If a Fireball goes off in the woods, does it make a sound?
|Recently, in one of the games I GM, the party was sneaking into a complex and the mage cast Fireball. The question came up: how much noise does a Fireball spell actually make?
The spell description doesn’t tell us much:
“A low roar” is evocative, but hardly definitive. Looking online, there’s two schools of thought as pertains to how loud a fireball is, exemplified by the two sections of this reddit post, to wit:
It’s loud: “I found a research paper that indicates the SPL [sound pressure level] of the classic Chem 101 exploding hydrogen balloon can be as high as 160 dB at 6 feet distance. Seems like a decent conservative analog for a fireball.
Sound volume drops by 6db when the distance is doubled. If you figure the SPL of the crack is 160dB at 6 feet and the ambient noise level of a forest is about 60 dB then the crack could be heard from almost 37 miles (6.5km) away. It would be just a low rumble by then though. Based on some other reading on thunder, it appears the “clap” limit is about 1/16 of the “rumble” limit, and the max audible distance is about 10 miles. so one might guess a fireball would be audible as a rumble to 10 miles and as a snap to about 1/2 to 5/8 of a mile (~ 1km)
ETA: underground or indoors a good thick stone wall is going to block and reflect a lot of that sound. Several feet of stone is going to make sure that (a) everyone in the room gets the full blast of the sound and (b) nobody outside the room is going to hear much at all.
ETA2: On the gripping hand underground that crack is going to echo down hallways like a mofo, much like that poor skeleton that got knocked down the well in Moria… probably with similar results…
It’s not: “You ever seen a pyre covered in petrol go up? That sound is distinct and “loud” but it doesn’t carry. You wouldn’t hear it at all at 300ft. You probably would hear it in a field at night in the country from 150ft. In the city, around the corner, in the middle of the day, you probably wouldn’t hear that sound from 60ft.
So basically, I would rule, from the center of the spell sound travels 150ft in a silent area, 50ft in a noisy area, maybe a little further with echo. It’s not louder than yelling and doesn’t travel like baby crying or deep exhausted notes (trying to give obvious sounds that are relatable).
We generally do agree that fireball has a mild concussive effect, not any damage generated by this is not taken into account by the spell (no bludgeoning, all fire) so I tend to lean toward the “It’s not” opinion. Fireballs are like gasoline igniting, not like a bomb going off.
Comment with your opinions!