Heavy Armor Master AND Barbarian Rage

[Hylomorph]

The wiki shows the effects for:

Heavy Armor Master (RESIST: 3 slashing,bludgeoning,piercing,!magic)
Barbarian Rage (...;RESIST:bludgeoning,slashing,piercing)

But if you have both, they don't combine correctly. It only applies the rage (damage / 2), not HAM-then-rage ((damage-3) / 2).

Is there a way to encode these to combine properly? Sorry if this has already been answered; searching just turns up all threads from 2015 when support for (RESIST: N) was added.

Edited: Just to be clear, I'm interested in combining HAM with any damage resistance that affects slashing/piercing/bludgeoning.

[LordEntrails]

RAW they should not stack. The Barbarian Rage feature says this;

While raging, you gain the following benefits if you aren't wearing heavy armor:

If you want to houserule it, not sure how to make it work.

[Hylomorph]

That's absolutely true. I picked Rage just as an example of Damage Resistance, but it wasn't a good one! But, I still want to combine HAM with, for example the Hill Rune from Rune Knight, or Fiendish Resistance (Slashing), etc.

[Zacchaeus]

As LE says resistances don't stack. So no matter how many RESIST: slashing you have on you you only half the damage - not a quarter or any other fraction. So the effects are working as intended. If you want to change that then you'll need to do it manually

[Hylomorph]

It is 100% true that damage resistances don't stack. However, Heavy Armor Master is not damage resistance! We just use the FG RESIST code to encode it, but it's not actually "damage resistance" in the rules. So, it does combine with damage resistance; see this sage advice (https://www.sageadvice.eu/2016/06/19/does-damage-reduction-of-heavy-armor-master-apply-before-or-after-damage-resistances/), for example.

[Zacchaeus]

It's not going to automate that I'm afraid. You could replace the RESIST: 3, slashing etc on the Armour thing with RESIST: 3, all and it will then work with a general RESIST: slashing. But that's going to give you other issues with other types of damage. You'd have to suspend the effect any time the character was about to take some damage type not covered by the feat. The other alternative is for the DM to apply a -3 modifier into the modifier box prior to rolling slashing, piercing etc damage. Or leave the general RESIST on and then adjust the 3 points after the fact by healing the character for 3 damage. Again that's problematic.

[Hylomorph]

Dang. I thought that might be the case, but I was hoping I had missed something. LE and Zac, thanks for taking a look and making suggestions.

[Hylomorph]

In the unlikely event that someone else wants this, here's an extension I slapped together. Instead of using RESIST, you can encode Heavy Armor Master as
REDUCE: 3 slashing,bludgeoning,piercing,!magic and it will reduce 3 damage of the correct types as usual, as well as halving the reduced damage with applicable RESISTs.

This extension is barely tested, fragile, and should probably never be used by anyone.

[GavinRuneblade]

This extension is barely tested, fragile, and should probably never be used by anyone.
lol. Here have this, but I don't recommend it. Reminds me of Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka. ;)

I have the player slap on temp hp as needed. Little fiddly but it works. This looks better. Thank you!

[Elowin]

Not as unlikely as you might think, I've been pining for this exact thing too. Quite a happy coincidence someone put something together for this problem just a few weeks ago!
Many thanks.

[Hylomorph]

Excellent! If you can, let me know know in a few weeks if it worked as expected. If there are a handful of folks who are interested enough to use it, and it doesn't break for them, I'll clean it up a bit and repost it over in the Extensions forum.

[Ragnar Tryggvy]

This may or may not work for you. In my games, I use DR on armor and using an effects extension code the resist onto the armor itself. So just putting on say a set of chainmail armor gives the player a RESIST already. To make the Heavy Armor Master feat work properly with that, I created an item of armor called Heavy Armor Master [FEAT] that you add to your character sheet just like a normal armor. When you equip your heavy armor, you also equip this. It has the Effect coded in as follows:
RESIST: 3 all, critical, !magic, !psychic, !acid, !cold, !fire, !force, !lightning, !necrotic, !poison, !radiant, !thunder;
I have tested it a bit and that provided resistance to only slashing, piercing and bludgeoning damage and also applies to critical damage of that type as without adding the critical it would not subtract if the resistance exceeded the basic damage. Say you had RESIST: 2 all; from your armor and then the HAM resist. If a creature did 4 slashing, all would be resisted. If they crit and did 2 slashing + 2 slashing from the crit, the extra 2 would not be resisted without the 'critical' added to the RESIST code.
Not sure if this will help you, but it is working for me. Does require an equipment effects extension. The effects extension I use is https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?40833-5E-Advanced-Effects-(items-npcs-characters), it is free and no, I didn't make it.
I hope this helps in some way, good luck and happy gaming.

[Hylomorph]

That's great! It's a trick I didn't think of: you can't combine "RESIST: 2 slashing" with "RESIST: slashing", but you can "combine RESIST: 2 all, !everythingbutslashing" with "RESIST: slashing". That approach is usable without the effects extension, too.

[Hylomorph]

If anyone other than me was crazy enough to use the addon code I provided back in 2020, it stopped working with a recent update to the 5E ruleset. Ragnar's post above provides a different way to accomplish the same thing, and that method still works.