For the sake of simplicity, though, it's an easy cut.

Fatigue? Rounds?

This is probably the part that breaks the most from Pathfinder as written.

I've run several games with barbarians now and... the round limit never matters for us. Even with multiple combats in a day, the barbarian rapidly eclipses the round limit and it becomes pointless book-keeping.

Fatigue is the other half of the coin. It comes up even less and, in theory, requires you to track the length of each rage (along with the total number of rounds left).

Boiling out fatigue and rounds

So, I'm just going to say "you start rage as a free action and, once you stop, you can't start again this combat." This cuts out rage cycling as written, but it can easily be edited back in.

The only tricky part is converting any powers that require rage rounds. By default, as you don't have rage rounds, they wouldn't function.

All that said, here are cards for standard rage and rage-related fatigue:

Others are a little more "classic."

  The shifts for those are mostly moving around the rolls so players don't have to make saves immediately. This serves two purposes:

Pushing the rolls to times they can be handled without disrupting turn order.

Letting them stew in their terror a bit... I mean, see what they might be up against.