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<blockquote data-quote="Authweight" data-source="post: 6442564" data-attributes="member: 6693417">I agree, this is reading a lot into it. But what other plausible explanation is there for Mearls tweeting that shields would apply?My guess is that at some point they had a concept like &quot;base AC,&quot; which was set by your armor. Some armors would let you add dex, others wouldn't (this is in practice what we have now). My guess is the earlier barkskin referenced base AC and set it to 16. With the base AC rules elsewhere in the book, it was clear how this would work. However, at some later point they realized they didn't really need the specific concept of &quot;base AC&quot;, and could remove it for simplicity. Some intern or something was told to go through the book and rewrite every reference to &quot;base AC.&quot; He got to barkskin, realized it did something kind of unique to the old concept, and clumsily tried to replace it.That's obviously a fairly specific theory, and is probably wrong, but it seems like the most plausible explanation to me.Do you have a better theory for why Mearls would say to allow a shield bonus, other than Mearls just doesn't give a flip about what his team wrote in the book?</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Authweight, post: 6442564, member: 6693417"] I agree, this is reading a lot into it. But what other plausible explanation is there for Mearls tweeting that shields would apply? My guess is that at some point they had a concept like "base AC," which was set by your armor. Some armors would let you add dex, others wouldn't (this is in practice what we have now). My guess is the earlier barkskin referenced base AC and set it to 16. With the base AC rules elsewhere in the book, it was clear how this would work. However, at some later point they realized they didn't really need the specific concept of "base AC", and could remove it for simplicity. Some intern or something was told to go through the book and rewrite every reference to "base AC." He got to barkskin, realized it did something kind of unique to the old concept, and clumsily tried to replace it. That's obviously a fairly specific theory, and is probably wrong, but it seems like the most plausible explanation to me. Do you have a better theory for why Mearls would say to allow a shield bonus, other than Mearls just doesn't give a flip about what his team wrote in the book? [/QUOTE]

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