2 Magical armor questions

[Emongnome]

1) Does an enhancement bonus to an armor (or shield) improve your AC against touch attacks?

2) The description for a Darkwood Shield does not give an arcane spell failure. Do I assume it's the same as for a regular large wooden shield (+10%)?

Thanks!

 

[Crothian]

1) Does an enhancement bonus to an armor (or shield) improve your AC against touch attacks?

2) The description for a Darkwood Shield does not give an arcane spell failure. Do I assume it's the same as for a regular large wooden shield (+10%)?

Thanks!

1) No, it does not.

2) A darkwood shield can be a buckler, a small shield, or a large shield (I think it can be a buckler, I see no reason it cannot). So, use whatever is the arcane failure for the shield.

 

[Emongnome]

In the PHB, the Darkwood Shield is described as "...a large non-magical wooden shield." A regular large shield weighs 10lbs, or twice the Darkwood. If it were a small shield or buckler (which there's no reason it couldn't), then the weight of those should drop accordingly; from 5lbs to maybe 3lbs. Otherwise, I'd say you were right: In the absence of a contridiction, I should assume there is no change in the spell failure statistic. Thanks.

And by the way, Crothian, referring to a seperate thread: If your posts were not thoughtful and well-received, I don't believe you would have reached the 8,000 mark! So there!

 

[Crothian]

In the PHB, the Darkwood Shield is described as "...a large non-magical wooden shield." A regular large shield weighs 10lbs, or twice the Darkwood. If it were a small shield or buckler (which there's no reason it couldn't), then the weight of those should drop accordingly; from 5lbs to maybe 3lbs. Otherwise, I'd say you were right: In the absence of a contridiction, I should assume there is no change in the spell failure statistic. Thanks.

And by the way, Crothian, referring to a seperate thread: If your posts were not thoughtful and well-received, I don't believe you would have reached the 8,000 mark! So there!

No problem with the help. It's how I got most of these 8000+ posts. I have no problem with people thinking I am thoughtful and helpful, I just don't want people looking at the posts and making assumptions. There are people on here much better at these things then I with much smaller postcounts. And all the time we are getting new people who could very easily be the next on line genius. Always remember, postcount means nothing.

 

[Pax]

Another way to go about it is, look at the entry for the material used (extraordinary materials are detailed in the DMG, pages 242-243), and see what Darkwood says there. And, in fact, Darkwood does nothing for arcane spell failure %. 8)

However, it DOES change the armor checkpenalty by 2 (for the better), possibly allowing a non-shield-proficient character to use one without Armor Check penalties (-0 to everything is ... no penalty to ANYthing! ).

 

[Wolf72]

you could use the darkwood variant in Dragon Mag ... SKR has written/posted that they weren't playtested or balance so take the items with grain of salt.

-5% ASF
+1 MxDx
-2 ACP
one weight cat lighter (light is still light)

light armor +750
medium armor +2,250
heavy armor +6,000