D&D Calculations/Notes

[SirNitram]

Ghost Hunter, if possible, sticky this. It'd be so much easier than hunting through months and months of posts to see the notes again.

First, Magic and Tech notes, from the boxed set Tale Of The Comet.

Taken from Tale Of The Comet, the rules for applying magic and high-end technology together. It should be noted the technology involved is comparable to B5 in most respects, though far more militerized, and with full robotics/cybernetics. Specifics on the two technological factions will be provided if requested.

General treatment: Magic and Technology.

If something has a special immunity or vunerability to an element, technology inflicting damage of that kind suffers the same effects(Duh). Similarly, devices that render similar effects to specific spells are also in this treatment: A Prismatic's sphere outermost layer can be defeated by using a device that generates a blast of subzero cold. Examples of this include treating high explosives as Fireball spells, directed bolt weapons as Lightning Bolts, etc.

Normal equipment, even if Masterwork, is useless against it's technological rivals. Full Plate won't stop a blaster bolt, and a sword will do only slight damage to a combat drone(Strength bonuses remain, but all other damage vanishes.. Period). The great equipilizer, however, is magic. An enchanted suit of armour offers it's enchantment as it's sole defense.. That is, a +5 suit of normal clothing will offer the exact same defense against a blaster as a +5 suit of mail. For the non-AD&Ding, this means that the strength of the enchantment alone offers a meagre defense. The reverse also holds true: An enchanted weapons magical damage seeps through(Again with strength damage to represent sheer blunt trauma).

Holograms and the like are identical to Illusion spells, though they remain even if someone disbelieves.

There is always an innate layer of defense against magic. Even those who have never seen a mage or believed in it have the same chance of resisting their magic as someone of their equal who knows more. Similarly, anyone can try to minimize the damage from being the target of Lightning Bolt by diving away. Whether you make it is another question.

Spells like Unseen Servant, Wall Of Force, and others that produce force but no physical manifestations are completely immune to damage from technology, unless there is a stipulation that can be fufilled(For instance, an Unseen Servant fades if 5 points of damage are inflicted on an area. A high explosive grenade can easily deliver this, and neutralize the Servant).

Machines obtain no defenses against illusionary magic unless they have a reason to disbelieve.

All the obvious rules for magic still apply(Cannot mind-control things without minds, etc).

There's also rules for individual spells, but they are mostly things like 'If a robot is hit with Lightning Bolt, it suffers normal damage and is the victim of a Slow effect'.

Brief thing on Artifacts, the nigh-undestructables...

Any situation in which the artifact should be destroyed(Crushed, burnt, vaporized, disintigrated) causes the artifact to immediately, flawlessly teleport to a safe location. Usually nearby.

Insert visual of someone with a plasma torch chasing the Hand Of Vecna around a labratory here, as the hand keeps reappearing somewhere behind him each time he tries to torch it, here.

Why Nitram can't blink.. No, wait, wierd laws of magical interaction.

Conservation Of Momentum: It seems obvious to us, doesn't it? And indeed, as Factol Hashkar says(Found in the book The Factol's Manifesto, the law of Action-Reaction applies as physics. Yet when magic enters, physics is ignored. A simple Fly spell allows a subject to soar around without trouble, no exhaust needed. Hell, even in vacuum they are unimpeded. The spell Protection From Normal Arrows makes someone immune to normal sized projectiles. Interestingly, there is one example of a spell that actually puts this universal axiom to use. But that's a singular case of many, many spells..

Conservasion Of Energy: You'd think this one would work. You'd really think that. And for a while it does: Fire burns, lights shine, ecetera. But magic, again, evades this rule entirely. It can go from large, common breaches(In the Forgotten Realms, an entire breed of mages draws all their magic from a seperate universe, the Plane Of Shadow), to smaller ones(If you open a Gate to another universe, a creature can cross over without the attendant movement of mass to make up. In fact, some powerful beings use open Gateways to provide heat for their homes. Gotta love Netherese decadence).

EDIT: Super-duper edit. I have been informed that if two planes can interact and exchange energies, they are both part of the universe in regards for CoE. Therefore there is no violation.

Gravity: Ignoring the various spells of flight and beings that stay aloft despite not having any business doing so, we come to two nasty examples that piss in physic's face. The first is the spell Reverse Gravity, which actually flips gravity in a small place to it's opposite briefly. Worse is how it works macroscopically. This takes a bit.

Okay. The size of an object determines the size of the gravity it projects. But gravity is always 1G or 0G.. There's no partial. And larger objects make the gravity well larger, but not heavier. Worse still is how the pull of the gravity is decided: A sphere will pull you to it's surface, but a ship will pull you to it's deck, preferring common sense to any science.

Of course, whether the above is a result of large amounts of intrinsic magic, or what, is just a damn good question. The source for the section on magic is the Spelljammer campaign book, Concordance Of the Arcane Spheres.


Just some rough ones as I've turned up Spelljamming resources at last. All figures are from 2nd Edition, the only one with official SJ and Netheril rules.

