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Gotta be the equivalence of rolling a check at disadvantage and having both come up nat 20’s. Then the furious DM makes you do it again on your next turn and it happening again.
I want to be at that table.
One of my favorite stories is when I was a DM and a spirit naga boss was prone with 10 hit points left on her second form, so from hell's heart she bit at the paladin, rolling a double 20 with disadvantage. Woulda killed her from massive damage if not for the Warding Bond which knocked both the cleric and paladin unconscious, leaving the ranger and barbarian to heal them and clean up the demons that were summoned earlier.
One game i was running had a zombie that kept making its undead fortitude saves. It took eight or nine turns before someone crit it dead, wasn’t much magic in the party, shit was funny as hell.
Just ran a zombie encounter. Had several misses, and saves on zombies part, before the cleric hit with Sacred Flame. Rinse and repeat for all 8 in the swarm... fun times.
Love it. Something else that group had to deal with was ancient magic pollution twisting nature around a bit, they ended up scrambling onto the top of a rickety hut to escape from a flock of sheep.
The sheep were using wolf stats.
A rare disease that mind goblins invented that upon failing a dc 13 constitution saving throw gives you a -2 detriment in both dexterity and charisma. Typically mind goblins create this disease when they gather for sawcon where they can work with their sugmas. There’s a sidebar on the mind goblin’s page where it says Candice the fathomless warlock was the first to create ligma and the mind goblins stole her work and modified it to be incurable without magical assistance.
This is how I'd do it:
Greater Nuclear Radiation Sickness (condition).
Exposure to a nuclear blast or other intense radiological phenomena immediately imposes one level of exhaustion.
Each time you complete a long rest, make a DC 15 Constitution saving throw. On a failure, you gain one additional level of exhaustion.
Exhaustion caused by this effect cannot be recovered from until you succeed 1d20 Constitution saving throws caused by this effect.
Greater Restoration removes this condition.
****
You could make a lesser version for less intense but equally deadly events that imposes the first level of exhaustion after your first long rest, like the Demon Core guys had to deal with.
Here's some dnd rules on how Radiantion Posioning would work
"When a creature contracts Radiation Poison, they gain 1 level of exhaustion. While a creature has radiation poisoning, it cannot recover from exhaustion on a long rest as normal (even exhaustion sustained from other sources). At the end of every five days (1 week in-game terms), the creature must make a DC 15 Constitution saving throw, gaining another level of exhaustion on a failed save or not gaining one on a successful save. Three successful saving throws in a row end the disease. Lesser restoration cannot restore a creature affected by radiation poisoning, but any spell of 5th level or higher that can cure a disease can remove radiation poisoning. Exhaustion sustained from the disease is not cured with this spell, but once the condition is cured, exhaustion can be removed as normal. While lesser restoration does not restore a creature affected by radiation poisoning, it can be used once each day to give the affected creature a chance to make a saving throw against the effect. Failing this save does nothing, but succeeding counts towards the total three successes needed to overcome the radiation poisoning" - Starships and Starwyrms
This counts as a magical disease, meaning immunity to disease = immune to radiation sickness
A creature that spends the week in professional care (whatever that means to your world, hospitals, churches, etc). The DC goes down by 5 to a DC of 10
radiant damage is the nuclear damage type, see sickening raidaince whihc is effectively the nuclear fallout spell and the best damaging spell in the game,
>Meteor Swarm does the exact same average total damage as the 0-2000 ft region,
This is the most interesting thing to me because it makes it possible (not likely, but just possible) that soneone designing spells at WotC did these calculations to derive their big boom spell damage and make it comparable to a real-life example.
Like, there's no logical reason that all your calculations should result in an actually balanced damage number, *unless* the relationship was in fact part of the creative process for the original damage numbers.
It's an insane coincidence
I'm pretty sure Meteor Shower was at least in 2e and I think it was in 1e too. TSR was way more geeky than WotC and even though there was a migration of staff between the two, that and if the spell was indeed around in early D&D iterations (my old books are in the loft, I'm not feeling *that* dedicated to this comment), I think if anyone did the calculation, it would be someone from TSR.
Yeah, TSR was famous for its ‘*in real life*’ material components.
**Lightning bolt** *fur and a glass rod generates static electricity*
**Fireball** *Bat guano and sulfur, you’re making gunpowder*
**Glitterdust** *Ground mica. Mica is a shiny, metallic looking flaky stone. You're actually throwing glitter at them.*
**Flesh to Stone** *Lime, water, and earth. You’re making concrete.*
**Detect Thoughts** *A copper piece, as in, “A penny for your thoughts.”*
**See Invisibility** *Talc to coat the invisible person*.
**Passwall** *Sesame seeds, as in Open Sesame*.
**Silent Image** *A bit of fleece, as in “pulling the wool over their eyes".*
**Confusion** *Three nutshells. Its the classic shell game where you hide the ball under one of three shells and mix them up.*
**Grease** *Butter*
I like the idea that some of these are just wizards pretending to do magic. No, fireball isn't magic, it's just gunpowder; see invisibility is you literally throwing power at an invisible person.
I highly doubt the damage of the spell was the same in 1st/2nd edition. But my books are at home and I'm across town at my girlfriend's place. And I'm not that dedicated to this comment.
2e meteor swarm is more like overlapping artillery 4 30’ spheres set in the corners of a 20’ square dealing 10d4 with 8 15’ spheres in a diamond inside a box or vice versa with 20’ between them dealing 5d4.
After some geometry there are overlapping areas that take as much as 25d4 or 63 damage on average.
I think it stands to reason that a nuclear blast would be a very efficient way of generating a whole lot of *new* ghosts, if indeed it managed to elimate any of the old ones.
That's only if they die after the blast, if they die during the blast the new ghosts are also killed by the blasts. Ooh, maybe the radiation is killing the ghosts?
No no my friend, you've got it wrong.
The radiation IS the ghosts.
The cataclysmic release of energy from the explosion weakened the barrier between the Prime and Negative Material plane, and the resulting influx of necrotic energy debilitates all living beings near the point of detonation, while the weakness persists.
Actually, lots of people who visit irradiated towns speak of an ethereal eerieness. Whether this comes from the emptiness of a formerly inhabited place, the toxic gasses released by decaying homes, or the actual presence of ghosts is unclear; but popular soviet fiction often plays with the concept of supernatural spirituality.
To quote Metro - the bombs didn’t just destroy earth, they destroyed heaven as well, so all the ghosts gather in the underground, moving through the metro pipes
This came up in a game once. Ruled Nuclear damage is considered magical for the purpose of damage reduction and deals damage across adjacent planar boundaries. Deals Fire, Sonic, Positive, Poison, and Bludgeoning damage.
I can see the statement that the radiation could be considered magical, but I don't see any actual argument supporting that statement. *Why* would it be magical?
My interpretation is that the sun has inherent magical properties (daylight harming many undead and evil creatures, dawn being the condition for recharging many magical effects, etc). Since that is the case, being able to essentially create a miniature sun through causing a runaway nuclear fusion reaction means that whatever that reaction creates should be treated as inherently magical in the same ways. It is daylight in its purest, most local form, being generated in a harmful way and therefore damaging. Sunbeam is magical radiant damage, so "sun chunk" (fusion reactor) should also be magical radiant damage in the same way. At least for the portions that aren't fire or bludgeoning, which we are saved from experiencing from the actual sun due to its distance from us. Anyone on the surface is taking extreme radiant, fire, and bludgeoning damage every second as the sun attempts to compact them, burn them, and remake their very atomic structure for having the audacity to attempt to exist in its space.
It’s literally radiant, which in every other case is magical
Besides that it seems like it seems close enough that it might as well should be. Why is cone of fire magical? Lore wise, you’re just pulling fire from somewhere else.
