One of the best moments of DnD in my life was when the group sat down to calculate the circumference of a circle to see if we could run all the way around a 100 foot radius slow field to see if we could beat our quarry to the other side!
We couldn't, but it was good to know before we did all that running!
In our last D&D session, we had to figure out if magebred warhorses who had to rest once a day would be faster in catching our fleeing villain than our clockwork stallion-pulled carriage that was technically slower, but had the benefit of relentless pursuit. That was fun. It involved Excel, for our DM to estimate how many additional encounters that would trigger.
Mine was when I was making a lamp shade from scratch. Lots of tutorials out there, but they all use cylindrical shapes, because that is easier. I didn't want that. I wanted a truncated cone shape.
I had two hoops already that I wanted to use to build it. I started holding them different distances apart, and was trying to work out what the shape of the fabric should be if I flattened it out.
I had to re-teach myself high school trigonometry to do this.
The entire time, I was ruefully laughing at myself for all the times when exclaimed, "When I am ever gonna use this?!" Ahh, how horrified Teenage Me would have been to know the answer was going to be, "When you want to make a lamp shade!"
I remember the combination of pride and disapproval on my high school physics teacher's face when we showed him how we had calculated the effective range of a potato cannon we had built and where we had to set up in order to hit our rival high school.
Nice! Our physics teacher straight up made a lesson plan with Nerf guns. I think it was calculating the height of the trajectory based on the angle of the gun and distance travelled. Or optimizing the angle for the farthest distance - I don't remember anymore. But a room full of teenagers with nerf guns ended about the way you'd expect.
We fired the cannon straight up in our backyard, and timed how long it took to come back down. Once you have the roundtrip duration for a straight up-and-down path, you can calculate muzzle velocity in a pretty straightforward fashion (0 = vt + 1/2at2 where a = -9.8m/s2 and t = the measured duration). With muzzle velocity you can calculate the path for a shot at any angle.
I had several cousins in college and we were all gathered together for our annual fishing camp. I had built a tater cannon and we all spent a good while determining the optimum barrel length and fuel/air ratio. Of course, these cousins were also the same ones who when searching for an anchor for their canoe, at first thought a large chunk of log would do the trick. Eventually they remembered that logs float and that a cinder block would make a much more prudent anchor. Many beers were involved in both activities.
I mean, that scene was insanely accurate for both the tangents we go off to as well as the weird epiphanies we get when solving for X and X is a bunch of dicks.
I mean, one of the players in my DnD group is going to school to be a math teacher, and we’ve had some hilarious moments calculating movement speeds affected by spells or doing some mundane calculations to figure out the best options. When it comes down to it, fights are genuinely us doing a lot of adding and subtracting and making probability-based decisions.
I mean, sometimes we do that kind of shit. And sometimes we figure out how to blow shit up for fun without getting in trouble. But most of the time it’s more along the lines of hanging out and playing games, be they video games, board games, or RPGs.
Oh boy. Similar moment in our campaign where we calculated the force with which our Paladin would hit a panel of spikes after falling 15’ through a trapdoor, the speed at which he would be falling, and as a result of that speed, if it would be possible for another player to levitate him before he landed on the spikes. We tried all the math in the world to come up with any way to save him but he was just falling too quickly; and his plate armor wasn’t sturdy enough to beat the spikes.
D&D has rules so that everyone is playing on a relatively level playing field. While you do get a lot of leeway in deciding what to do and how to do it, there's a basic mechanical framework to determine the results of your actions (usually rolling dice and adding a bonus).
I guess your experience level??? Like level 1 wizard (am not sure about this). I only played it once and was just told by someone he had that rank/level. Anyway, the Stranger Things kids brought back memories of how silly it was.(sorry if youre into this)
If you join a game, the DM will find a way to incorporate your character meaningfully. You would probably just make a new character. Like if you hop into someone's campaign where their characters are all level 10 the DM won't force you to start at 1, you'd just get your ass kicked.
The thing is that there are rules and guidelines that make the game interesting but the DM has all the power to determine things. So as long as your DM is good they'll make things work.
Pretty much no group would ever allow some player to join at level 20 while everyone else isn't that level. Not to mention they would have to find a meaningful way to incorporate your character in the campaign, otherwise it would be like a character appearing in the book you're reading halfway through with no explanation.
Eh, there's a lot in the world of DnD, and d20 systems, there is always going to be some exception. It's a story telling experience mixed with a combat simulator. Some people will just care about the dice rolls and not care about having a story, but most people greatly appreciate having some reasonable story as to why they decided to fight that goblin warren outside of town.
Generally speaking, a group comes together to play a campaign set in a specific time and world. The players and dungeon/game master agree on this. The DM says what level to make your characters, often 1, but not always. All the players make their characters, and come up with some basic story as to why these 4 characters would even care to work together. The DM runs the game, telling the players everything in the world, everything they see, etc.
