[Jack Simth]

As I said; the D&D sound mechanics don't make Real Life sense.

I'm actually rather familiar with sound; Decibals are a lot like the Richter Scale for earthquakes - 30 decibals is 10 times the volume of 20 decibals, 20 decibals is 10 times the volume of 10 decibals. Theoretically, you could have a -2,860 decibal sound; in practice, why bother?

Sound is a form of radiant energy; when uncontained, unchanneled, and unabsorbed, it spreads out and weakens at the square of the distance (surface area of a sphere, specifically....) so that something 10 times further away from the source gets 1% of the same energy (e.g., if someone at 10 feet hears 100 decibals, someone at 100 feet hears 80; someone at 1,000 feet hears 60). In practice, though, that theoretical model simply doesn't work; anything soft (people, grass, foilage, cloth...) soaks up the sound; anything irregular (people, ground, furniture, trees) breaks up the sound so that it gets fuzzy. Large, flat, hard surfaces reflect the sound (and large, hard, curved surfaces can be used to do interesting tricks - ever whispered to someone on the other side of the room, had your taget hear you, but not someone directly between? Can be done, easily, in the right room from the right spots).

The D&D mechanics, while not real-world realistic, are simple enough to use and are reasonably balanced (don't give one character type much of an advantage over another) under most circumstances. Gives some bizzare results when applied to real-world situations, but that's okay; D&D isn't the real world.