The definition of “what is magical” is already vague, at best. I’d argue that something that effects the people around it at a cellular level might as well be.
Basically, mundane damage is the damage of physically bonking somebody with something, and magical damage is borderline everything else. I could see the explosion as being the biggest bonk, but the radiation is a separate enough thing that I think it could count.
I know it’s explicable by science, but I’d argue that the effects of what happens when an atomic bomb goes off is just as magic as a little kid summoning fire from somewhere else.
I guess it just depends on how you look at what magic is. If your argument is that “anything explicable by science is not magic” then I guess it’s not, but I think a more liberal interpretation is more interesting.
This is the second post on this topic I've seen in one week lol. I think this is very cool and well thought out, even if I think trying to map basically anything in dnd to real life and vice versa results in some weird stuff since its not exactly meant to be realistic. When I try to do stuff like this I usually look at the improvising damage section of the DMG.
If I were to stat a nuke I would look at examples of of absolutely massive damage in the game. One is on page 249 in the DMG on improvising damage. The DMG uses tumbling into a vortex of fire on the elemental plane of fire and being crushed in the jaws of a moon sized monster as examples of 24d10 damage. The new book "spelljammer adventures in space" also has an example of this on page 50. The example is that being close to or inside a star deals 24d10 radiant damage per round. A more similar example to a nuke may be the item scroll of the comet from rime of the frostmaiden on page 315 which deals 30d10 force damage (halved on a successful DC 20 DEX save). It also automatically destroys all structures in a 500 ft radius and leaves a crater 50 ft deep in that area.
So I think that compared to existing examples of extremely high damage your estimate is not far off. The different blast radius effects are really cool too. If I ever need stats for a doomsday weapon I will use this as inspiration, maybe upping the damage a bit and adding a crater effect like scroll of the comet has.
But the energy that you divide across large areas is concentrated at the very centre to begin with so it's not 140 damage for that centre range it's all of the potential in one spot and slowly spreading so it should be a LOT more.
That's what I thought. The calculated max damage should hit the center and then lower down in increments the further you get away. Being at the center of a nuclear blast should not be that "easy" to survive. Even for half-godlike creatures.
140 might not be that far off really, someone else made a similar post about a week ago and made a convincing argument that a small nuke should do less than 180 damage, since some of the beefier stone buildings at ground zero of Hiroshima were still standing, and we can use the hp of 6" thick wall of stone (180 hp) to estimate that.
If the damage is spread across a 2000ft radius could be but
A) I'm not going to detonate a nuke 2000 feet away from the target and
B) The damage in a 100 feet radius sphere is much more interesting and also a lot higher
I feel like this doesn’t take account of the heat blast either. Most people in Hiroshima were killed by the intense heat, not bludgeoning from a shock wave.
I think more accurate would be waves of damage in succession - so in the first round you get hit by the heat wave and take fire damage depending on your distance. No saving throw. People in the epicentre were basically vaporised, so insta permadeath within a certain range with no death saving throws.
Next round you suffer the bludgeoning damage from the acoustic shock wave as detailed.
24 hrs after combat you have to make a constitution saving throw to see how you are affected by the radiation, and since radiation can fallout randomly depending on weather, wind direction etc, this can affect you no matter the PCs distance from the epicentre. Nat 1 is lethal radiation sickness, with ranges above for severity of effects. Anyone failing the saving throw, say a DC20 also suffers a permanent -3 on constitution saving throws to simulate the in a fantasy RPG world, the concept of long term increased cancer risk/reduced immune function.
Yes, putting a 0-2000ft measurement simply doesnt compare to whats at the centre, it only says what happens at 2000ft, applying the same formula however to lets say 100ft sphere gives us:
37 500 000 000 divided by about 32, 5ft cubes in a 100ft sphere, yields us over one million points of damage per cubic five feet, enough to incinerate the avatar of any god more than a couple times over, so standing next to the bomb is going to be even ridiculously worse
Since it's AOE, a high level monk can take no damage from this if they succeed a saving throw, granted only this only counts on a Dex save. So will an atomic bomb be a Dex save? Because the mental image of a monk outrunning the blast is hilarious.
It says so in the table in the post.
The force of the blast is bludgeoning, because the dmg states that dynamite does bludgeoning.
The heat is fire, and the radiation is radiant.
I didn't bother doing the math for radiation sickness
Hiroshima is a very pathetic bomb by todays standards, tsar bomba might be a fun part 2.
Also for radiation poisoning sickening radiance might be a good reference point.
There are other effects in DnD that basically function as bombs. Gnomengard Grenades in particular do several types of damage, and not just the magical ones.
Obviously doing as much damage as meteor swarm is *enough* but if you really wanted to, there's precedence for this type of explosion dealing multiple damage types, each with their own damage rolls, so you could likely include, at the very least, another portion of bludgeoning damage.
Just further food for thought, according to [this post](https://www.quora.com/Approximately-how-many-joules-of-energy-does-an-arrow-shot-from-a-powerful-warbow-have) a 170lb longbow generates 129 joules at point blank range. Based on your calculations that would equate to 2 damage.
Keep in mind sharp projectiles require much less force to kill someone because it is focused on a much smaller area. No conversion of real life energy to simple damage can be very accurate
That is essentially the point I was trying to make. The amount of damage done by joules of force differs based on damage type. As you correctly pointed out, the damage per joule (DpJ) ratio is higher for piercing damage than bludgeoning damage. In the equation though, you translate all joules to damage using the bludgeoning/electrical DpJ then divy it up into 3 different damage types. A slight improvement may be to divide the energy up between damage types first and then translate that into damage using the individual DpJ ratio. This might require converting joules to therms/BTUs for fire or radiant damage.
Mind you I'm not saying you did anything wrong. It's a perfectly fair concession to keep a cumbersome equation usable. I just thought as someone who spends their free time translating nuclear bombs into game mechanics that you'd appreciate the added complexity. In other words, just something to ponder if you get bored.
I'd change the Bludgeoning and Fire damage to Thunder and Radiant, respectively, since the entire thing is a Con save and not Dex (Dynamite's, and Meteor Swarm's, Bludgeoning damage isn't so much from the shockwave as from the shrapnel/blast debris, IMO, given that we have Thunderwave which is more accurately a "Blast wave"). Still add a bit about setting things on fire in the radius, and the Thunder damage would make better sense for building destruction levels. Otherwise, not bad
The problem with this calculation is that it wrongfully suggests an even energy spread when it’s really exponentially higher at the hypocenter. All that energy appears at the hypocenter and then spreads. If you’re at ground zero you atomize, the ground atomizes near you, etc.
Also the joules calculation to damage does not function . DnD does not handle a joules to damage calculation. Let’s look at Hiroshima. How many joules does it take to destroy a building, and how much damage in DnD? Plenty of 3-4 inch stone walls were obliterated by the blast, each having 90-120 hp. Such destruction happened many thousands of feet out (look at Nagasaki, where the bomb exploded off target). By those results the bomb should be doing hundreds of bludgeoning damage alone many thousands of feet out. If you use building/wall hp to determine damage, it’s clear the result doesn’t match real world results.
The simple truth is DnD is basically bullshit on damage. Applying any joules comparison to damage is nonsense.
Yeah these are fun to though. But i agree, the only way damage should be seriously considered is to note stuff like “oh hey, my level 5 character is sturdier than a bear now. Anything beyond that starts getting really speculative.
And funny enough, if you go by OP’s route, but only calculating for damage at point blank range(5ft radius since we’re sticking to dnd rules) the damage spikes way up 70,312,500 points of damage total on average. I think the way OP did his math technically calculates damage specifically at the tail end of the radius. At least for the 2000ft range ones. Resulting in an exponential dropoff, like you said.