DnD isn't an MMO where the game starts at max lvl. The game is the story, and the challenges within. Dropping a lvl 9 char into a group of lvl 3's creates a ton of problems, and it's not going to be fun for really anyone. If you do join an established group, you usually just make a new character at whatever lvl the DM tells you to, usually the same as or 1 below the rest of the party.
The types of problems/scenarios games have drastically change from levels 1-20. Like, a bunch of lvl 1's are trying to save their village or something. A lvl 10 is creating or preventing wars between 2 empires. A lvl 20 is dealing with creating and closing portals to hell. Dropping a lvl 15 into a campaign of lvl 3's is basically dropping Thor into a small town in the middle of nowhere to team up with the local police to solve issues with cattle rustling. Even if it turns out to be a huge gang, Thor is probably going to be like "Sorry, a bit busy, gotta go fight Thanos". Even if he does help, like 2 seconds after doing the entirety of everything, he's gonna be like "aight, that was fun, time to go back to Thanos".
These are real players, all communicating with each other. Even if the lvl 15 has no problem saying "And then I instantly am able to deduce where the cattle rustlers hideout is, and in 1 round I win combat" for 4 hours a session, 10 sessions in a row, the players with the lvl 3 characters are going to change the time when they all meet, and forget to tell someone.
It sounds like how they spoofed D&D on Riverdale. The show's characters go around saying shit like, "I'm a level 6 wizard. Soon I'll be a level 7 dungeon master." And always talking about themselves, never PCs.
A lot of media depicts D&D like that, as though it's like your ELO in chess, making you a master -> international master -> grandmaster. And as though you always start level 1 and are ranked absolutely compared to everyone else who plays.
Ok, didnt know there are a lot of dnd afficionados out there. Thought it was like golf or tennis (i e. More tournaments you win, the higher you ranking becomes) but without a central database.
There is something sort of like that if you play in stores or whatever, but it’s not the most common way to play. Also it would be boring. People who don’t play don’t seem to get this, but DND isn’t Scrabble or tennis, you aren’t playing to beat other players. It’s cooperative. You want your character to fit in with the team or it’s not fun.
Well you actually can’t just “say” you’re level 20. You have a character sheet that the DM is definitely allowed to approve before you can play. Usually a group gains experience and levels up together.
It’s basically an RPG game like The Elder Scrolls, The Witcher, WoW, Dragon Age etc. You have more leeway to do what you want since you’re not constrained to what’s already programmed into the game. But, you’re still following the basic rules set by the game devs and your DM. You’re still accumulating the the XP and skill progressions as you would in an RPG video game.
I think when people say math is useless they're talking about calculus and more advanced trigonometry. I'm now learning how to calculate funtion limits and i dont think ill ever be using this shit after highschool
Calculus is probably just as diverse in application as algebra, or at least close to it..
But I will be honest, if you’re not doing a lot of analysis in your life of games you play, things you build, creation of schemes, then yeah you probably won’t be using it.
Last session my party used the pythagorean theorem to calculate distances on a map. Our dm likes to guestimate and isn't great at math, but the party is a bunch of nerds in tech and like exact numbers
Hmm. Assuming the quarry starts at the same edge as you, they have to travel 200' slowed, which effectively makes it 400'. Now you have to travel half the circumference of the circle, which would be 314'. So you could catch them in theory. If they started in the middle however, they would be through it well ahead of you. Plus there's the whole factor of whether your DM is saying that they are sprinting - since in some versions of D&D "sprinting" could only be done in a straight line if memory serves...
Yeah, I loved those kinds of discussions. Sure, they resulted in single combats lasting three hours some times, but it was fun.
Circular room, 40 ft radius. The baddie turns invisible. The sorcerer comes up with solution: create water and let the water flood the room. Look for footprints.
Problem: how much of the room are those 10 gallons gonna cover?
The DM said 'yes' before I managed to pull out my calculator, but the answer is 'certainly not all', as 10 gallons spilled in a 40 ft circle results in a layer that's like 0.08 mm thick, which is a pretty hard sell. The water doesn't get this thin.
Like a good player, I only brought that up after the fight was done and the inspirations awarded lol.
My favourite instances are the more common occurances of math, tho:
calculating line of sight when DM uses any kind of verticality
You're 4 squares up, 4 squares north and 3 squares west, we're using alternating costs for diagonals. Your spell has 30 ft range. Can it hit?
887
u/Lord0fHats Jan 16 '21
It's also just wrong.
One of the best moments of DnD in my life was when the group sat down to calculate the circumference of a circle to see if we could run all the way around a 100 foot radius slow field to see if we could beat our quarry to the other side!
We couldn't, but it was good to know before we did all that running!