3028: D&D Roll

Five-Day Forecast

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Title text: You know what they say--if you don't like the weather here in the Solar System, just wait five billion years.

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Explanation

Weather forecasting is an extremely difficult task, even if it is only for five days. In numerical models, extremely small errors in initial values double roughly every five days for variables such as temperature and wind velocity. So most meteorologists provide us with only a five-day forecast.

In this comic Randall takes this to the extreme by first showing a Five-Day Forecast and then progressing to five-month, year, million, billion and finally trillion-year forecasts, leading to weather patterns that we don't regularly see.

Since the first weather symbol is the same in all six rows, we can assume it indicates the weather today and not tomorrow, in a trillion years, etc. It is only in the second panel of each row that time has passed per the row's label. Consequently, the last column gives the predictions for four days, four months, ..., four trillion years from today.

When moving past the five-day prediction, the forecast is just a qualified guess based on the time of year. In a month it is Christmas as shown in the second panel of the second row. Then it is January and February so snow is likely, but certainly not something that happens on all days of a winter month.

Looking at the five-year forecast, guesses are made as to what the weather will be like at the same time of year. For these first three predictions the weather symbols are all of the same three types: Sun, clouds and some kind of precipitation, rain or snow, with the temperature ranging from 21 to 44 °F (-6.1 to 6.6 °C) - late-autumn/fall (perhaps early-winter) temperatures.

Then we go into the far future, jumping a million years from panel to panel. But still the weather symbols stay the same. In 3 million years, however, aliens (or advanced humans) attack with energy beams from flying saucers. They are absent a million years later, or at least not actively attacking in any visible way during this later snapshot. The temperature range remains the same across the panels except that it rises to 52 °F (11 °C), a possible reference to global warming, in one panel, and while the attack is going on it rises to 275 °F (135 °C).

Once we get to the billion-year mark it actually becomes more meaningful to try to predict the "weather", because now we reach the times when the Sun begins to change. Although the Sun will continue to burn hydrogen for about 5 billion years yet (while in its main sequence), it will grow in diameter as it begins to exhaust its supply of fuel. The core will contract to increase the temperature, and the outer layer will then compensate by expanding slightly. This is what is indicated in panels two and three, where the color of the Sun changes towards red as the surface becomes cooler as it expands away from the center of the Sun. The temperature will rise on Earth as indicated in the panels (105 °F = 40.5 °C and 371 °F = 188 °C). The temperature will get hot enough in about a billion years that the Earth's oceans will boil away.

Once it no longer has enough hydrogen, the Sun will expand into a red giant. This should not happen until around five billion years from now, but in the forecast it is indicated to happen in only three. Maybe this is Randall taking liberties to show what happens during this phase, which would not fit into a four-billion-year forecast. Alternatively it just indicates how uncertain these kinds of forecasts are, or a statement that we may not know for certain that it will take five not three billion years, nor what toll other influences (such as attacking aliens) might take on the Sun.

In any case, the fourth panel shows the temperature at Earth's position inside the red giant Sun. The color of the panel indicates that we are inside the Sun. The temperature is 71,488,106 degrees Fahrenheit (39,715,597 degrees Celsius). The current temperature of the center of the Sun is "only" 27 million degrees Fahrenheit (15 million degrees Celsius), and although that may rise by a factor of ten during helium fusion, that will only be at the very core and not out in the solar atmosphere reaching out to Earth. Here the temperature would only be of the order of thousands of degrees Fahrenheit, since the Sun's outer temperature decreases as it increases its diameter. So this panel's temperature also makes little sense by current understanding. It may involve some ambiguities regarding what the forecast means; the edge of the red giant Sun is predicted to be somewhere near the current orbit of Earth, but the position of the Earth could change. The most likely prediction at the moment is for Earth to move outward but, if the planet is engulfed by the Sun, it would spiral inward, and at some point fall apart. So in some sense "here" for the forecast could become a position deep inside the Sun, where core temperatures could reach 100 million Kelvin. The temperatures shown are unreasonably precise; they probably should have only two or at most three significant figures, if not for the running theme of escalating levels of prescience (enough to predict a future attack by flying saucers, etc).

The red giant phase lasts only half a million years, so a billion years after the Sun has been a red giant its outer atmosphere will definitely have disappeared, leaving only a dim, cool white dwarf to cool down. Given Randall's version of this time schedule, then it will have had about a billion years to cool down, but would still likely be the brightest object in the sky as seen from where the Earth once was. It is not shown in the last panel, where we just see other stars of the Galaxy. The temperature is down to that of the background radiation. Today this radiation has a temperature of 2.72548 kelvin = -270.4245 °C = -454.7641 °F. That is a few degrees F colder than what is shown in the comic, which states the temperature is -452 °F = 4.26 kelvin. This higher temperature may have been chosen to reflect that even the light from other stars would increase the actual temperature.

In the last panel with trillions of years, we jump right past the Sun's red giant phase to a panel looking much like the one after five billion years with only other stars, one of the original stars being no longer visible. Over the next three trillion years the stars become fewer and dimmer as they run out of fuel, while fewer new ones form to continue the cycles of star-formation. After four trillion years the background temperature decreases one degree to -453 °F as the universe keeps expanding and the wavelength of the radiation does the same, thus decreasing its temperature.