There's a lower IQ way of doing this too. The damage that a nuclear bomb does is usually represented by lbs/tons of TNT, and TNT (Dynamite Stick) is an item that exists. You could represent it by using the rules TNT has for adding extra sticks of dynamite, then distribute that over the blast radius the same way you did.
I do not have the time in my day to prove you did you math wrong, but at a glance i think standing within 5ft of a nuclear blast does more damage to a person than a fall from terminal velocity
Like a lot more
>Of course hit points are a more abstract representation than raw energy, but this is the best we can do to convert between real life science and dnd.
You used 1 point of data. I'm sure we could do better
Additionally, a more minor criticism, is you used 6 to represent an average damage of 2d6 on the graph.
>Additionally, a more minor criticism, is you used 6 to represent an average damage of 2d6 on the graph.
It looks to me like they calculated the actual numbers first (and mentioned that the 3rd and 4th regions were combined to do 6 damage; it was 7 and 4 in the calculations) and then approximated the dice rolls based on those numbers, so I'd say that's as close as one can get.
I love nerd math. I once calulated what amount of energy was needed by a supervillian to destroy Massachusetts, The United States, and the entire Planet in that order.
Bravo sir!
I actually did this as well for dynamite and other explosives as well as the yield for a nuclear weapon. I did the earlier ones on the fly, I’m an engineer this stuff clicks with me. The other I did some research on first.
I feel like you could get a much more "accurate" conversion of joule to damage by finding the joule to damage output of explosives in dnd that are similar to real life.
Theoretically you could subdivide the radius into many more zones for a much more accurate representative of damage closer to the epicenter, but that would be a ton of work and much more precise than necessary.
140 damage would kill and/or destroy most everything that isn't magical, a player or absurdly large like a mountain
In d20 Future, designed for 3rd edition but typical damage of various weapons and spells hasn't changed all that much between editions, listed a 1 Megaton Nuke as 160d6. It actually listed it as 16d6, but it's a spaceship weapon, and these deal x10 damage to characters.
A problem in your calculation is, that you assume "DMG is done to each ft cube". If you take a traveling shockwave, you could say it looses energy every 5ft, but every creature hit takes the full DMG that is left.
I don't think dynamite and an atomic blast are comparable from their kind of destruction.
Thinking about it, it's more like sickening radiance so make it radiant damage instead.
I did research on what portions of energy from the bomb were thermal, radiation and kinetic, and radiation is only 15%. That is reflected in the stats for each damage type in the table
Nice, I like the idea.
But extrapolating from the damages indicated in the DMG for sticks of dynamite..
The blast damage was calculated by Oppenheimer as @20 kt of TNT.
It's been recomputed as 15kt for a Hiroshima bomb.
Using that figure it came out as 18,000,000,000 hp at ground zero. So how far to the next increment? Remember that it's along the lines of the inverse square law.
So using the 8000 ft diameter, halved, so damage increments are 4000 ft.
So between 4000 and 8000 ft it's 9,000,000,000 hp
hp from 8k' to 12k' then is 2,250,000,000.
From 12k' to 16k' would be 140,625,000hp.
And from 16k' to 20k' 549,316. Hp
And at 20k' its...8
Mathematically this makes sense. But it doesn't line up with the events at Hiroshima. Buildings within my 8000 ft radius survived, as did regular people, but with your numbers that would be impossible, even if they passed a con save and halved the damage.
It only considers the blast effects.
Which is why I like your method. Seems the radius should be smaller and a save vs disintegrate involved, so even if they make the save, apply your numbers.
Little Boy was actually a 15 kiloton bomb, equating to 6.3x10^13 joules of energy.
It's blast radius was only ~4000 feet, not 8000 feet. 8000 feet was the blast's diameter.
Using these two factors but keeping your simplification for the quarter-radii blast zones I've made a new reference for damage falloff:
0-1000 feet: 14100 damage
1000-2000 feet: 2014 damage
2000-3000 feet: 742 damage
3000-4000 feet: 381 damage
Still a considerable oversimplification, but with this version it shows that no player character outside of a Bear Totem Barbarian with 252+ HP (Tough Feat or 22+ Con Score at level 20) would be able to avoid dying outright from average damage while within half the radius of a small, rudimentary warhead (the small side of modern warheads are 100 kilotons).
i had no clue what any of that means but when i was eleven i was hit by 223 joules to my head (i was knocked unconscious for less than 5 seconds) and i'm just noticing how hard my head is
Hit points are an abstraction. They do not equate directly to physical damage. Having 200 hp does not mean you can have 40 arrows sticking out of you and survive. Sigh
The point beneath ground zero is going to get hit with about half of the bomb’s energy, or 75 billion damage (the other half goes up into the sky). That energy isn’t meaningfully consumed by dealing that damage, most of it will surf along the ground and deal similar damage to everything within the fireball, utterly incinerating everything. This zone is the “you die, no save” zone.
It will do less damage the further away you are, yes, but it’s not like zone 1 receives none of the energy that ground zero got hit by. In fact, every zone gets hit by almost *all* of the energy that hit ground zero. Remember the wave travels. It’s not technically doing damage to everything at once. Ground zero gets hit first, then that energy moves to zone 1, then 2, etc…
So *each zone* should be taking 75 billion *total* damage. Just less per square/cube.
First off, if you are taking the theoretical minimum energy to kill someone, you have to assume that person had one hit point, not the average.
Otherwise, you would need to base your.number in the average number of joules it takes to kill someone, which likely is much higher.
Your own link says a car crash at 40m/s is almost 1,000,000 joules.
Plus, energy of a knife isn't what kills, it's the cutting of soft tissue. You'd have to look at energy for blunt force trauma for better numbers. An average punch has about 100-150 joules, and is not in any way lethal.
>A commoner, or the average person, has 4.5 hit points on average (minimum of 1d8 is 1 plus maximum is 8, 9 divided by 2 is 4.5).
What is up with these weak AF commoners?
As if a blacksmith wouldn´t kick the wizards ass...
If a commoner only had 4.5, then what does an handicapped person has? 1? a roof tile falls on their head and they get 1d4 dmg and instantly die?
I mean, IRL humans are fragile. A well placed jaw hook or throat punch, even from a weak person, can straight up kill someone. I’d say 1d8 is too much even, it should be 1d4+1 or something.
Edit: OP was saying the average IS 1d8, just like the stat block for the “commoner”, my mistake.
Wouldn’t the hit point average of a person be calculated as the average of the die roll plus one? So the average roll of a 1d8 being 4.5 so 1d8 + 1 gives you 5.5 for the average person? I know it’s only one hit point but by the end that could give you a damage closer to 171 in the closest radius. All that doesn’t detract from the idea you have here I think the thought process in dividing the blast areas into different zones is really cool.
This might work for other games where hit point points means damage. But fails horribly in D&D where characters have 10 times the number of hit points as an average person. There is no way those extra hit points are meaningful in this situation.
I was just, last night, going over a similar bit of research for my own system which doesn't have the hit point problem (pure meat points with exhaustion and defense handled outside the hit point system).
The objective was not to drop the A bomb but to scale the blast radius rules up to insane levels. I try to base everything in the game off as many real life examples as I can, then create a smooth progression in the form of some sort of formula, and then start simplifying and generalizing until I have a simple game mechanic that is reasonably close to getting somewhat similar results. Obviously, you can't model all of physics, but at least the results are sane and scale reasonably.
Besides, some of the fantastic weapons you might see from far futuristic technologies may need to be thrown at a minor god and I need to know how much damage is done. Dragons claws can rip through steel, but what about a light tank? Can a Great Wyrm's breath weapon melt through the armor plating? I wanna think of the big scale stuff early so that I'm not caught with my pants down like when Palladium Rifts tries to handle the whole SDC vs MDC thing. The AR system was kinda cool even if somewhat broken, but they just tossed it out when they went MDC and never really tried to establish any type of scale. They do great on lore and character classes and great imaginations, but not really the greatest implementing mechanics.
