D&D 5E barkskin

[BryonD]

Cover won't help it? Shield of Faith[/ii] won't help it? Shield won't help it? None of those boost it either. It's that weak for a 2nd level spell? You think that was the intent?

Then I imagine our rule will be a house rule. A 2nd level spell weaker than mage armor is pretty lame.

I figured the line "...regardless of what kind of armor you are wearing" implied that they meant for barkskin to be a replacement for armor and thus stack with everything that can boost armor. If that isn't the case, they need to take a look at it. It's super weak for a 2nd level spell.

Your points are reasonable. But by a flat literally interpretation of the wording, NOTHING stacks with it because there is nothing to stack WITH.

Check you AC as if barkskin does not exist, then use that or 16.

Not saying is it a good spell. Not saying it is well presented. Not saying this is what is even intended because clearly I don't know.


House rules are your friend.

 

[Celtavian]

Your points are reasonable. But by a flat literally interpretation of the wording, NOTHING stacks with it because there is nothing to stack WITH.

Check you AC as if barkskin does not exist, then use that or 16.

Not saying is it a good spell. Not saying it is well presented. Not saying this is what is even intended because clearly I don't know.


House rules are your friend.

Yep. Pretty weak second level spell without the house rule we decided upon. Though druid is one of the few it helps more than others due to working Wild Shape and Polymorph. Still doesn't make much sense given its duration, level, and the benefit it provides.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

I don't think it's a house rule. It's an interpretation that's also in line with Mike Mearls' tweet that a shield does increase the AC. It think the wording of the spell indicates that it's natural armor, and shields stack with that no problem. Not sure about the DEX bonus but I'm pretty sure that does too.

Ilbranteloth

 

[BryonD]

I don't think it's a house rule. It's an interpretation that's also in line with Mike Mearls' tweet that a shield does increase the AC.

Whatever. I'm not one to get hung up on "house rule" as a term suggesting anything questionable. And if we consider the tweet to be effectively a correction, then cool.

It think the wording of the spell indicates that it's natural armor, and shields stack with that no problem. Not sure about the DEX bonus but I'm pretty sure that does too.

Ilbranteloth

There is no such thing as "natural armor" in 5E as in 3E. And nothing in the wording to be found in the PH suggests that anything shields or otherwise, stack with it.

But, again, there is also nothing whatsoever wrong with assuming that the words as written are a poor effort at saying what was MEANT. It may be that what was meant is exactly in line with how you are playing it.

And IMO, who cares??? Play the way that works for you.

 

[KarinsDad]

Cover won't help it? Shield of Faith[/ii] won't help it? Shield won't help it? None of those boost it either. It's that weak for a 2nd level spell? You think that was the intent?

All of these things work fine with it. They just do not add to the AC 16 itself.

Example:

PC has AC of 15. With Barkskin, it is now 16. With Shield of Faith, it is now 17 (15+2). With Shield of Faith and cover, it is now 19 (15+2+2).

The purpose of this spell is for when a Druid is wild shaped into a creature that has low AC. If the Druid casts Barkskin and wild shapes into an owl, she has AC 16 instead of AC 11. It's not typically a buff for other PCs, but people are wanting it to do that. That's not the main purpose of the spell.

The other time this is typically useful is when the party Wizard has AC 11 or 12 and the party Druid bumps that up to 16 (or if the PCs are escorting a merchant who is not in armor, or whatever).

But, there are a lot of subpar, not well thought out spells in the game. This one is fine for what it is meant to do, but is subpar as a "buff someone else" spell.

Then I imagine our rule will be a house rule. A 2nd level spell weaker than mage armor is pretty lame.

I figured the line "...regardless of what kind of armor you are wearing" implied that they meant for barkskin to be a replacement for armor and thus stack with everything that can boost armor. If that isn't the case, they need to take a look at it. It's super weak for a 2nd level spell.

Except that "regardless of what kind of armor you are wearing" only means what it states and nothing more. It means that the minimum is there and it doesn't matter what type of armor you are wearing, it's still the minimum.


It's only weak as a "buff someone else" spell. As a buff druid spell while wild shaped spell, it's actually not too bad.


Btw, I am totally open to the house rule that Barkskin takes the AC supplied by armor and makes its minimum 16 (and hence, everything stacks with it). I think that is a good house rule because it makes the spell useful to buff other PCs. It does require a tiny bit of work adding in the Dex of any creature wild shaped into.

 

[Authweight]

The most ambiguous case to me is cover. It seems to me like by RAW you would add cover to your regular AC, then check if that was higher than 16. If so, bark skin does nothing. If it's still lower than 16, your AC becomes 16. It means that most barkskinned characters don't benefit from half cover in any way at all. If I hadn't read it closely, though, I would have never caught that, and it's pretty counterintuitive.

It seems to me like the most intuitive ruling is that it sets your AC to 16 (no dex, since it works more like heavy armor where you don't add dex) but you do add shield and cover bonuses to that. But that ruling isn't RAW at all.

 

[Joe Liker]

I was kind of on the fence about this spell for a long time -- I had no idea what to think and simply hoped no one would ever use it.

But thinking about druids and wildshape, the intention of the designers suddenly seemed a lot clearer. Looking at it from that perspective, it even starts to make sense that the wording is so vague.

This is primarily a druid spell. It is intended for use by druids. Druids are the only class that suddenly shifts in and out of armor on a regular basis. They couldn't clone the wording of mage armor because mage armor doesn't work with real armor. They had to word it so the spell is not overpowered if you are sometimes wearing armor and sometimes not.

I think they were probably trying to avoid all jargon because maybe they weren't sure what the final terminology would be for things like "base AC" -- or if those things would even be rigorously defined. (It turns out they aren't, really.)

So now I'm squarely in the camp where barkskin replaces the base AC that is normally set by armor unless you are already wearing armor that is better. Everything stacks on top of that, including Dex, shields, cover, and shield of faith.

 

[CapnZapp]

You see?

I could not hope to illustrate the problems better if I tried... ;-)

These last posts, where people say the spell is fine and it's obvious how it works... Yet reaches completely opposite conclusions!

Nothing more needs to be said. It's completely impossible. That's broken to me...

 

[SkidAce]

For simplicity's sake, we treat it as Heavy Armor AC 16 and we're done. No dex, but anything that would add to armor does.

 

[Authweight]

You see?

I could not hope to illustrate the problems better if I tried... ;-)

These last posts, where people say the spell is fine and it's obvious how it works... Yet reaches completely opposite conclusions!

Nothing more needs to be said. It's completely impossible. That's broken to me...

I agree, the rule is unnecessarily vague. Some people will argue that that this a feature of 5e, not a bug, arguing essentially that ambiguity is supposed to be a tool to increase the DM's power by relying on "rulings, not rules." I find that argument incredibly bogus. If the designers want rulings, not rules, they should just say so, for instance saying "barkskin makes your skin bark-like and hard. The DM decides what this means, but here are some possible interpretations: ..." instead of trying to get there through some sort of strategic ambiguity. Vague rules are just bad design and bad writing.