cathan wrote:
I was under the impression that magical protection added ac on armor pieces that had ac. I'll suppose that since D didn't dispute it, that it holds true. If so, does the spell shield also give ac?
No, when you get down to it there are a variety of things that help. When magical protection is enchanted on armor, there are two things that it gives you. But I'll need to break it down into basically two different areas.
Absorb and Spell protection.
Absorb is basically how much damage a piece of armor reduces. Which to my understanding is increased by a magical protection enchant -on a piece of armor-. The shield spell does not increase this value in any way. It does however increase the overall magical protection that your character has which is added together with the magical protection enchantments on your armor. This value is used to reduce damage from spells that do direct damage to the character.
When somebody mentions AC it conjures up the convuluted scheme of D&D where AC only prevents somebody from doing damage to you. It can be used to explain some things in Shattered Kingdoms but I don't like the term Armor Class myself. So I simply call it Evade. That's whenever you see that something "misses" you.