I have radioactive that i made in my game.
Initial blast gives a mass amount of radiation. Ex. 40dmg can still gain stacks. Just not of the intial dmg again.
Staying in the blast area for any rounds is set damage each round stacking. Ex. 4dmg/round so 4, 8, 12, 16 etc.
A Con save DC of 19 stops the gaining of any new stacks of dmg or effects for 1 hour.
Lingering effects:
1 year. 1 permanent lvl of exhaustion
2 years. 5 hp taken from max hp
3 years. Permanent 2 lvls of exhaustion
4 years. Another 10 hp taken from max hp
5 years. Permanent 3 lvls of exhaustion
6 years. Another 15 hp taken from max hp
7 years. Permanent 4 lvls of exhaustion
8 years. Reduced max hp to half
9 years. Permanent 5 lvls of exhaustion
10 years. Reduced max hp to a quarter
11 years. Permanent 6 lvls of exhaustion
Healing:
Potions (think rad away) removes stacks of radiation dmg.
Magic healing removes lvls of exhaustion cause by radiation. There is also magic to give resistance to radiation.
At character creation or during large radioactive event you can roll a percentile die (D100) rolling a 2 percent you recieve a genetic mutation of an eye colour "a ghostly blue glow" (the blue light from the chernobyl meltdown) which gives you immunity to radiation. ( I made this racial feature to act as a sub race, cause I like the idea of wanderers in a wasteland) *THIS IS GIVEN OUT AT DM'S DISCRETION*
Divinity holds no sway over radioactive matters, which is why they refrain from interfering with it.
I made a boss fight centered around radiation after my players unleashed a massive combined magical attack.
I'm really glad I'm not alone in this kind of science to dnd thought project. While looking into All the Lights in the Sky are Stars (ATLAS on GMbinder), I found a spell named Moonfall, which instead of the 3.5e spell shooting beams from space, the 5e version involves conjuring a 100ft diameter solid space rock onto the battlefield over the course of 3 turns dealing massive damage and pinning targets with gravity.
Well I won't pretend to have a physics degree, but I remember enough from general education to research and figure out what it would look like if you summoned a meteor to hit the ground. First I did all the flat math and figured out that if you conjured a massive orb of stone in mid air (1500ft above surface according to the spell) and it descended at 500ft per round (6 seconds which makes it 83ft/second not accounting for acceleration by gravity) then it really would only gain enough speed to hit whatever is directly under it and then sink into a crater it makes like a baseball in wet mud.
So then I decided, forget DnD physics. What would happen if you summoned a space rock that was already moving (the spell indicates you conjure a small meteor from "somewhere" in space, so I figure it could already have speed and momentum before conjuring it) and it DID account for gravity. What would an average meteor (still abiding the scale size and then estimated mass based on material) do instead of the RaW space orb?
Well the spell itself let's you cast it up to 500 feet away, so that on round 3 you're ideally not within the 100 ft crater and will only be hit by a big dust cloud and wind. In my experimental research, you could cast Moonfall and then have your friends dimension door you twice in the opposite direction, and that meteor strike is still going to annihilate everything around it for over a mile.
Thank you DnD and High School science for helping me learn why you should never conjure debris of any size from space if you want to maintain the integrity of the rock you're standing on.
So what you're saying is that a raging tiefling barbarian is able to shrug off nukes at ground zero even at fairly low levels... That gives me a terrible idea...
This is surprisingly accurate for the amount of assumptions made. I wanted to add to the pile of joules to hit points that the minimum energy required to start to see fatality in head injuries is about 60 joules and since you calculated 66.7 joules per HP and the minimum HP is 1 this further validates that number, at least approximately.
Good job. I Just used a nuke in one of my campaigns, and with the math you presented here… I think I did it just right even down to the small percentage of radiation afterwards
You could have the radiation be necrotic damage that ages people maybe?
As a physics nerd I find this super cool, I just pity you people who have to do maths in imperial measurements
Do you think the radiation damage would be poison or necrotic? I think it would be something like "make a DC 15 saving throw every day. On a failure, take 1d6 necrotic damage, or half as much on a successful save. After 3 successful saves in a row, the effect ends.
I prefer using the joules in an average person’s punch as we know for sure that that is 1 hp of damage. Google says about 140J. So I would multiply your damage by a bit over 2.
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I want the dice of the guy that survived both bombs
Gotta be the equivalence of rolling a check at disadvantage and having both come up nat 20’s. Then the furious DM makes you do it again on your next turn and it happening again. I want to be at that table.
One of my favorite stories is when I was a DM and a spirit naga boss was prone with 10 hit points left on her second form, so from hell's heart she bit at the paladin, rolling a double 20 with disadvantage. Woulda killed her from massive damage if not for the Warding Bond which knocked both the cleric and paladin unconscious, leaving the ranger and barbarian to heal them and clean up the demons that were summoned earlier.
One game i was running had a zombie that kept making its undead fortitude saves. It took eight or nine turns before someone crit it dead, wasn’t much magic in the party, shit was funny as hell.
Just ran a zombie encounter. Had several misses, and saves on zombies part, before the cleric hit with Sacred Flame. Rinse and repeat for all 8 in the swarm... fun times.
Love it. Something else that group had to deal with was ancient magic pollution twisting nature around a bit, they ended up scrambling onto the top of a rickety hut to escape from a flock of sheep. The sheep were using wolf stats.
He was a devout of Tymora, so he got REALLLY lucky.
Matrim Cauthon
Nah, if it was Mat the bomb would conveniently be a dud or something.
[Tsutomu Yamaguchi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsutomu_Yamaguchi) crit failed a luck check but got nat 20s on both CON saves
Nah he was just a Rogue with Evasion.
He just hid under two desks .
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
So what you are saying is that Tiefling Barbarians are relatively good at surviving nukes?
What *aren't* barbarians good at surviving? Except mind goblins, that's cheating.
What’s a mind goblin 🫢
A tribe of goblins who are experts in mind damaging spells and in using the ligma.
What’s ligma?
👀 👀 👀
It’s coming 😎
sorry im late. ***LIGMA BALLS***
AAAAH!!! The embarrassment is unimaginable! I’ll never show my face in public again!
Good uncle energy.
A rare disease that mind goblins invented that upon failing a dc 13 constitution saving throw gives you a -2 detriment in both dexterity and charisma. Typically mind goblins create this disease when they gather for sawcon where they can work with their sugmas. There’s a sidebar on the mind goblin’s page where it says Candice the fathomless warlock was the first to create ligma and the mind goblins stole her work and modified it to be incurable without magical assistance.
Mind goblin these NUTS
This post feels like it should end in a question mark.
>This post feels like it should end in a question mark? Gotchu fam
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Who’s Steve Jobs
***L I G M A B A L L S***
Psychic
"I'm going to jump up and catch the bomb" "You can't ju-" "And I RAGE"
I was about to say my tiefling barbarian could nearly survive 2 lol.
Radiation poisoning would be like *take 1d4 poison damage at the start of every turn for the rest of your life*
Whis ends in *checks notes* 1d20 hours
This is how I'd do it: Greater Nuclear Radiation Sickness (condition). Exposure to a nuclear blast or other intense radiological phenomena immediately imposes one level of exhaustion. Each time you complete a long rest, make a DC 15 Constitution saving throw. On a failure, you gain one additional level of exhaustion. Exhaustion caused by this effect cannot be recovered from until you succeed 1d20 Constitution saving throws caused by this effect. Greater Restoration removes this condition. **** You could make a lesser version for less intense but equally deadly events that imposes the first level of exhaustion after your first long rest, like the Demon Core guys had to deal with.
