D&D 5E Barkskin *Might* Be the Worst Spell Description I've Ever Read

Ok. First the way I run barkskin is this.
If Current AC < 16
Move 16 To AC.
Get AC.
If Fool behind Cover ? Accept Answer. IF Answer Y add 2 to AC.
I see nothing in the description that say you add cover bonus first.
Second.
IT IS NOT NICE TO FOOL MOTHER NATURE. Mother Nature said your AC is 16.
Morrus " Cool I Leather Armour +5 to my ac. My skin looks very Oak like. Should I steal mothers skin lotion?"
DefCon1 " Whaaaaa! I spend 10 GP on a Shield. I only get +3 to my AC. My skin looks the same as Morrus'."
Mother Nature, "KIDS YOU HAVE THE SAME AC.!"
DefCon1, " But but but his + to AC is greater than mine. Not fair! Not Fair! Not Fair!"
Mother Nature, "GO TO YOUR ROOMS. I swear I will make killer plants to keep in your rooms."
Mother Nature wanders off looking for moonshine. "Kids these Days".

Lanefan said:

We're good up to here.

The spell's very name would rather strongly suggest otherwise.

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How so? In what way is skin of bark harder to make contact with than skin of... skin? It may be more difficult to penetrate, but it is not more difficult to hit.

Lanefan said:

Which is fine as far as it goes, but last I checked oak trees can't effectively wield shields to improve their defenses, nor can they duck behind a rock. They're also not all that dextrous, unless the wind is strong enough to represent its own hazard.

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Well, yeah. Oak trees are objects. Objects’ AC represents the difficulty of damaging them, not the difficulty of hitting them.

Lanefan said:

Druids, on the other hand, can wield shields - at least when in normal form - and duck behind rocks, and sometimes have some dexterity going for them as well.

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With you so far.

Lanefan said:

Therefore, if your total AC gets to what it is via 13 (armour) + 2 (shield) + 2 (dex) = 17, sheer logic says that because your skin is now that much harder it goes 16 (barkskin) + 2 (shield) + 2* (dex) = 20*.

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Except Druids are creatures, and a creature’s AC represents the difficulty of hitting it, not the difficulty of damaging it. That 13 + 2 + 2 = 17 represents the difficulty of getting around that shield, to a gap in that armor, while the Druid is trying to dodge. The druid’s skin being hard as bark doesn’t enter into that calculation, because it doesn’t make the Druid more difficult to hit, it makes them more difficult to damage, which in the case of objects like oak trees, is modeled with an AC value. So, if an attack hits the Druid (by beating their 17 AC), it is then compared to the difficulty of damaging them (represented by their 16 AC). For simplicity’s sake, we can just say the Druid’s AC can’t be less than 16, rather than saying he has two different AC values.

Personally I think it’s dumb that creatures and objects use the same mechanic to represent different things, but since that’s how D&D does it, this effect seems perfectly reasonable within the rules of D&D.

CapnZapp said:

You know, I think any spell that triggers such a long and complex response should probably be considered for a rewrite on that criteria alone.

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This is silly criteria. You can over-explain literally anything if you want to.

Mr. Crawford's sage advice on the barkskin spell is one of the clearest indications, to me, of the stark raving madness of trying to foist your DM's responsibility for making rulings off on a distant, removed arbiter. Jeremy's primary objective is not to make sure that things work at your table in a way that makes sense and promotes your fun game session. That may be a secondary objective, but the primary objective is to preserve, to the greatest degree possible, the consistency and internal logic of his rules system.

If there are two ways to read a rule, one of which works really well for everyone involved and the other preserves the integration of the rules by abiding by them in a stupid way that renders, for example, a spell completely useless, Jeremy Crawford will choose--must choose, really--the second interpretation. The goal is always to keep errata down to the barest minimum possible.

I don't begrudge him that. Keeping the 5e rules rationally integrated and consistent is his job, and he's pretty good at it. What I don't have much respect for is the DMs who look to him to make rulings for their own campaign. That's your job as a DM, man. Sure, you can look at the sage advice for guidance. You probably should, from time to time. Never lose sight of the fact that it's advice, though. Take notice of it, let it inform your ruling at the table, but never lose sight of the fact that it is your ruling, not Jeremy's. If you tell your druid player that barkskin won't stack with a shield, a ring of protection, or cover... that's your ruling, dude. You may be ruling in the way JC advises, but it's still your ruling, and you can't just say "hey man, that's the rule, clarified in Sage Advice." The rule is what's in the book, the interpretation is yours to make, and Sage Advice is just there to make a suggestion if you aren't sure which way to go with it.

