Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 7916378" data-attributes="member: 6779196">There is a way to explain this within the fiction, but not everyone cares for the explanation because it relies on the abstract nature of AC and gets a bit meta. I know I’m not going to convince you to run Barkskin RAW, and I’d really have no interest in trying to do so - you prefer for it to set base AC to 16, and more power to you! But since the verisimilitude argument has come up a few times now, I figure I’ll offer my interpretation for anyone who might be interested.So, AC is abstract, and reflects the overall difficulty of landing a potentially harmful blow on the target. When attacking a creature, this means the creature’s ability to dodge and the coverage of the creature’s armor (and/or natural protection, such as thick hide or scales) are both factors that go into the creature’s AC. However, when attacking an object, it has no ability to dodge.An object’s AC reflects only the toughness of the object, as there is no meaningful chance of missing a stationary object.What Barkskin does, in my evaluation, is it makes the target’s AC work like an object’s. They’ve grown the bark of a 16AC tree on their skin. The difficulty of hitting a vulnerable spot is not factored in, because the target has no vulnerable spots. The naked Druid in example has 16 AC because that reflects the difficulty of penetrating his barklike skin. Now, if you hand that Druid a shield, that doesn’t increase the difficulty of penetrating his skin. If he stands behind cover, if you give him a suit of armor, none of this affects the difficulty of penetrating his skin, so none of it changes the 16 that an attacker needs to roll to do so.Now, if between the armor, the shield, and the cover, the Druid’s AC is greater than 16, then you can use that value, because the difficulty of slipping past those layers of defense is greater than the difficulty of penetrating his barklike skin. The spell hasn’t gotten weaker, it’s just that any blow that is potentially harmful after all that armor would also be potentially harmful to a tree with bark like his skin. In essence, what Barkskin does is gives you a second AC value, that works like a tree’s AC instead of a creature’s, and you use the higher of those two values. Those values don't stack because they’re representing two different things: the difficulty of landing a strike on a vulnerable part of his body, and the difficulty of landing a strong enough blow to damage an oak tree. The former is a matter of both accuracy and force, while the latter is only a matter of force.</blockquote>

Verification