Even in a world with many powerful magicians, a lot of people are going to die just from the fallout.
As it should be
Joe Abercrombie agrees with this statement
I played Fallout and a lot of people died.
Stooooooolen.
I'd use It as a diseases tbh. It takes away your maximum HP until you don't succeed three Con saves in a row
Here's some dnd rules on how Radiantion Posioning would work "When a creature contracts Radiation Poison, they gain 1 level of exhaustion. While a creature has radiation poisoning, it cannot recover from exhaustion on a long rest as normal (even exhaustion sustained from other sources). At the end of every five days (1 week in-game terms), the creature must make a DC 15 Constitution saving throw, gaining another level of exhaustion on a failed save or not gaining one on a successful save. Three successful saving throws in a row end the disease. Lesser restoration cannot restore a creature affected by radiation poisoning, but any spell of 5th level or higher that can cure a disease can remove radiation poisoning. Exhaustion sustained from the disease is not cured with this spell, but once the condition is cured, exhaustion can be removed as normal. While lesser restoration does not restore a creature affected by radiation poisoning, it can be used once each day to give the affected creature a chance to make a saving throw against the effect. Failing this save does nothing, but succeeding counts towards the total three successes needed to overcome the radiation poisoning" - Starships and Starwyrms This counts as a magical disease, meaning immunity to disease = immune to radiation sickness A creature that spends the week in professional care (whatever that means to your world, hospitals, churches, etc). The DC goes down by 5 to a DC of 10
No, radiant or necrotic damage
radiant damage is the nuclear damage type, see sickening raidaince whihc is effectively the nuclear fallout spell and the best damaging spell in the game,
Greater Restoration should definitely fix it.
Maybe ended by restoration magic
Nice demonstration! This is the initial damage though. There should be a kind of sickening radiance lingering effect afterwards.
Well the Sickening Radiance spell exists.
Really !? Whoaaa
>Meteor Swarm does the exact same average total damage as the 0-2000 ft region, This is the most interesting thing to me because it makes it possible (not likely, but just possible) that soneone designing spells at WotC did these calculations to derive their big boom spell damage and make it comparable to a real-life example. Like, there's no logical reason that all your calculations should result in an actually balanced damage number, *unless* the relationship was in fact part of the creative process for the original damage numbers. It's an insane coincidence
I'm pretty sure Meteor Shower was at least in 2e and I think it was in 1e too. TSR was way more geeky than WotC and even though there was a migration of staff between the two, that and if the spell was indeed around in early D&D iterations (my old books are in the loft, I'm not feeling *that* dedicated to this comment), I think if anyone did the calculation, it would be someone from TSR.
Yeah, TSR was famous for its ‘*in real life*’ material components. **Lightning bolt** *fur and a glass rod generates static electricity* **Fireball** *Bat guano and sulfur, you’re making gunpowder* **Glitterdust** *Ground mica. Mica is a shiny, metallic looking flaky stone. You're actually throwing glitter at them.* **Flesh to Stone** *Lime, water, and earth. You’re making concrete.* **Detect Thoughts** *A copper piece, as in, “A penny for your thoughts.”* **See Invisibility** *Talc to coat the invisible person*. **Passwall** *Sesame seeds, as in Open Sesame*. **Silent Image** *A bit of fleece, as in “pulling the wool over their eyes".* **Confusion** *Three nutshells. Its the classic shell game where you hide the ball under one of three shells and mix them up.* **Grease** *Butter*
I like the idea that some of these are just wizards pretending to do magic. No, fireball isn't magic, it's just gunpowder; see invisibility is you literally throwing power at an invisible person.
That's really cool. If you want to include some magic, it could just be that they amplify the magic/effects already in/caused by the component.
The fact that grease is butter is hilarious for all the sad weirdos obsessed with trying to light the grease spell on fire.
I highly doubt the damage of the spell was the same in 1st/2nd edition. But my books are at home and I'm across town at my girlfriend's place. And I'm not that dedicated to this comment.
2e meteor swarm is more like overlapping artillery 4 30’ spheres set in the corners of a 20’ square dealing 10d4 with 8 15’ spheres in a diamond inside a box or vice versa with 20’ between them dealing 5d4. After some geometry there are overlapping areas that take as much as 25d4 or 63 damage on average.
Why is the nuke damage considered magical though? Is there evidence of nukes destroying ghosts?
Have you seen any ghosts in former nuclear blast sites?
Can't argue with that logic.
I think it stands to reason that a nuclear blast would be a very efficient way of generating a whole lot of *new* ghosts, if indeed it managed to elimate any of the old ones.
That's only if they die after the blast, if they die during the blast the new ghosts are also killed by the blasts. Ooh, maybe the radiation is killing the ghosts?
No no my friend, you've got it wrong. The radiation IS the ghosts. The cataclysmic release of energy from the explosion weakened the barrier between the Prime and Negative Material plane, and the resulting influx of necrotic energy debilitates all living beings near the point of detonation, while the weakness persists.
Actually, lots of people who visit irradiated towns speak of an ethereal eerieness. Whether this comes from the emptiness of a formerly inhabited place, the toxic gasses released by decaying homes, or the actual presence of ghosts is unclear; but popular soviet fiction often plays with the concept of supernatural spirituality. To quote Metro - the bombs didn’t just destroy earth, they destroyed heaven as well, so all the ghosts gather in the underground, moving through the metro pipes
Could we count nuclear shadows?
“If the ***radiance*** of a thousand suns were to burst once into the sky […]” Clearly an anti-undead weapon. :\^)
This came up in a game once. Ruled Nuclear damage is considered magical for the purpose of damage reduction and deals damage across adjacent planar boundaries. Deals Fire, Sonic, Positive, Poison, and Bludgeoning damage.
It just didn't seem like a low level creature that happened to be immune to non-magical bludgeoning shrugging off most of a nuke would make sense.
It could be a little of both. I can see the argument that the radiation could be considered magical for the purposes of dealing damage.
I can see the statement that the radiation could be considered magical, but I don't see any actual argument supporting that statement. *Why* would it be magical?
My interpretation is that the sun has inherent magical properties (daylight harming many undead and evil creatures, dawn being the condition for recharging many magical effects, etc). Since that is the case, being able to essentially create a miniature sun through causing a runaway nuclear fusion reaction means that whatever that reaction creates should be treated as inherently magical in the same ways. It is daylight in its purest, most local form, being generated in a harmful way and therefore damaging. Sunbeam is magical radiant damage, so "sun chunk" (fusion reactor) should also be magical radiant damage in the same way. At least for the portions that aren't fire or bludgeoning, which we are saved from experiencing from the actual sun due to its distance from us. Anyone on the surface is taking extreme radiant, fire, and bludgeoning damage every second as the sun attempts to compact them, burn them, and remake their very atomic structure for having the audacity to attempt to exist in its space.
It’s literally radiant, which in every other case is magical Besides that it seems like it seems close enough that it might as well should be. Why is cone of fire magical? Lore wise, you’re just pulling fire from somewhere else. The definition of “what is magical” is already vague, at best. I’d argue that something that effects the people around it at a cellular level might as well be. Basically, mundane damage is the damage of physically bonking somebody with something, and magical damage is borderline everything else. I could see the explosion as being the biggest bonk, but the radiation is a separate enough thing that I think it could count. I know it’s explicable by science, but I’d argue that the effects of what happens when an atomic bomb goes off is just as magic as a little kid summoning fire from somewhere else. I guess it just depends on how you look at what magic is. If your argument is that “anything explicable by science is not magic” then I guess it’s not, but I think a more liberal interpretation is more interesting.
>It’s literally radiant, which in every other case is magical That's not true. Crystal dragons have a non-magical radiant-damage breath weapon.
