OT: Narf has gone looney and wants to GM.(Edited2)

[Violist]

Hmm, strong voice. I can understand with the ray spells, but as douglas points out, a tiny bead is going to be hard to see, would there be some DC associated with a Spot check for that?

Next time there's a chance, I should get that scroll... this could be very useful in keeping me alive

[narf poit chez BOOM]

...Uh...I can tell within five feet where someone is from sound at a considerably farther distance than five feet.

At the very least, I can tell direction.

[Jack Simth]

D&D sound mechanics don't make sense; really, they don't:

A battle has a base DC of -5. At 260 feet, the "average person" can't hear it at all (DC 21). At 300 feet, only wise individuals or those who have spent the time to learn to listen can tell it's there (and even then, only rarely - DC 25). At 400 feet, almost nobody can hear it (DC 35 - for a 20 to work, you need +15 in modifiers; 18 Wis and 11 ranks - an 8th level character!)

A lightning bolt strikes the ground. The thunder can be heard quite reliably and recognizeably in real life for miles. Assuming a base listen check DC of -1000, an "average" D&D character can hear it while sleeping on a roll of 1 at a distance of 9,910 feet. An awake character on roll of 20, 10,200 feet. A sound that has just traveled for well over a mile goes from waking everyone up to barely perceptable by someone extremely lucky in the space of 300 feet. A 20th level Cleric with Wisdom 30 and max ranks in Listen (+33 to check) can't hear it at all (roll of 20 fails) after 10,540 feet.

I'm not quite ready to start house-ruling it yet, though.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

Why not use decibels as the base for a number to divide the DC by?

[douglas]

The DC to notice a sound at all should increase with either the log or the square root of the distance, or maybe even the log of the square root since I think that's how decibels decrease with distance. The DC to pinpoint the source location should increase a whole lot faster, though. The DC to hear thunder might reasonably be -10 a mile away, but no one could possibly pinpoint the exact 5 ft square the lightning bolt hit from that distance, so a flat +20 modifier to the DC to make it DC 10 makes no sense.

[NullAshton]

How about loud sounds you can detect the general direction of, but not the exact location?

[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.

[Violist]

By the way, in-game, I'm kind of curious as to why everyone is so willing to go along with me to this mysterious far-off land in search of arcane knowledge, when this sorceror is right nearby? Is it because the only way we'll catch up is by increasing our skill, or are there some other motivations?

Just doesn't seem quite reasonable for everyone to say "Oh hey, this elven wizardess chick we've known for about a week wants to travel a thousand miles across an ocean, desert, mountains, in pursuit of knowledge that we can't benefit from unless she stays with us." Not that I'm encouraging dissent.

[NullAshton]

Well. We could... get someone in that wizards place to teleport the sorcerer to that place? I dunno. Maybe the sorcerer decided he wanted to make holes in his fireballs too.

[Violist]

Bah. If he's casting Fireballs... you're in for a rough ride