Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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Greetings everyone,
one of my players approached me considering the unarmored defense property of monks.
His monk (https://www.dndbeyond.com/characters/153949766), a halfling, has +3 Dex and +0 Wisdom. According to my understanding his monk should have 13 AC (10 + 3 + 0), but the character has 16 AC, since Unarmored Defense counted his +3 to dex seemingly 2 times.
I created two monks, one for 2014 (https://www.dndbeyond.com/characters/165557305) and one for 2024 (https://www.dndbeyond.com/characters/165557142). For both, the Dex modifier is not counted for Unarmored Defense- only their wisdom modifier.
For about an hour I look for the reason, why the monk of my player has 16 AC instead of 13 AC, but I cannot figure it out unfortunately.
I've no clue what is going on, does someone have a clue?
Building a Monk with a Wisdom modifier of 0 seems… unwise.
Sorry for the pun.
I’ve looked at the sheet. It gives the AC as 10 + 3 (for DEX) + 3 (miscellaneous bonus linked to Unarmoured Defence), which just doesn’t make sense. In the Monk traits section for Unarmoured Defence it correctly gives the AC as 13.
He probably hit the "Customize" button on the armor page and added the dex bonus again as Miscellaneous for Unarmored Defense. He should remove that.
Also, yeah, Monks abilities need Wisdom a lot more than they need STR or CHA, and the bonus to armor is just one of those. I would strongly recommend to him that either of those 15's replacing the 8 in WIS would make him a lot more effective mechanically.
Player definitely went and manually added a +3 to their AC. Best case and likely scenario they just didn't realize it was already included in their AC and accidentally doubled up.
I could see why they might have made that error: in the traits section, for Unarmoured Defence, it just states that when wearing no armour or shield, your base AC is 13, with no explanation of how that’s derived. If they hadn’t properly read the Monk features, they might have assumed that UD changes the AC calculation from 10+DEX to 13+DEX.