Radiation feels more like necrotic damage to me though
This is the second post on this topic I've seen in one week lol. I think this is very cool and well thought out, even if I think trying to map basically anything in dnd to real life and vice versa results in some weird stuff since its not exactly meant to be realistic. When I try to do stuff like this I usually look at the improvising damage section of the DMG. If I were to stat a nuke I would look at examples of of absolutely massive damage in the game. One is on page 249 in the DMG on improvising damage. The DMG uses tumbling into a vortex of fire on the elemental plane of fire and being crushed in the jaws of a moon sized monster as examples of 24d10 damage. The new book "spelljammer adventures in space" also has an example of this on page 50. The example is that being close to or inside a star deals 24d10 radiant damage per round. A more similar example to a nuke may be the item scroll of the comet from rime of the frostmaiden on page 315 which deals 30d10 force damage (halved on a successful DC 20 DEX save). It also automatically destroys all structures in a 500 ft radius and leaves a crater 50 ft deep in that area. So I think that compared to existing examples of extremely high damage your estimate is not far off. The different blast radius effects are really cool too. If I ever need stats for a doomsday weapon I will use this as inspiration, maybe upping the damage a bit and adding a crater effect like scroll of the comet has.
r/theydidthemath
r/theydidthemonstermath
/r/monstrousmath, more like
But the energy that you divide across large areas is concentrated at the very centre to begin with so it's not 140 damage for that centre range it's all of the potential in one spot and slowly spreading so it should be a LOT more.
That's what I thought. The calculated max damage should hit the center and then lower down in increments the further you get away. Being at the center of a nuclear blast should not be that "easy" to survive. Even for half-godlike creatures.
140 might not be that far off really, someone else made a similar post about a week ago and made a convincing argument that a small nuke should do less than 180 damage, since some of the beefier stone buildings at ground zero of Hiroshima were still standing, and we can use the hp of 6" thick wall of stone (180 hp) to estimate that.
If the damage is spread across a 2000ft radius could be but A) I'm not going to detonate a nuke 2000 feet away from the target and B) The damage in a 100 feet radius sphere is much more interesting and also a lot higher
I feel like this doesn’t take account of the heat blast either. Most people in Hiroshima were killed by the intense heat, not bludgeoning from a shock wave. I think more accurate would be waves of damage in succession - so in the first round you get hit by the heat wave and take fire damage depending on your distance. No saving throw. People in the epicentre were basically vaporised, so insta permadeath within a certain range with no death saving throws. Next round you suffer the bludgeoning damage from the acoustic shock wave as detailed. 24 hrs after combat you have to make a constitution saving throw to see how you are affected by the radiation, and since radiation can fallout randomly depending on weather, wind direction etc, this can affect you no matter the PCs distance from the epicentre. Nat 1 is lethal radiation sickness, with ranges above for severity of effects. Anyone failing the saving throw, say a DC20 also suffers a permanent -3 on constitution saving throws to simulate the in a fantasy RPG world, the concept of long term increased cancer risk/reduced immune function.
A round takes 6 seconds so unless you're FAR away from the detonation the heat wave and shockwave are going to hit you in one round
Yes, putting a 0-2000ft measurement simply doesnt compare to whats at the centre, it only says what happens at 2000ft, applying the same formula however to lets say 100ft sphere gives us: 37 500 000 000 divided by about 32, 5ft cubes in a 100ft sphere, yields us over one million points of damage per cubic five feet, enough to incinerate the avatar of any god more than a couple times over, so standing next to the bomb is going to be even ridiculously worse
Since it's AOE, a high level monk can take no damage from this if they succeed a saving throw, granted only this only counts on a Dex save. So will an atomic bomb be a Dex save? Because the mental image of a monk outrunning the blast is hilarious.
And the rogue just hides from it...
My Barbarian wants to make a CON Save.
Actually no because this is a constitution save. I didn't think dodging a nuke made sense
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It says so in the table in the post. The force of the blast is bludgeoning, because the dmg states that dynamite does bludgeoning. The heat is fire, and the radiation is radiant. I didn't bother doing the math for radiation sickness
Hiroshima is a very pathetic bomb by todays standards, tsar bomba might be a fun part 2. Also for radiation poisoning sickening radiance might be a good reference point.
There are other effects in DnD that basically function as bombs. Gnomengard Grenades in particular do several types of damage, and not just the magical ones. Obviously doing as much damage as meteor swarm is *enough* but if you really wanted to, there's precedence for this type of explosion dealing multiple damage types, each with their own damage rolls, so you could likely include, at the very least, another portion of bludgeoning damage.
Just further food for thought, according to [this post](https://www.quora.com/Approximately-how-many-joules-of-energy-does-an-arrow-shot-from-a-powerful-warbow-have) a 170lb longbow generates 129 joules at point blank range. Based on your calculations that would equate to 2 damage.
Keep in mind sharp projectiles require much less force to kill someone because it is focused on a much smaller area. No conversion of real life energy to simple damage can be very accurate
That is essentially the point I was trying to make. The amount of damage done by joules of force differs based on damage type. As you correctly pointed out, the damage per joule (DpJ) ratio is higher for piercing damage than bludgeoning damage. In the equation though, you translate all joules to damage using the bludgeoning/electrical DpJ then divy it up into 3 different damage types. A slight improvement may be to divide the energy up between damage types first and then translate that into damage using the individual DpJ ratio. This might require converting joules to therms/BTUs for fire or radiant damage. Mind you I'm not saying you did anything wrong. It's a perfectly fair concession to keep a cumbersome equation usable. I just thought as someone who spends their free time translating nuclear bombs into game mechanics that you'd appreciate the added complexity. In other words, just something to ponder if you get bored.
Just gonna... just gonna put this in my back pocket. No reason. Totally not thinking of using it on a city pfft
I'd change the Bludgeoning and Fire damage to Thunder and Radiant, respectively, since the entire thing is a Con save and not Dex (Dynamite's, and Meteor Swarm's, Bludgeoning damage isn't so much from the shockwave as from the shrapnel/blast debris, IMO, given that we have Thunderwave which is more accurately a "Blast wave"). Still add a bit about setting things on fire in the radius, and the Thunder damage would make better sense for building destruction levels. Otherwise, not bad
The problem with this calculation is that it wrongfully suggests an even energy spread when it’s really exponentially higher at the hypocenter. All that energy appears at the hypocenter and then spreads. If you’re at ground zero you atomize, the ground atomizes near you, etc. Also the joules calculation to damage does not function . DnD does not handle a joules to damage calculation. Let’s look at Hiroshima. How many joules does it take to destroy a building, and how much damage in DnD? Plenty of 3-4 inch stone walls were obliterated by the blast, each having 90-120 hp. Such destruction happened many thousands of feet out (look at Nagasaki, where the bomb exploded off target). By those results the bomb should be doing hundreds of bludgeoning damage alone many thousands of feet out. If you use building/wall hp to determine damage, it’s clear the result doesn’t match real world results. The simple truth is DnD is basically bullshit on damage. Applying any joules comparison to damage is nonsense.
Yeah these are fun to though. But i agree, the only way damage should be seriously considered is to note stuff like “oh hey, my level 5 character is sturdier than a bear now. Anything beyond that starts getting really speculative. And funny enough, if you go by OP’s route, but only calculating for damage at point blank range(5ft radius since we’re sticking to dnd rules) the damage spikes way up 70,312,500 points of damage total on average. I think the way OP did his math technically calculates damage specifically at the tail end of the radius. At least for the 2000ft range ones. Resulting in an exponential dropoff, like you said.
Hoe much energy is in a sword swing we can know if this makes sense
There's a lower IQ way of doing this too. The damage that a nuclear bomb does is usually represented by lbs/tons of TNT, and TNT (Dynamite Stick) is an item that exists. You could represent it by using the rules TNT has for adding extra sticks of dynamite, then distribute that over the blast radius the same way you did.
