It comes up more often than you'd think

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Thoughts and prayers? I'm thinking about kicking your ass and you better pray I don't! My healing spells are only to ensure you don't die before I get my point across!

Ope. Hang on.

Normally this is obviously correct, but in this case, we have to consider how tall the characters are. As a DM, I would rule that if any part of the character (their actual person, not including, say, the reach of the sword they're holding) is within the 30' circle, or could be if they actively collaborated with the cleric using free actions, then the bless would affect them.

There's also a few definitions we need to talk about:

• if the cleric (we'll call them Carl) is 30' in the air, that is understood to mean that if the spell holding them up there fails, they will fall 30'. By the same token, a character 0' feet in the air can only fall 0'. We can infer that Carl's feet (or the bottom part of the PC, at any rate) are 30 feet in air.
• we consider Carl to be in the center of the 5x5 grid square in the plane A formed 30' above the flat terrain.
• the "allies are 20ft away" part is a bit too fuzzy for this to work (how many allies? which ones? they can't all occupy the same grid square unless they're tiny), so we'll have to make some calls here. Let's just consider one ally, Alice, who is 20' away.
• We consider Alice to be in the center of her grid square, in the plane T formed by the flat terrain.
• When we say Alice is "20ft away" from Carl, we mean that a perpendicular line drawn through the cleric intersects with T at the center of a grid square in A--we'll call this square C(T) and Carl's square at current altitude C(A), and the center of C(T) is 20' from the center of Alice's square A(T). Visualized as a battle grid you would have C ◻◻◻ A in plane T, with 3 empty squares separating them. On a physical table, Carl would also probably be standing on a little platform or a d6 to indicate altitude.
• "Range: 30ft" 30 feet from what? Definitely not Carl's god, they're probably not even in the room. Maybe we mean 30ft from Carl's 3rd chakra, or maybe it's just 30ft from any part of Carl's person. That seems easier, let's go with that one.

Based on some anthropometric data I found very quickly, the average human woman has a vertical reach of about 77 inches or 6' 5". That's naked, and she's probably wearing boots, let's add another inch for the soles so 6' 6".

We can give her a little bit more of an advantage as well; the shortest path between Alice and Carl is a straight line following the radius of the sphere, so she could "lean in" a bit with her arm to get closer. She can't go a full 45 degrees without falling prone though, so this only adds a little. Without a posable figure and a 3d model of the space in front of me I couldn't tell you how much she could reasonably add by pointing her body and hand at an angle, so let's just call it 2 more inches and keep measuring vertically.

We'll call the apex of her fingertips at 80 inches above T a new plane F, and A(F) is the point where she touches that plane with her fingers.

Now we get to actually apply the Pythagorean theorem. It's a triangle formed by the points (C(A) -> A(A) = 240") as leg 1 and (A(A) -> A(F) = 280") as leg 2. The hypotenuse, then, is 368 inches.

30ft is 360 inches. Is 80 inches of Alice enough to put a fingertip through any part of a 30ft sphere around Carl's feet?

No it isn't. So no +d4 for you Alice, piss off.

I would argue that this explanation still requires a working knowledge of the Pythagoras theorem, even if you don't employ the formula directly. Specifically the knowledge that the hypotenuse must be longer than either of the sides unless the angle of the non-90 degree sides are 180 and 0, essentially making it a line.

You deducted the hypotenuse must be longer than 30 since they weren't aiming directly at the ground. Believe it or not, that's not common sense.

And if this is a "circles are square" world (which makes life so much better), they're simply 30ft away.

Me at 15: I'm never going to need Chebyshev distance in real life.

Also, while they simplified distance, they made finding you're in range of Fireball much, much more complicated. You can't just use the Pythagorean theorem to find out if the center of your square is in range. You have to use trig integrals to calculate how much of your square is inside the circle, and if it's more than half.

I use it regularly to estimate if a tree will hit anything when falling over.

I knew it! Feet are not real! Nobody is using such unit in real life!

(Sorry, not sorry 😛)

But how tall is the target?

Angled distance is 100% pythag theorem

A²+b²=c²

That's only true for movement. For areas of effect, there are templates for each size for square grids that are roughly shaped like real circles.

Nah, what would be silly is using Manhattan distance

As a long-time DM, this sort of loosey-goosey handling of basic math in D&D is how Flight makes it into 1st level games... ie. "What could go wrong?" is the epitaph for the vast majority of games killed by shenanigans. 😜

(laughs in maths)

D&D math jokes? Let's go!

Q: What phases through stone and is equivalent to the axiom of choice?

A: Xorn's Lemma

That's the beauty of DND, you can play however makes you happy :)

It's honestly a lot of fun if you can get a good group together. The hardest part is scheduling.

If you're looking for a group online the lfg subreddit is the place to go. Most people there are very welcoming of new players, and you can catch on quick through play.

Sadly the LFG here on lemmy is lacking, I've been trying to get a group going for a while with no luck, so currently reddits the only real option for online dnd

I would recommend picking up a play podcast. Great way to get introduced.

CAD made me...not lazy, but certainly changed my approach with stairs and railings.

In my architectural design classes, when doing a stair layout, the most important factor, and really the only thing that mattered from a situational perspective, was the overall height. That, combined with values that didn't change, drove the rest.

Basically we had a defined max height for risers (7 3/4" off the top of my head) so you just divided that whole vertical distance in inches by 7.75 and add 1 to the answer (unless it came out perfectly even) and that's your number of steps. Now take that overall height again and divide by number of steps, and you get the height of each riser. Set tread length as needed (usually 10-12") and now you can lay out the basics of the staircase with each step surface and riser face marked out.

From there, it's trivial to strike a line across the front corner of each step and offset it down for the back end of the stringer and up for a railing.

No geometry, no Pythagoras, just some simple arithmetic and drafting skills. I would have thought this would be fairly common knowledge in my field but on one occasion, just Knowing how to do this, in an interview, got me a job offer.