See the spoiler above. It literally talks about preventing the kind of unbalanced mess 5e deliberately collapses into
D&D (2024) Rogue's Been in an Awkward Place, And This Survey Might Be Our Last Chance to Let WotC Know.
- Thread starter Soulknife_Infiltrator
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James Gasik
We don't talk about Pun-Pun
If we're talking about Cleric spells that increase AC, one I used often was Recitation, since it can be Persisted. There's also Divine Protection, Eyes of the Oracle, Guardian Spirit, Foundation of Stone, Iron Bones, Investiture of the Steel Devil, True Prayer of the Chosen, and of course, Righteous Might.
I would much rather have the 5E unbalance. We have had PCs hit 32AC in 5E and it was fine. Unbalance has never bothered me or any of the other players in the games I played.
The silly bonuses and penalties and figuring out what stacked and what didn't in 3E on the other hand certainly did bother me.
Wait now - 5e is an unbalanced mess? It's the most balanced version I've played apart from 4e, which had issues over feeling like a push button game with only slight variations in abilities. Every version has pros and cons. We're at 16th level and I can't recall any other version being this easy to play at those levels.
Yes and I don't even need to go further than the post above the one I'm quoting for an example of how 5e's unrestricted stacking causes the math to breakdown. That's especially noteworthy when viewed against "The main reason to keep track of what stacks and what doesn’t stack is to keep total bonuses from getting out of hand. If a character wears a belt of giant Strength, it’s unbalancing to allow the cleric to cast bull’s strength on her as well and allow both bonuses to add up. Likewise, a character with mage armor, magic plate armor, a ring of protection, and a divine favor spell would be unbalanced if all his bonuses were cumulative. Stacking restrictions keep the game within manageable limits, while still allowing characters to benefit from multiple magic items. For instance, note that some of the items from the previous example—the magic plate armor, the ring, and the divine favor spell, for example—could work together, because they provide bonuses of different types."
With that said, context & how this tangent came up is critically relevant to the "unbalanced mess" statement. It started out because back in 760 it was erroneously stated that it was "awful"to figure out AC when some bonuses did & did not stack.
That led to 761 & 762 expressing how it was fine & not difficult because any questions of stacking were unusual edge cases that were almost always temporary & rarely able to stack.
From there in 763 someone pointed to a pathfinder PC with seven different bonuses with only one to AC & no named sources that would allow any sort of discourse. In case you lost track we were talking about the braincells involved in figuring out what 3.x AC bonuses do & don't stack though so six of the seven are just filler.
After that things went well & truly off the rails to a couple posts of discourse over literally any cleric buff to anything that could conflict. For whatever reason that came up even though those conflicts were almost certainly deliberate for the very reason described in the DMG spoiler that referenced how it would be "unbalanced" if a cleric were unrestricted in stacking buffs+gear. In case you lost track we were talking about the braincells involved in figuring out what AC bonuses do & don't stack though, at least the DMG specifically talked about why the cleric buffs conflict.
Oh right. I suppose I always understood that in a bounded system, prevention of stacking was surely intended to be baked into the system and none of my players would bother to try and break the system. The highest AC we have is AC24 with magic scale armour and a sword of defending. I realise that the rules say that bonuses from different sources stack but some of the wording is pretty vague. Bracers of Defence are weird in this edition. They should just provide AC8 and not require attunement but as worded, there's nothing to say the bonus applies after you work out monk or barbarian AC. Rings of Protection have never stacked with magical armour bonuses so why would I ever think they were intended to start now in 5e in a bounded system but it does feel odd that they cost attunement - maybe they were intended to be different in this edition but it seems counter-intuitive. I also assumed that they could not possibly have intended +3 armour and +3 shields to stack so I only apply the highest bonus but then I've never really dished out any +3 items. DMs do control the flow of things like that.
Temporary bonuses are not so bad as they are temporary but a sword of defending should probably only apply an AC bonus against a single melee opponent to stay in balance.
James Gasik
We don't talk about Pun-Pun
Rings of Protection stacked with armor bonuses in 3e as they granted a Deflection bonus.
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
You're completely missing the point. Of course they don't stack, that's the issue. You have to track every type of bonus and compare it to any buffing spell(and there are hundreds outside of the PHB) you want to cast or is being cast on you to make sure you aren't doubling up. It takes a bit of work. It's significantly more complicated than 5e. It's not a problem, though.
If they stacked it would be MUCH easier.
But ring of protection didn't stack with shield of faith lesser deflect or a cloak of protection . Now in 5e that ring cumulatively stacks with the cloak a shield spell a magic shield magic armor a shield of faith spell defensive fighting style and so on all combined. Now 5s so irresponsible in service of recklessly chasing unbalanced results that it doesn't even bother trying to use the one limiting check against stacking that it has on the lowest of low hanging fruit by not bothering toskeb+n weapons and armor require attunement
Yeah it's so obviously wrong in the bounded system that you assume it must have been an oversight. I'd be interested to see the designers' reasoning for not either closing down stacking or just putting a hard cap of AC25.
Of course, I also think they screwed up the stat boosting magic items, which should have been +2 or +4, capped at X, plus something extra, such treated as large or huge for carrying, shoving etc or maybe advantage or +1d4 on linked skill rolls. Giving a strength 10 character Str14 plus greater carrying capacity is not as much bang as giving a St18 fighter Str22 and the ability to shove huge creatures.
