Empress Garb and feats/combat styles

Empress Garb is considered clothing, rather magical and powerful clothing, but sadly not armor. 

I suggest TA might want to make it dual tagged Clothing and Armor, so feats would work for high-dex warriors for example.

Alright, the skin of this armor was not that appealing and now that, I think I'll keep the leather armours :p

Thank you for your answer mate :)

Alright, the skin of this armor was not that appealing and now that, I think I'll keep the leather armours :p

Thank you for your answer mate :)

The appearance of that armor in Solasta is commonly disliked :P
I used a mod to change it.

Ok. so if empress garb is flagged as clothing, is there a reason that it conflicts with draconic resilience?  Did some testing and can show drwith basic sorc outfit, and nodr with emp cs. unfortunately cannot upload ss png here, but have them.

Thanks..

Ok. so if empress garb is flagged as clothing, is there a reason that it conflicts with draconic resilience?  Did some testing and can show drwith basic sorc outfit, and nodr with emp cs. unfortunately cannot upload ss png here, but have them.

Thanks..

It is because of how AC is calculated in 5th Edition D&D and it is correct that Draconic Resilience shouldn't stack with the Empress Garb Chain Shirt.

AC is usually calculated as:

Base AC (10) + Dex modifier + other modifiers

Draconic Resilisnce changes the base AC value, rather than being a +3 modifier. Th formula becomes:

Base AC (13) + Dex modifier + other modifiers

Wearing armor also changes the base AC value rather than being a modifier, so the Garb makes the formula look like so:

Base AC (15) + Dex modifier + other modifiers

Changes to base AC do no stack, so only the highest value should be in use. Draconic Resilience should work with Braces of Deflection though, which is an attunement item that increases AC by 2 when you're not wearing armor. The Garb might work with that too, I haven't tested.

The Garb also works with the Barbarian's Unarmored Defense (even though I wouldn't have allowed that as a DM myself), because it is technically clothing and Unarmored Defense is an "other modifier". So a Barbarian with decent dex and con can use the Garb to get pretty high AC values. 

Thanks Tom. It is deceptive, like most things in 5e ( or tbh, since they abandoned thac0... =) )
what was unclear was how the draconic resilience read, as it seemed to provide it's flexible bonus depending on whether or not the character was wearing armor ( not clothing), and that it was a bonus, not just raising the AC of said clothing. I initially thought that a chain shirt is light armor, so no big deal, but when it was brought up as clothing, well, it became more a why does this not work with clothing thing. 

Thank you for the breakdown.

I always found THAC0 and its related systems to be one of the least intuitive things about 2e, since it is just adding extra steps to comparing your dice roll to the armor class. Weapons being +1 while giving -1 THAC0 certainly doesn't help people uninterested in learning archaic tabletop rules that never made sense to begin with. Having some bonuses go by + and others by - makes it very inconsistent. I was very happy with the chance to simply having all bonuses be + and all detriments be -.

As for the confusions for it change base AC compared to giving a bonus to AC, this has been with us since at least 2e too. A studded leather armor, for example, in 2e will set your base AC to 7 then you'll add your bonuses from dexterity, damage type modifications from the armor itself (6 AC v slashing and 5 AC v piercing IIRC), other items and so on. This is also how it works in 3e and 3.5, and I'd hazzard a guess that is how 4e handles it too.

TL;DR: The way armor and armor-like equipment changes base AC in 5e is simply consistent with how D&D has handled it the last 40 or so years. It's also a very effective way to do it, since you can easily avoid unintended AC stacking that would break the bounded progression.