Rainbow Dash: Here goes nothing, I guess.
roll
Rainbow Dash: Ugh. 10.
Fluttershy: Um, can I support Dash with a cheer? "You can do it, Presto!"
DM: ...thanks to the power of friendship, you manage to make it up to the top.
Rainbow Dash: Thank Celestia.
Uni: I will patiently await your return, friends! From the nice, safe ground.
DM: At the front of the castle, you find a closed drawbridge.
Merlin: Apologies, but I'm a bit occupied at the moment, so you'll have to open it yourselves.
Twilight Sparkle: A drawbridge implies a moat, right?
DM: Yes, but in this case, it's less "pit of water" and more "open sky."
Pinkie Pie: How wide is the moat, anyway?
DM: It's these blue squares here.
Rainbow Dash: ...I should build a moat.
Pinkie Pie: That's not very far! I bet I could jump it with my staff!
DM: You know each of these squares is 5 feet, right? It'd be like you trying to jump this whole table.
Pinkie Pie: Ooh! I bet I could! Lemme just-
DM, Applejack, Twilight Sparkle, Rarity: Pinkie Pie, no!
Pinkie Pie: What? I was just gonna roll. Woo! 25!
DM: O-oh. Okay. Uh, sure, you make it to the other side.
Pinkie Pie: Now let's make some room for me to try the real jump!
Twilight Sparkle: PINKIE.
Guest Author's Note: "Distance is weird in tabletop RPGs. Whether you're using a tileset, or playing in the theatre of the mind, not everyone processes the dimensions of a room or layout very well. It's one of the reasons that sizes function so strangely when you get into the nittier, grittier parts of mechanical function (especially if you're trying to make a player character outside of the typical size.)
All of this distance talk gets even worse when you have to consider other forms of movement. Walking up walls? Swimming? Flying? And of course, jumping! Jumping is weird! And it kind of makes sense, because how often do you jump in real life? The rules in 5e have it based on raw Strength, 4e had it as an Athletics check, 3e had a Jump skill (with results partially dependent on height, and proficiency with Jumping), and 2e had it based on level of all things (with special rules for pole vaulting)!
All of this translates to a skill that I don't think gets used very often, and a spell that probably gets used less. But those times when you need it...oh boy, do you need it.
(The funniest thing to me is that the spell Jump, when applied to a character with a strength of 10 in 5e, translates to someone who can just barely eek out a jump of 30 feet. The current long jump world record is 8.95 meters, or 29.36352 feet, set in 1991 by Mike Powell. It takes actual wizard powers to match our real world record holder.)"
Notice: Guest comic submissions are open! Guidelines here. Deadline: February 20th.
I would have liked it more if they weren't spaced so far from each other that the second line of text overlapped bubble edges. It actually made it a bit difficult to read. I STILL keep reading the "no" as "na".
To be fair, our real world record holders are jumping into a nice safe pit of sand, not over a yawning abyss of doom. If I had to jump 30 feet across one I'd very much like to have wizard powers backing me up to land safely.
I use the jumping rules all the time in games I run. It's a great way to give the non-magical classes a chance to show off, and tempt the magic classes to spend spell slots out of combat.
Then there are monks. It's amazing how many encounters you have to tweak when one of the players has an average long jump of 80 feet.
OTOH, you have people complaining about how short the distance their PCs can jump if they aren't uber-specialized to max out their possible jumping ability¹. The fact that getting a total of +10 to the roll in 1ed Pathfinder makes you capable of matching the RL world record long jump, (with only a 10' run up and landing on your feet), doesn't seem to enter into it.
(In PF1, doing that 15' jump would need +6 at most to simply take-10 and get an autosuccess.)
1: One of the common wrong beliefs found around 3.x was that you either had max skill or were completely useless at it. It didn't help that some GMs would de-facto enforce it as true by setting all relevant DCs that high.
Guest Author's Note: "Distance is weird in tabletop RPGs. Whether you're using a tileset, or playing in the theatre of the mind, not everyone processes the dimensions of a room or layout very well. It's one of the reasons that sizes function so strangely when you get into the nittier, grittier parts of mechanical function (especially if you're trying to make a player character outside of the typical size.)
All of this distance talk gets even worse when you have to consider other forms of movement. Walking up walls? Swimming? Flying? And of course, jumping! Jumping is weird! And it kind of makes sense, because how often do you jump in real life? The rules in 5e have it based on raw Strength, 4e had it as an Athletics check, 3e had a Jump skill (with results partially dependent on height, and proficiency with Jumping), and 2e had it based on level of all things (with special rules for pole vaulting)!
All of this translates to a skill that I don't think gets used very often, and a spell that probably gets used less. But those times when you need it...oh boy, do you need it.
(The funniest thing to me is that the spell Jump, when applied to a character with a strength of 10 in 5e, translates to someone who can just barely eek out a jump of 30 feet. The current long jump world record is 8.95 meters, or 29.36352 feet, set in 1991 by Mike Powell. It takes actual wizard powers to match our real world record holder.)"