Do cover bonuses stack?

[AuraSeer]

Re: No not really answered it

So, am I STILL missing it here or is the above a reasonable way to do cover?

Seems reasonable to me. There's no hard and fast rule, just DM judgement, so pick something that makes sense and run with it.

 

[Christian]

Yep, you've got it, two. Basically, you look at how much exposure the target has (taking into account that exposure of extremities is less important than exposure of vital spots) and compare it to the 'standard' examples, then pull out a reasonable number. Not complicated-but a lot of DM judgment is involved. There were just too many possible variables, I suspect, to make a single hard & fast rule for cover. PH p. 132 has everything the ruleset has to say about it ...

 

[Lord Pendragon]

Re: No not really answered it

Archer shoots at monster. According to the LP, I presume, since all the party members give the same cover "bonus" only the highest applies,

Sometimes I don't know why I bother. Really. If you're going to reference my post, the leastyou could do is read it, huh?

Originally posted by Lord Pendragon

Now multiple creatures are different. They're moving, of different sizes and shapes, etc. But the two covers still don't just simply stack, for the same reason that the two walls don't stack: some of that cover is going to overlap and be useless. So instead, with multiple creatures, more bracken between archer and target, etc., the DM simply assigns a higher cover bonus for the whole thing based on his judgement.

 

[Angcuru]

It's for reasons like this that I always have my archer characters get unerring accuracy bows A.S.A.P. If the cover doesn't apply, don't bother worrying about it.

 

[Legildur]

In my two table-top games, we simply increase the cover to the next degree of cover for each intervening creature the same size of the target.

That is, 2 intervening creatures would provide 3/4 cover to the target.

Everyone seems happy with this, and it seems to work well.