how exactly do damage barriers work ive read the rules but dont get it

A damage barrier makes you immune to physica l weapons with a base damage equal to or less than the damage barrier's rating.

If you had a damage barrier of 60, and an army of common men rushed at you with longswords, or shot a rain of arrows on you, you would be completely unharmed.

Inanimate objets can have damage barriers too. For example, a stone wall will never be harmed by a dagger, no matter how well the attack is delivered, or how strong its user is. Its simply not an effective tool against a stone wall.

what if you had a damage barrer of 40 and some one with a base damage of 50 attack you would it drop the damage down buy 40

Nope. Don't think about it as a shield, it's not a shield or a damage absorber.

Think about it as a 'requirement'. If an attack has a base damage that is greater than the value of the damage barrier, the damage barrier will do nothing.

If you have Damage Barrier 40 and the incoming attack has a base damage of 50, you suffer the full attack (so you have to defend, and your normal AT value applies).

If the base damage was lower than or equal of that value, the damage becomes automatically 0. You don't even need to defend at all.

Supernatural stuff is going to bypass the damage barrier, unless specified in the barrier effect itself.

Let's say you have damage barrier 60. A guy with a knife can't possibily damage you using that knife (unless he's using supernatural powers).

...or with an exceptional strength.

The rules say Base Damage, but the examples say Final Damage and it's more logic.

Sebashaw said:

If by "Final Damage" you mean the modified base damage, or Final Base Damage, yes I completely agree and that is what I believe it means. If by "Final Damage" you mean the damage after the attack (such as 150% of arrows is 60 to get past a Damage Barrior of 50), or what's called the Final Damage, I disagree.

That's why they said "Base Damage" - to avoid confusion.

As always, there's some bad choice of words in the manual, anyway, yes: the Bonus from Strenght is included into the 'basic' damage.

They use the proper term "Base Damage" that is something else, to express the '100% damage of that attack'.

The stronger the attacker is, the easier to bypass the Damage Barrier.

Do damage barriers from different sources stack, or is it highest only? This becomes more pertinent with Dominus Exxet, where it's easily conceivable that someone might, say, have Transformation: Physical Power and Rex Frame. The book's kind of silent on the matter.

I stack them in my games. It's true that heroes get pretty much invulnerable to most physical attacks (which is exactly what you see manga/anime/JRPG heroes become at some point in their life), but the simple ability to damage energy allows to bypass entirely the damage barrier, so they have still to be careful when facing a single supernaturally gifted opponent. That's pretty much the way things go in J settings, and Anima is based on JRPG, so I don't see any problem with things going this way.

I have only the highest one work, but I make it clear some Damage Barriors are ignored if the attacker can hit energy and some are not. (some are always active, no matter how strong the enemy, but normally these are very small, and block daggers at best. Others have to be attacked by someone with Gnosis X or Base Presence X to bypass them. For example the Damage Barrior spell from the book of creation is not bypassed if someone can just hit energy, but only if they can hit energy and have a base presence equal to or greater than the casters.) that way obtaining multiple Damage Barriors isn't pointless, and is in fact extremely useful, but it doesn't ever becomes like 200+ and able to fight an army without caring. And that way by level 3 a damage barrior is still useful against some enemies that actually matter (as that most enemies I use are supernatural or too weak to matter, and just anything supernatural can hit energy.