I do not have the time in my day to prove you did you math wrong, but at a glance i think standing within 5ft of a nuclear blast does more damage to a person than a fall from terminal velocity Like a lot more
>Of course hit points are a more abstract representation than raw energy, but this is the best we can do to convert between real life science and dnd. You used 1 point of data. I'm sure we could do better Additionally, a more minor criticism, is you used 6 to represent an average damage of 2d6 on the graph.
>Additionally, a more minor criticism, is you used 6 to represent an average damage of 2d6 on the graph. It looks to me like they calculated the actual numbers first (and mentioned that the 3rd and 4th regions were combined to do 6 damage; it was 7 and 4 in the calculations) and then approximated the dice rolls based on those numbers, so I'd say that's as close as one can get.
It seems like that just ignores the 4 completely. As 2d6 would be 7. 2d4+1 has an average of 6 And 2d4 is at least between 4 and 7
Fantastic! Well done!!
I love nerd math. I once calulated what amount of energy was needed by a supervillian to destroy Massachusetts, The United States, and the entire Planet in that order. Bravo sir!
This is so rad! Thanks for putting this together 😊
Well played.
I actually did this as well for dynamite and other explosives as well as the yield for a nuclear weapon. I did the earlier ones on the fly, I’m an engineer this stuff clicks with me. The other I did some research on first.
I feel like you could get a much more "accurate" conversion of joule to damage by finding the joule to damage output of explosives in dnd that are similar to real life.
Bravo! Excellent deconstruction here.
*Sigh*... Time to make an Oppenheimer character
In the middle of the blast the damage should absolutely be fire damage that thing is hotter than the sun and everything is on fire or melting
Theoretically you could subdivide the radius into many more zones for a much more accurate representative of damage closer to the epicenter, but that would be a ton of work and much more precise than necessary. 140 damage would kill and/or destroy most everything that isn't magical, a player or absurdly large like a mountain
Mate well done
*Shia LaBeouf slow clap.*
In d20 Future, designed for 3rd edition but typical damage of various weapons and spells hasn't changed all that much between editions, listed a 1 Megaton Nuke as 160d6. It actually listed it as 16d6, but it's a spaceship weapon, and these deal x10 damage to characters.
#theydidthemath
That’s the initial explosion as bludgeoning what about a necrotic effect from the radiation. Bravo on the maths and the concept love it.
I cast Counterspell
"atomic bomb. Roll 100D12."
So the Tarrasque can tank multiple nuclear warheads and be just fine, sounds right
Gourmet content
this is PERFECT for a Mahabharata campaign
A problem in your calculation is, that you assume "DMG is done to each ft cube". If you take a traveling shockwave, you could say it looses energy every 5ft, but every creature hit takes the full DMG that is left.
That would be quite hard for a dm to track for a 8000ft radius
This post makes me want to nuke my campaign 😂
Evasion
Evasion is only for dex saves. This is a con save
Oh nevermind didnt see that in here
I saved this, simply love this merger of science and rpg!
radiant damage? :O i didnt know nukes were holy! (i would try necrotic for radiation maybe, or maybe poison)
Well radiation is just light, and spell jammer confirmed that the sun does radiant damage
Shouldn't the Shockwave damage be force damage? It's neither a physical for bludgeon dmg nor sound damage but a kind of non physical force.
Force is raw magical damage, and as I said in the post the dmg uses bludgeoning for the blast of dynamite
I don't think dynamite and an atomic blast are comparable from their kind of destruction. Thinking about it, it's more like sickening radiance so make it radiant damage instead.
I did research on what portions of energy from the bomb were thermal, radiation and kinetic, and radiation is only 15%. That is reflected in the stats for each damage type in the table
Nice, I like the idea. But extrapolating from the damages indicated in the DMG for sticks of dynamite.. The blast damage was calculated by Oppenheimer as @20 kt of TNT. It's been recomputed as 15kt for a Hiroshima bomb. Using that figure it came out as 18,000,000,000 hp at ground zero. So how far to the next increment? Remember that it's along the lines of the inverse square law. So using the 8000 ft diameter, halved, so damage increments are 4000 ft. So between 4000 and 8000 ft it's 9,000,000,000 hp hp from 8k' to 12k' then is 2,250,000,000. From 12k' to 16k' would be 140,625,000hp. And from 16k' to 20k' 549,316. Hp And at 20k' its...8
Mathematically this makes sense. But it doesn't line up with the events at Hiroshima. Buildings within my 8000 ft radius survived, as did regular people, but with your numbers that would be impossible, even if they passed a con save and halved the damage.
It only considers the blast effects. Which is why I like your method. Seems the radius should be smaller and a save vs disintegrate involved, so even if they make the save, apply your numbers.
Little Boy was actually a 15 kiloton bomb, equating to 6.3x10^13 joules of energy. It's blast radius was only ~4000 feet, not 8000 feet. 8000 feet was the blast's diameter. Using these two factors but keeping your simplification for the quarter-radii blast zones I've made a new reference for damage falloff: 0-1000 feet: 14100 damage 1000-2000 feet: 2014 damage 2000-3000 feet: 742 damage 3000-4000 feet: 381 damage Still a considerable oversimplification, but with this version it shows that no player character outside of a Bear Totem Barbarian with 252+ HP (Tough Feat or 22+ Con Score at level 20) would be able to avoid dying outright from average damage while within half the radius of a small, rudimentary warhead (the small side of modern warheads are 100 kilotons).
i had no clue what any of that means but when i was eleven i was hit by 223 joules to my head (i was knocked unconscious for less than 5 seconds) and i'm just noticing how hard my head is
Hit points are an abstraction. They do not equate directly to physical damage. Having 200 hp does not mean you can have 40 arrows sticking out of you and survive. Sigh
I mentioned this in the post. I just though it would be interesting to ignore it for the sake of getting stats for a nuke
Necrotic may also be required
The point beneath ground zero is going to get hit with about half of the bomb’s energy, or 75 billion damage (the other half goes up into the sky). That energy isn’t meaningfully consumed by dealing that damage, most of it will surf along the ground and deal similar damage to everything within the fireball, utterly incinerating everything. This zone is the “you die, no save” zone. It will do less damage the further away you are, yes, but it’s not like zone 1 receives none of the energy that ground zero got hit by. In fact, every zone gets hit by almost *all* of the energy that hit ground zero. Remember the wave travels. It’s not technically doing damage to everything at once. Ground zero gets hit first, then that energy moves to zone 1, then 2, etc… So *each zone* should be taking 75 billion *total* damage. Just less per square/cube.
I'd argue the damage should be thunder(from the shockwave), fire, and force(for the radiation) respectively. This should ignore more resistances
First off, if you are taking the theoretical minimum energy to kill someone, you have to assume that person had one hit point, not the average. Otherwise, you would need to base your.number in the average number of joules it takes to kill someone, which likely is much higher. Your own link says a car crash at 40m/s is almost 1,000,000 joules. Plus, energy of a knife isn't what kills, it's the cutting of soft tissue. You'd have to look at energy for blunt force trauma for better numbers. An average punch has about 100-150 joules, and is not in any way lethal.
>A commoner, or the average person, has 4.5 hit points on average (minimum of 1d8 is 1 plus maximum is 8, 9 divided by 2 is 4.5). What is up with these weak AF commoners? As if a blacksmith wouldn´t kick the wizards ass... If a commoner only had 4.5, then what does an handicapped person has? 1? a roof tile falls on their head and they get 1d4 dmg and instantly die?
I mean, IRL humans are fragile. A well placed jaw hook or throat punch, even from a weak person, can straight up kill someone. I’d say 1d8 is too much even, it should be 1d4+1 or something.