In my campaign, barkskin is natural armor giving you an AC of 16. Like heavy armor, it doesn't stack a Dex bonus, but unlike heavy armor it doesn't penalize stealth at all. You can gain a benefit from rings/cloaks of protection, haste, dual wielder feats, shields, and cover. That's not a house rule, that my ruling as a DM on the rule as it appears in the Player's Handbook. I have considered and rejected the advisory opinion of Jeremy Crawford vis-a-vis the barkskin spell.

I have contemplated a house rule that would set the AC at 15 (like a wooden object) and give the target a damage threshold equal to 3 + the level of the spell slot, or maybe 2 x the level of the spell slot. Fire damage would bypass the threshold. It seems like it would be entertaining to play up the transformative aspect of the spell that way.

jasper said:

Ok. First the way I run barkskin is this.
If Current AC < 16
Move 16 To AC.
Get AC.
If Fool behind Cover ? Accept Answer. IF Answer Y add 2 to AC.
I see nothing in the description that say you add cover bonus first.
Second.
IT IS NOT NICE TO FOOL MOTHER NATURE. Mother Nature said your AC is 16.
Morrus " Cool I Leather Armour +5 to my ac. My skin looks very Oak like. Should I steal mothers skin lotion?"
DefCon1 " Whaaaaa! I spend 10 GP on a Shield. I only get +3 to my AC. My skin looks the same as Morrus'."
Mother Nature, "KIDS YOU HAVE THE SAME AC.!"
DefCon1, " But but but his + to AC is greater than mine. Not fair! Not Fair! Not Fair!"
Mother Nature, "GO TO YOUR ROOMS. I swear I will make killer plants to keep in your rooms."
Mother Nature wanders off looking for moonshine. "Kids these Days".

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FWIW "Armor Class (AC). Armor protects its wearer from attacks. The armor (and shield) you wear determines your base Armor Class."

I know the spell does not say "base Ac" but the sense that armor and shield are included in AC and cover bonus would not be is at least partially supportable by that.

So this thread can be boiled down to:

1) The spell is clear in what it does.
2) The spell creates an issue with dispersion of disbelief for many players. Leading people to want the spell to work differently.

Ultimately I don't think its a great spell myself. The AC bonus isn't that great when your not wildshaped, and when you are its then very vulnerable to concentration issues.

So the issue is not that the spell is unclear. Its simply that the spell is bad.

Charlaquin said:

This is silly criteria. You can over-explain literally anything if you want to.

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Sure, but when you feel like you have to, there might be a problem.

Stalker0 said:

... The spell is clear in what it does. ...

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I'm not sure where you're getting that notion. Mearles said it stacks with a shield, which tells you right there that pro DMs will read the rule in different ways. I doubt seriously that very many people would have reached the conclusion that someone with barkskin couldn't benefit from cover.

I think it is pretty clear on what it does, but I don't think it does what Jeremy Crawford says it does. That would suggest that it isn't, in fact, objectively clear.

epithet said:

Sure, but when you feel like you have to, there might be a problem.

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I don’t feel like I have to. The spell’s mechanical function is perfectly clear, and in my assessment, internally consistent with the way creature and object AC works in the game. But, since some people seem to be struggling to understand how the mechanics translate to the fiction, I explained it in detail for their benefit.

If there’s anything here complicating the explanation, it’s not the spell, but the way D&D abstracts accuracy and the strength of a hit. It’s super unintuitive for both your likelihood of hitting a creature and your likelihood of hitting an object hard enough to damage it to be represented by the same value. I’ve seen the exact same reaction every single time I’ve had to tell a player that they need to make an attack roll against an inanimate object. They say some variation of “how hard can it be to hit something that isn’t moving?” and I explain that, in this instance, it’s not about whether or not they hit it, but whether or not the hit is solid enough to damage the object. I’ve also had quite a few new players surprised that a heavily armored character is harder to “hit” than one who is lightly armored but extremely nimble, to which I explain that hitting someone wearing heavy armor doesn’t generally do meaningful damage, you have to go for a vulnerable spot like a gap in the armor. So while the heavily armored character may be easier to touch, they are harder to hit in a spot where it will do damage.

Nobody expects to “miss” a tree, and everybody expects armor to reduce damage. But us D&D veterans are good at looking past the many, many unintuitive quirks of D&D’s mechanics. Until we encounter a mechanic that works differently than the particular ones we’ve gotten used to. Barkskin is such a mechanic. The way it works is in fact consistent with the way D&D handles creature AC vs. object AC, but the way D&D handles creature AC vs. object AC is super unintuitive. We’re just used to handling each in isolation. This particular case where both need to be used to resolve an attack forces us to confront that, and many people assume it’s the spell’s fault for being unintuitive rather than the system’s.

CapnZapp said:

You know, I think any spell that triggers such a long and complex response should probably be considered for a rewrite on that criteria alone.

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If that applies to more than just spells, work on 6e would have begun the day 5e came out.