If the range of Bless is 30ft and the Cleric is 30ft in the air, then any non-zero horizontal distance would technically put them out of range. You don’t need to calculate that they are 36.06ft away to know if they are out of range or not.
But do their feet need to be in range or just a single part of their body?
Depends on which part of them needs to be blessed?
The opposite of that happened to Achilles
Except the game uses Chebyshev distance, so as long as they’re within 30 feet in the x, y, and z dimensions, they’re within 30 feet.
Though for area damage spells, it’s much, much more complicated. You don’t just have to find the Euclidean distance from them to the center. You have to calculate how much of their square is within that distance.
Depends how tall they are.
If the cleric is 30ft in the air, and the allies are 20ft away but on the ground, then the allies are probably 10ft tall
RAW yes, they’re 30 feet away.
As a home rule, I’ll sometimes run total distance = long distance plus half the short distance. That also correlates nicely with making every other diagonal count as 10’
Ironaically enough, you just take either the horizontal or the vertical distance (whatever is longer) instead of calculating. I hate that rule and never use it, but that’s what RAW says.
Used it in practice in my head the other day - even nailed the sqrt to a decimal point. I have created human life, but I think I was more proud of this lol
That is one reason I don’t like D&D, it is a glorified boardgame the hides it’s wargame roots under a very thin layer. I like tactical rpg on the computer but investing that level of math and detail in a pen & paper game is so boring, for me at least.
My group plays pretty loose goosy with the rules. We just look at it and make a quick estimate of whether something looks in range. They also have little range finder tools that are helpful for quickly determine cones, spheres, etc. We’re also the kind of party that doesn’t really keep track of gold. Apparently gold has a weight?
For this reason I actually don’t like playing one shots with people I don’t know, because they don’t play by all of our house rules, lol.
I think you’d like how Exalted handles money. (Note: I’m talking about second edition here; I never got familiar with third edition.)
In Exalted, wealth is represented by a Background called Resources. Backgrounds are essentially stats that represent useful things your characters has in a general sense like wealth, fame, contacts, or a mentor. They go from zero to five.
Resources is a vague representation of wealth. At Reduces 1 you’re one meal away from total poverty. At Resources 5 you have something that passively generates substantial amounts of money for your character, whether that’s ownership of a lot of land or an army of accountants maintaining your investment portfolio. Whatever is is, it works without you having to deal with it.
In terms of game mechanics it’s easy to use: Prices are expressed as Resource scores. If you want to buy something you just compare your score to the item’s.
- If yours is higher, you just get the item as the price doesn’t affect your wealth significantly.
- If both scores are the same you get the item but have to reduce your Resources by one. This represents you having to liquidate a large amount of your assets to cover the price.
- If your Resources score is lower than that of the item, you can’t afford it.
It’s a nice system for a game that doesn’t want resource management to get in the way of epic adventure.
Sounds cool, thanks for the explanation!
In general I don’t really like Pen&Paper RPGs where you need miniatures (and for worse range finder tools) to play them. But that is a me thing, don’t read my words as that I want to say D&D should change. Far away from that, D&D is a great game and I love it on the PC (where it IMHO only works, not at the table)
If you actually have to use that much math more than once in a blue moon, you’re doing it wrong.
If I think more about it i come to conclusion that is not really the math per se, but what I find boring is that 90% of the rules (measured by feeling) are about battle and battle takes such a huge and detailed part in the game.
That’s fair. Perhaps another style of DMing and/or a different system are more your speed.
And there are more then enough systems out there for everyone to find his perfect match and then some.