Spelljamming Speed: For long range movement. Can only be obtained at decent range from a large body. Quoted at '100 million kilometers per day', or 1/4th of a Lightday per day by my math. 1/4th Cee for normal vessels, however, the Netherese spell Valdick's Spheresail doubles this speed, allowing a vessel to hit .5c in realspace.

Tactical speed: Automatically engages when a large object is nearby. This is actually pretty slow. 500 meters per 'round'(A nebulous term, I'm going with a 'round is ten seconds' here) per SR. The top speed for a normal Spelljammer(And that granted by Spheresail) is 20, so we'll go from there. 1 Klick per second is my result(20 x 500 / 10).

FTL: Hard to decypher. The Phlogistron, the amber river which all star systems are accessable by, is damn wierd in it's own right. Travel times are from '10 to 100 days'. This is further complicated by the languages used to describe each 'Crystal Sphere', identifying them as Galaxies.

Blowing up rocks

Because it's the only way to know for sure

Inevitably, the best way to measure firepower is against inert rock. But it's not every day a Netherese or normal AD&D wizard hits an asteroid with a Meteor Swarm, so we use rock walls instead.

The normal rock wall of a dungeon, in 10 x 10 cubes, is rated at about 90 HP. This is about the power unleashed by a 15th level Netherese spellcaster's Lightning Bolt.. A spell they can shit out in terrifying quantity. But that's tricky. Does the hit melt, crater, vaporize, or fragment?

Examining the spell description of Lightning Bolt, it only melts materials with a low melting point, like gold etc. The specific word used is 'shatters' when talking about busting through barriers, so I will use the fragmentation energy of igneous rock.

This is stolen from Mike's Asteroid Calculator. 1 Isoton is about what he rates a 10m x 10m object for fragmentation, though I'll convert that to '1 ton of TNT'. I'll piss the Trekkies off later.

1 ton of TNT is approximately 4e9 J, according to Revelle, D. O. Global Infrasonic Monitoring of Large Meteorids. Assuming my remembering of prefixs is right, that's about 4 GJ. Keep in mind this is a bit more than a normal AD&D wizard can unleash.. In normal settings in 2nd Edition, damage for Lightning Bolt caps at 60HP, and in 3rd Edition it takes a special quality to boost spells up to that level.

As for how often a Netherese of the 15th level can shit out this spell, approximately 31 times every day.. Assuming no other spell use. How common is a caster of this level in Netheril? Each large city has 15 on call for it's city watch.

More to come!

[Thunderfire]

What frightens me? The endurance of The Spelljammer is up at 1,000,000 HP.. Which means it's nearly as durable as a planet. Gonna have to run some calc's, methinks...

The spelljammer has 1,500,000 hull points
1 hull point = 10 hit points
The best theory you get is that the damage is done against a human
sized target. Larger targets will suffer multiple hits. I would rule that
the spelljammer is instantly vaporized.

[SirNitram]

While I gaze in awe at SJ stuff.. Time for some Netherese notes.

The Science Of Enclaves.

Alright. First, an 'Enclave' is a flying city. For one to gain the title of Archwizard in Netheril, one had to construct one. The usual means was to, literally, detach a mountain from the ground and set it in the air, though some took a shortcut and simply detached existing cities. The maximum size of the mountain able to be detached was never actually found; the largest Enclaves spanned three miles in diameter, and the only increased load came later, when the initial levitation wore off.

Assuming the 3 mile example is primarily granite, we're talking a minimum weight lifted of ~1.3e11 tons. Maintaining this after the initial casting wasn't stenuous, either, as many Archwizard's constructed magical items after lifting their mountain, and shifted the towns under their control onto it. In an attempt at being conservative, I'm pegging the acceleration of a mountain at 2G. If my math is, for some reason, right, we're talking a force of 5e15 N. That wouldn't be pleasant when applied into a projectile, now would it?

Two weeks after the initial lift, a supernatural construct called a Mythallar was installed to fully lift the burden of the lifting off the Archwizard. A Mythallar is a sphere about 150 feet in diameter, perfectly smooth and emitting a blinding light equal to the sun. Why so bright? Well, what these things did was draw magic from the Weave that surrounds Toril and convert it into usable energy for those that lived on the Enclave. This took many forms: It could make cheaply made magical items function like fully fledged ones, allowing the mass production of luxuries like fresh running water, ovens with elemental fire inside, refridgeration, and so on. It could also be imbued with effects, allowing the entire Enclave to benefit from a spell(One was reputed to have a spell cast on it that made everyone in the city more beautiful.. There's a place to go for your holidays. Others were used for mass-terraforming, driving glaciers back as they converted fields of ice into tropics.). And, finally, it could hold up an Enclave. The radius for each was one mile in every direction, requiring multiple ones working in concert to hold up large cities.

Actually touching a Mythallar was the last thing anyone ever did. Touching it would cause a brief flash as the object or person was instantly vaporized. Not even magical items could withstand this.