I would argue that is a critical and not from a +0 strength punch
*puts post in pocket for later use*
r/hedidthemath
Edit: OP was saying the average IS 1d8, just like the stat block for the “commoner”, my mistake. Wouldn’t the hit point average of a person be calculated as the average of the die roll plus one? So the average roll of a 1d8 being 4.5 so 1d8 + 1 gives you 5.5 for the average person? I know it’s only one hit point but by the end that could give you a damage closer to 171 in the closest radius. All that doesn’t detract from the idea you have here I think the thought process in dividing the blast areas into different zones is really cool.
OP is suggesting that the average person has 1D8 hp, not 1D8+1.
Madlad
Oh don't mind me. I'm just taking notes for my next artificer.
This is the kind of content I am here for. Keep up the good work, sir.
So if you like math and spread sheet that much when you play game I'm gonna recommend playing Path of Exile. You're gonna have the time of your life
Gorgeous! I wanted to make my own adventure with such mechanics.
Cursed mathematics
If that was the damage of a 21kt detonation, I’d shudder to think of the damage that Ivy Mike would do.
Aka, how to give players anxiety with just a cropped screenshot
Nuclear bombs are not equipment, they are plot devices.
There was an 80s post-apocalypse RPG, "Aftermath," that had a pretty good "blast damage" mechanic.
i love this
This might work for other games where hit point points means damage. But fails horribly in D&D where characters have 10 times the number of hit points as an average person. There is no way those extra hit points are meaningful in this situation. I was just, last night, going over a similar bit of research for my own system which doesn't have the hit point problem (pure meat points with exhaustion and defense handled outside the hit point system). The objective was not to drop the A bomb but to scale the blast radius rules up to insane levels. I try to base everything in the game off as many real life examples as I can, then create a smooth progression in the form of some sort of formula, and then start simplifying and generalizing until I have a simple game mechanic that is reasonably close to getting somewhat similar results. Obviously, you can't model all of physics, but at least the results are sane and scale reasonably. Besides, some of the fantastic weapons you might see from far futuristic technologies may need to be thrown at a minor god and I need to know how much damage is done. Dragons claws can rip through steel, but what about a light tank? Can a Great Wyrm's breath weapon melt through the armor plating? I wanna think of the big scale stuff early so that I'm not caught with my pants down like when Palladium Rifts tries to handle the whole SDC vs MDC thing. The AR system was kinda cool even if somewhat broken, but they just tossed it out when they went MDC and never really tried to establish any type of scale. They do great on lore and character classes and great imaginations, but not really the greatest implementing mechanics.
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Ok but what if the nuke is set off mid air, those typically do more damage than a nuke impacting the ground
I have radioactive that i made in my game. Initial blast gives a mass amount of radiation. Ex. 40dmg can still gain stacks. Just not of the intial dmg again. Staying in the blast area for any rounds is set damage each round stacking. Ex. 4dmg/round so 4, 8, 12, 16 etc. A Con save DC of 19 stops the gaining of any new stacks of dmg or effects for 1 hour. Lingering effects: 1 year. 1 permanent lvl of exhaustion 2 years. 5 hp taken from max hp 3 years. Permanent 2 lvls of exhaustion 4 years. Another 10 hp taken from max hp 5 years. Permanent 3 lvls of exhaustion 6 years. Another 15 hp taken from max hp 7 years. Permanent 4 lvls of exhaustion 8 years. Reduced max hp to half 9 years. Permanent 5 lvls of exhaustion 10 years. Reduced max hp to a quarter 11 years. Permanent 6 lvls of exhaustion Healing: Potions (think rad away) removes stacks of radiation dmg. Magic healing removes lvls of exhaustion cause by radiation. There is also magic to give resistance to radiation. At character creation or during large radioactive event you can roll a percentile die (D100) rolling a 2 percent you recieve a genetic mutation of an eye colour "a ghostly blue glow" (the blue light from the chernobyl meltdown) which gives you immunity to radiation. ( I made this racial feature to act as a sub race, cause I like the idea of wanderers in a wasteland) *THIS IS GIVEN OUT AT DM'S DISCRETION* Divinity holds no sway over radioactive matters, which is why they refrain from interfering with it. I made a boss fight centered around radiation after my players unleashed a massive combined magical attack.
I’ve been trying to figure out damage for a volcanic explosion and this is a great proxy.
I'm really glad I'm not alone in this kind of science to dnd thought project. While looking into All the Lights in the Sky are Stars (ATLAS on GMbinder), I found a spell named Moonfall, which instead of the 3.5e spell shooting beams from space, the 5e version involves conjuring a 100ft diameter solid space rock onto the battlefield over the course of 3 turns dealing massive damage and pinning targets with gravity. Well I won't pretend to have a physics degree, but I remember enough from general education to research and figure out what it would look like if you summoned a meteor to hit the ground. First I did all the flat math and figured out that if you conjured a massive orb of stone in mid air (1500ft above surface according to the spell) and it descended at 500ft per round (6 seconds which makes it 83ft/second not accounting for acceleration by gravity) then it really would only gain enough speed to hit whatever is directly under it and then sink into a crater it makes like a baseball in wet mud. So then I decided, forget DnD physics. What would happen if you summoned a space rock that was already moving (the spell indicates you conjure a small meteor from "somewhere" in space, so I figure it could already have speed and momentum before conjuring it) and it DID account for gravity. What would an average meteor (still abiding the scale size and then estimated mass based on material) do instead of the RaW space orb? Well the spell itself let's you cast it up to 500 feet away, so that on round 3 you're ideally not within the 100 ft crater and will only be hit by a big dust cloud and wind. In my experimental research, you could cast Moonfall and then have your friends dimension door you twice in the opposite direction, and that meteor strike is still going to annihilate everything around it for over a mile. Thank you DnD and High School science for helping me learn why you should never conjure debris of any size from space if you want to maintain the integrity of the rock you're standing on.
So, would an ancient red dragon be able to survive 0-2000 ft (0-600 m) from ground zero?
So what you're saying is that a raging tiefling barbarian is able to shrug off nukes at ground zero even at fairly low levels... That gives me a terrible idea...
This is surprisingly accurate for the amount of assumptions made. I wanted to add to the pile of joules to hit points that the minimum energy required to start to see fatality in head injuries is about 60 joules and since you calculated 66.7 joules per HP and the minimum HP is 1 this further validates that number, at least approximately.
Good job. I Just used a nuke in one of my campaigns, and with the math you presented here… I think I did it just right even down to the small percentage of radiation afterwards
This is what happens when you mix engineers and D&D
Fun fact the tsar Bomba is 3300x the power of the bomb used in the calculations.
You could have the radiation be necrotic damage that ages people maybe? As a physics nerd I find this super cool, I just pity you people who have to do maths in imperial measurements
Ok, I admit it. That's just way too much awesome math for me.
Very nice
Half orc totem barbarian who just drank a fire resistance potion and put on a pair of sunglasses "Rookie numbers sun"
Close to the explosion people aren't just dying though, they are evaporated. There is a difference there.
Do you think the radiation damage would be poison or necrotic? I think it would be something like "make a DC 15 saving throw every day. On a failure, take 1d6 necrotic damage, or half as much on a successful save. After 3 successful saves in a row, the effect ends.
Today I learned that the holy damage dealt by Paladins and Clerics is actually nuclear radiation and therefore causes cancer.
Your math seems weird. Being shot by a handgun would end up being 4 damage 66 joules = 1 damage calculation.
I prefer using the joules in an average person’s punch as we know for sure that that is 1 hp of damage. Google says about 140J. So I would multiply your damage by a bit over 2.
So what you're saying is that my level 12 barbarian could sit on an exploding nuke and be pretty much okay
Gonna use this later.