Li Shenron
Legend
DEFCON 1 said:What? Just because your skin takes on a hardened form of pseudo-natural armor that protects you even when you're wearing leather armor over it... but then that protection suddenly disappears once you strap a shield on your arm? How could that NOT make sense?!?
The only way to make some sense to it, is to try and keep focused on the original idea that in D&D "armor is cover", so any AC increase is more about covering your weak spots rather than absorbing hits.
If you think of Barkskin, natural armor, shield etc. to be mostly about covering more of your exposed body, it starts making some sense that these don't just stack like they easily did in 3e, but you tend to get diminishing returns from adding more AC bonuses.
But then, what suddenly starts to feel broken, is 3/4 cover. We have all these restrictions meant to keep your AC low for bounded accuracy, but a ranged combatant has such an easy way to boost her AC by a whooping +5 just by getting behind 3/4 cover that stacks with everything - except of course Barksin