Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="eamon" data-source="post: 4060612" data-attributes="member: 51942">Anyways, completely irrespective of whatever the rule-text of the two blurbs say, don't forget the "behind the curtains" on DMG page 21:BEHIND THE CURTAIN: STACKING BONUSESBalance: [sblock]The main reason to keep track of what stacks and what doesn’t stack is to keep total bonuses from getting out of hand. If a character wears a belt of giant Strength, it’s unbalancing to allow the cleric to cast bull’s strength on her as well and allow both bonuses to add up. [...etc...][/sblock] Summary: Disallowing stacking avoids easy loopholes that might provide wildly different power levels.Consistency and Logic: "The system of bonus types provides a way to make sense out of what can work together and what can’t. At some point, when adding types of protection together, a reasonable player realizes that some protections are just redundant. This system logically portrays how it all makes sense together." This is the big issue - what's the sense?  The swordsage's and the monk's AC bonus seem to model almost the same thing in-game.  That you can find similar in-game events modelled by differing game mechanics in the tens of thousands of pages of rules published by WotC does not surprise me.  They try to bunch similar concepts into similar "named modifier" buckets.  But the in-game world is a little fuzzy and the rules aren't perfect.  If you're trying to perform to model the same thing twice, and the mechanics happen to grant different modifiers, that doesn't mean they shouldn't overlap nevertheless.Encouraging Good Play: [sblock]Categorizing bonuses by type allows players to put together suites of effects that do work in conjunction in a consistent manner—encouraging smart play rather than pile-it-on play.[/sblock] Trying to find multiple rules with the same source (your wisdom) and the same effect (your AC gets better) is definitely pile it on play.Even if the class abilities had a name, the fact that the in-game justification is so similar, and the fact that the source is similar (your wisdom, presumably due to spot/listen/insight/sense motive/etc) and the effect is identical, should make it clear that these effects are too similar to stack.</blockquote>

Verification