Getting to an Enclave was quite difficult, or quite easy, depending. Teleportation, interdimensional travel, and any means of entering reality on the floating city was simply impossible: Perhaps it was spells universal to the Mythallars, or an effect of all that magic being pumped around, but such spells simply caused the person to re-enter at another point. As cruising altitude for one of the cities was a few miles up, this is a fatal proposition.

On the other hand, those willing to submit to customs agents equipped with Detect Lies and Detect Magoc, teleportal gates specially set up would allow someone to swiftly move about the Empire for a small fee.

Perhaps the great recorded feat of an Enclave was the Enclave of Shade's disappearance. The entire city actually crossed a planar boundary at the end of Netheril, though it took many centuries to return.

[The Dark]

OK, just a few small notes here, based on the War Captain's Companion and the Concordance of Arcane Space.

Nitram: According to page 55 of the Concordance, a round is one minute. First column, second paragraph. This would alter the top conventional speed of a spelljammer to .166 kps.


On to the information: Given the 90hp = 4 GJ of Nitram's math, I decided to figure the damage capacities of a few ships. Some are common, others are exceedingly rare to unique.

Tradesman: The most common Spelljamming vessel. A light cargo craft, not designed for combat. Capable of withstanding 11 GJ of energy before destruction.

Man O' War: A medium-mass Elven warship, used as a patrol ship or escort for their Armada-class ships. Can withstand 27 GJ.

Armada: An Elven carrier, with 40 fighters on board. 44.4 GJ to destroy.

Tsunami: The largest human ship, only 8 are in commission. Each carries 36 fighters. 88.8 GJ maximum.

Spelljammer: The largest ship in Wildspace, capable of annihilating entire fleets of lesser ships. Can withstand 666,664 GJ of energy before destruction.

The heaviest weapon carried aboard a ship is the Great Bombard, carried only by the ship of the same name. With an output of 12 GJ, and a fire rate of one shot every three minutes, it delivers an average of 4 GJ/minute. However, this weapon relies on unstable ammunition. The most efficient "safe" weapon is the Trebuchet, which delivers 3.6 GJ in three minutes, or 1.2 GJ per minute.

The least maneuverable Spelljamming ship has a turn radius of 1 kilometer, while the most maneuverable can turn end-on-end within 500 meters and pass through their point of origin quickly enough that there is no noticeable loss of acceleration potential.

More information forthcoming as I manage to get it (I'm trying to get my hands on 1st edition books, I know a guy who has them but he's out of town right now).

[Ghost Rider]

Just for the record...I split it so that calcs and what not are put here.

Discussion is in the other thread that was split off from this.

[NecronLord]

Just for the record.

Why Nitram can't blink.. No, wait, wierd laws of magical interaction.

Conservation Of Momentum: It seems obvious to us, doesn't it? And indeed, as Factol Hashkar says(Found in the book The Factol's Manifesto, the law of Action-Reaction applies as physics. Yet when magic enters, physics is ignored. A simple Fly spell allows a subject to soar around without trouble, no exhaust needed. Hell, even in vacuum they are unimpeded. The spell Protection From Normal Arrows makes someone immune to normal sized projectiles. Interestingly, there is one example of a spell that actually puts this universal axiom to use. But that's a singular case of many, many spells..

To be fair, all the law means is that the total momentum in the system must be conserved. It would be eaiser for magic flight to just apply the momentum to something that wouldn't notice it, such as the ground. And Protection from Normal Arrows is nothing so much as an insanely high hardness against normal projectiles. Normal projectiles kill by penetration, not momentum, same with handguns. I don't know how Protection from Arrows would do against being hit by a speeding train.

[AirshipFanboy]

Just some rough ones as I've turned up Spelljamming resources at last. All figures are from 2nd Edition, the only one with official SJ and Netheril rules.

Spelljamming Speed: For long range movement. Can only be obtained at decent range from a large body. Quoted at '100 million kilometers per day', or 1/4th of a Lightday per day by my math. 1/4th Cee for normal vessels, however, the Netherese spell Valdick's Spheresail doubles this speed, allowing a vessel to hit .5c in realspace.

I don't know what this is for exactly, but 100 million km/day is not 1/4 a light day. A light day is almost 26 billion kilometers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_day

And Spelljammer speed was supposed to be 100 million miles a day. I think you mean 1 Astronomical Unit / Day.

[Feil]

Are you seriously trying to obtain useful firepower calculations from game mechanics?

Does it also take one tonne of TNT to kill a 10th-level Barbarian?

Since we're scaling linearly by damage and hitpoints, does a kick in the shin from a little girl (small creature unarmed strike - average damage on 1d2: 1.5hp) strike with the destructive potential of 17 kilograms of dynamite?

[Mr Bean]

Feil check the posting dates before you reply, this sticky is over four years old

[Feil]

Shit - didn't see the sticky and I assumed it was a new thread. My apologies.

[Mayabird]

Destickied and locked. If you want to have an actual discussion, start a new thread.
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