D&D 5E Amulet of Natural Armor

[Paul Farquhar]

Or, of course, "your Dexterity bonus counts as one higher for purposes of calculating Armor Class" [emoji4]

Is it really that necessary to make something that stacks with light armour but not heavy armour (and may or may not stack with medium) though? It seems a bit complicated.

 

[Tormyr]

Or, of course, "your Dexterity bonus counts as one higher for purposes of calculating Armor Class" [emoji4]

I think this does a lot for providing one way of adequately calculating the benefit and have it interact well with the various AC calculation methods.
* Heavy armor users receive no benefit.
* Medium armor users receive a benefit if their DEX < 2.
* Everyone else receive a benefit because all the other AC calculation methods use the full DEX bonus.

The downside is that it is non-intuitive (the DEX isn't actually getting better, its just how the calculation is made). It also is not a very 5e way of doing things, although there is some precedent for saying an ability bonus is modified for the purpose of calculating something (carrying capacity adjustments come to mind.

The amulet of natural armor also has several items that are very similar, notably the ring of protection and bracers of defense.

Several people in this thread (myself included) have been looking at how to limit stacking of of the AC bonus to places where it makes sense, but in 3.5 the bonus stacked. https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Armor_Class#Natural_Armor

The following reference specifically mentions the natural armor bonus provided by barkskin.
http://archive.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/glossary&term=Glossary_dnd_naturalarmorbonus&alpha=

barkskin is also the spell used to create the amulet in 3.5. Given that, barksin may be a good place to check how natural armor could interact in 5e. In 5e, barkskin says your AC cannot be less than 16. The amulet of natural armor could say something to the effect that "your AC cannot be less than ##". The question would then be "what is the bonus?"

I would suggest that a rare or very rare amulet would function the same as barkskin. An uncommon or rare version would set the AC to 10 + proficiency bonus. In both cases you probably could skip attunement since it is not really better than many other AC calculation methods and does not stack with them.

 

[CapnZapp]

I think this does a lot for providing one way of adequately calculating the benefit and have it interact well with the various AC calculation methods.
* Heavy armor users receive no benefit.
* Medium armor users receive a benefit if their DEX < 2.
* Everyone else receive a benefit because all the other AC calculation methods use the full DEX bonus.

The downside is that it is non-intuitive (the DEX isn't actually getting better, its just how the calculation is made). It also is not a very 5e way of doing things, although there is some precedent for saying an ability bonus is modified for the purpose of calculating something (carrying capacity adjustments come to mind.

The amulet of natural armor also has several items that are very similar, notably the ring of protection and bracers of defense.

Agreed it is not immediately obvious. Which was why I wanted to share.

The difficulty is threading the needle - making it sufficiently different from rings of protection, bracers of defense etc and still not be completely worthless for people with abilities as different as monk's unarmored defense, the sorcerer's draconic resilience, the wizard's spell mage armor, the lizardfolk's natural armor or the druid's wild shape.

For all of them, and the rogue (or warlock, say) in Light Armor as well, a +1 Amulet of Natural Armor is and remains valuable.

I'd say most of the "unintuitiveness" is on the theoretical level. When you tell your player you get +1 to AC except when in medium or heavy armor, I wager there is nothing unituitive about it