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Only those proficient in the armor's use know how to wear it effectively, however.
" Armor Proficiency. Anyone can put on a suit of armor or strap a shield to an arm. There are drawbacks to wearing armor or carrying a shield if you lack the required proficiency, as explained in the Equipment section." "Your character needs to be proficient with armor and shields to wear and use them effectively, and your armor and shield proficiencies are determined by your class. Mage Armor also affects Base AC: "The target's base AC becomes 13 + its Dexterity modifier."Īlso, unless you have proficiency in shields, which most magic users do not start with, you couldn't even cast Mage Armor while wielding a shield: The armor (and shield) you wear determines your base Armor Class." True, shields don't count as armor, but they affect your base AC: " Armor Class (AC). Armor protects its wearer from attacks. If you have multiple features that give you different ways to calculate your AC, you choose which one to use." However, the +2 bonus from a shield would not stack with the Mage Armor. The way I interpret it is that the magical barrier created by Mage Armor surrounds you and all you are carrying, including the shield, thereby negating any bonus from the shield since you can only choose one method of calculating Base AC: "Some spells and class features give you a different way to calculate your AC. Per this 2016 Sage Advice, a player can wield a shield and use Mage Armor.
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That said, all Strixhaven students get a free feat, so it’s likely that everyone will have a little magical flare.Monstrous Compendium Volume One: Spelljammer Creatures Crucially, players don’t need to be a magic-using class to attend Strixhaven, as it’s about the study of magic, not just personal mastery of it. Perhaps in lieu of the nixed subclasses, there are new feats that give players a taste of Strixhaven’s magic teachings.
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The other third of the book provides a bestiary that’s full of both monsters and plenty of NPC foes that DM’s can throw at their players. There are also social events like dances and house parties, and you can make narratively and mechanically meaningful relationships with other NPC students - and that goes for both friends and frenemies. In addition to all the usual D&D adventure players expect from a campaign, Strixhaven also features more academic pursuits like exams that offer mechanical benefits depending on whether or not your character passes. The campaign is for players level 1 through 10. It can be played as one ongoing story, but each part (or year) can also be a standalone story that can be played over two or three sessions. It’s a four-part campaign, with each part representing a year of school. Once there, they have access to the roughly two-thirds of the book that are devoted to an academic adventure. Despite being a Magic cross-over, the scope of the book is so zoomed-in on the titular magic school that DMs could easily plop Strixhaven into any setting, homebrew or otherwise. What will be in the book seems quite exciting, though. Instead, Strixhaven is going in a different direction, one that Crawford says is “going to support even more character types than those hybrid subclasses were going to.”Ĭredit: Zoltan Boros/Wizards of the Coast He added that another concern was how closely the subclasses were tied to Strixhaven-specific lore, making them trickier for DMs and players to use in homebrew settings. “People love for D&D subclasses to speak to the distinctiveness of a particular class,” Crawford continued, explaining that playtesters didn’t love the one-size-fits-all nature of the subclassed. We put sometimes very experimental things out in front of D&D fans and really just ask them ‘hey, do you want to see more of this?’ And the simple answer we got was ‘No,’” D&D’s lead rules designer Jeremy Crawford explained with a laugh during a press preview for the game’s D&D Live 2021 event earlier this week. “Unearthed Arcana did the job that we ask it to do for us. Wizards, bards, and warlocks all had the option to become a Mage of Lorehold, for example. These subclasses, unlike every other subclass in D&D’s Fifth Edition, were not specific to any one class. Playtest content (known as Unearthed Arcana) released in early June gave fans an early look at five magical subclasses, each tied to one of Strixhaven’s schools of magic, that were in development for the new book. Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos is a crossover with Magic: The Gathering, and it transports players to a magical school.