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Ultimate combat introduced alternate rules where armor generates DR/Armor.
With the normal rules DR does not stack (Does Damage Reduction Stack In Pathfinder?).
With the alternate rules though there are some exceptions in regards to natural armour stacking there (example in the text is barkskin spell on someone wearing a chainmail). Now though some abilities grant a DR (like a barbarians). Are these worthless if these alternate rules are used, or do they stack with the DR/armour?
Armor as Damage says:
Armor in this system keeps all of its normal statistics and qualities, but its armor bonus (including any enhancement bonus added to armor bonus and natural armor bonus ) is converted to DR/armor. The DR an armor provides is equal to its total armor bonus...
... plus some about how it scales with hit dice.
Further,
DR/Armor: This type of DR blocks the damage of all attacks that would normally be affected by DR, based on the composition of the armor (see Table: Armor Composition and DR). Unlike most forms of damage reduction, DR/armor stacks with other types of DR. For instances, when fighting a skeleton with DR 5/bludgeoning and DR 4/armor (+2 for armor, +2 for natural armor ), the skeleton’s DR/armor reduces 9 points of damage from non-bludgeoning attacks, and 4 damage from bludgeoning weapon attacks. Magic weapons and attacks from Large or larger creatures bypass the DR 4/armor, but not the DR 5/bludgeoning. (emphasis mine)
From that table, nonmagical armor grants DR/magic. So, nonmagical armor that would normally grant a +5 Armor bonus to AC instead grants DR 5/armor(magic).
A creature with DR 10/magic and a +2 natural armor bonus instead gains DR 2/armor(adamantine).
That creature ("Bob") wearing that armor would now have:
... and gets to apply them in order.
Bob gets attacked several times, by differing weapons (all wielded by a normal human with a terrific str bonus). In all cases, the attacker hits and rolls 20 damage.
Bob then takes a few levels of Barbarian and gets DR 1/- from that class.
Bob now has:
Now, the normal DR overlapping rules kick in for the DR 10/magic and DR 1/- (ie., magic swords bypass the former so the latter applies, nonmagical swords don't bypass the former (which is better for Bob), so the latter doesn't apply). But, the DR/armor still stacks. Against that same human's attack:
In short: gaining DR in addition to DR/armor is still useful, subject to the same caveats about DR overlapping that have always been in place. DR/armor is "simply" a second level of DR that applies before those other sources. Actually, gaining DR other ways is probably more important when using DR/armor, since you're likely to be getting hit a lot more than without that optional rule.
