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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Harzel" data-source="post: 7917451" data-attributes="member: 6857506">The narration occurring after the mechanical outcome is determined and being dependent on it is what always happens in D&D, isn't it?While I am definitely not a fan of either the way the spell is written or Crawford's (most recent) interpretation, I think what [USER=6779196]@Charlaquin[/USER] is suggesting can be boiled down to the notion of a layered defense.  As long as one is willing to accept the somewhat abstracted notion that an attack either penetrates a defense unimpeded, or does not penetrate at all, and that there is no synergy between the layers, then keeping them separate up to the point of combining them with max( ) is an appropriate computation.Now as you have observed, if you insist on a narration that takes into account what we know IRL about how physical defenses - shields, armor, cover, DEX, etc. - protect people, then you can make a case for that abstraction still being unsatisfying.   However, a lot of (most?) DMs don't spend a lot of time on narrating exactly how a hit hits or how a miss misses.  And, even if you want that kind of detail, I think you can almost get there.  (And again, I think this is essentially what [USER=6779196]@Charlaquin[/USER] was suggesting, restated a bit.)  If you narrate Barkskin as defending against the force of an attack (which seems pretty reasonable), and all the things that make up your "non Barkskin" AC as being about avoidance, then you have more or less the situation that I described above - if an attack misses due to your avoidance defenses, then Barkskin doesn't matter, and if an attack gets by your avoidance defenses, then it's up to Barkskin to stop it (or not).The additional assumption needed is that the force of a blow and its accuracy are perfectly correlated.  And that seems to be what you are objecting to here.The attack barely got by your avoidance defenses, but a 17 is a pretty forceful blow, and so it was able to penetrate your Barkskin.  It's subjective, but the correlation doesn't seem to me to be that big a thing to handwave.  Most people seem ok with abstracting the role of armor in defense in a way that seems more like avoidance than damage mitigation, so the (accuracy vs. avoidance) vs. (force vs. toughness) situation is already muddied quite a bit.</blockquote>

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