The title text is a play on comments referring to fast-changing weather on a more ordinary human timescale, such as Mark Twain's quip, "If you don't like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes."

A ten-day forecast was used in 1245: 10-Day Forecast. In 1379: 4.5 Degrees, Randall looked at the weather over long periods of time as well. in 1643: Degrees he addressed Celsius vs. Fahrenheit for measuring temperature.

Image using Celsius

There is a different user-made version for the picture, using Celsius instead of Fahrenheit, in this image link. (For a version that also uses Kelvin, click here.)

Transcript

[A grid with six rows of five columns, where each row is labeled to the left. For each of the 30 squares a temperature is given in Fahrenheit at the top left. The rest of the square represents the weather as in a weather forecast (or some other relevant items for the comic), mainly in bright colors. Below are the six labels given above each of their five weather symbols with temperature given below these symbols description.]

Your 5-day forecast

[A bright yellow sun.]

38°F

[A grey cloud.]

41°F

[A grey cloud with six lines of blue raindrops below.]

36°F

[A grey cloud in front of a yellow sun.]

40°F

[A bright yellow sun.]

44°F

Your 5-month forecast

[A bright yellow sun.]

38°F

[A green Christmas tree with red presents beneath it.]

29°F

[A grey cloud with four snowflakes below.]

21°F

[A grey cloud with four snowflakes below.]

24°F

[A grey cloud.]

35°F

Your 5-year forecast

[A bright yellow sun.]

38°F

[A grey cloud.]

25°F

[A bright yellow sun.]

36°F

[A grey cloud with six lines of blue raindrops below.]

37°F

[A bright yellow sun.]

41°F

Your 5-million-year forecast

[A bright yellow sun.]

38°F

[A bright yellow sun.]

52°F

[A grey cloud.]

40°F

[Two red flying saucers (with bright domes) are shooting energy beams downwards. One of the beams seems to impact with something at the bottom of the panel, which then explodes. Two plumes of smoke rises up from below, drifting to the right.]

275°F

[A grey cloud in front of a yellow sun.]

40°F

Your 5-billion-year forecast

[A bright yellow sun.]

38°F

[A larger orange sun.]

105°F

[A very large red sun.]

371°F

[A pale yellow panel with no drawing.]

71,488,106°F

[A night sky with many bright stars.]

-452°F

Your 5-trillion-year forecast

[A bright yellow sun.]

38°F

[A night sky with many bright stars.]

-452°F

[A night sky with many stars.]

-452°F

[A night sky with fewer not so bright stars.]

-452°F

[A night sky with few dim stars.]

-453°F

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Discussion

Dice comic. 172.69.22.181 04:09, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

And in a pinch, d4s can be used as caltrops. --172.71.147.210 05:22, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

I am willing to bet good money that every D&D comic that features the game's name inside the title will either break the RSS Feed or User:TheusafBOT. 42.book.addict^{Talk to me!} 10:17, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

Ah, that's why we never got a good explanation about the one with the D&D players dialling in over AT&T to roleplay S&M sessions while eating M&Ms and drinking A&W. 172.70.90.4 13:22, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

Is this the same issue that causes the page title to be rendered as "D Roll"? Angel (talk) 08:50, 25 December 2024 (UTC)

Probably? 42.book.addict^{Talk to me!} 21:50, 26 December 2024 (UTC)

If the D20 is large enough (>30 cm?) and its full volume is made of a heavy metal or alloy, like iron, steel or gold, one can just use it as a "blunt weapon" (that is, the weight is used against the enemy). 172.70.39.208 17:01, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

30cm would be way too heavy to use as a blunt weapon. A 30cm d20 made of iron would weigh some 107 kilograms, and a golden one would be almost 270. Though I have thought for a while that a cube with a handle plugged into one corner would be a cool and effective shape for a mace head. 172.68.23.135 01:14, 27 December 2024 (UTC)

Second XKCD on D&D in a few months... I think some cartoonish picked up a new hobby recently. Ralfoide (talk) 18:25, 24 December 2024 (UTC)

Should have used the d65536. DL Draco Rex (talk) 19:55, 25 December 2024 (UTC)

Someone added the "chide the player for being presumptious" idea, which I corrected/added to a little (wondering if it should go into the Background section, to not clog up the basic Explanation). But just to note that 'local rules' that we always used to use were to allow 'presumptive' rolls to be made, to speed up gameplay. If the DM/GM/whoever needed more/different/other rolls to be made, they could ask for them (or, sometimes, just ask for them anyway, I think, to maintain the 'mysteries of the game' — "You enter an apparently empty room, roll 6D6... nothing happens! And now a D4... still nothing happens!"). Though with two caveats: No rolling then deciding the action to declare for it (e.g.: rolled high, tried stupidly damaging move; rolled lower, suggested an easier dodge) and even 'wasted' dice could then be used by the GM/DM (on a whim) if they rolled either extreme of critical. This led to the occasional 'speculative' rolling (without obvious purpose) that might lead to tripping over some discarded minor-artifact or a light-sleeping enemy, etc, just to mix things up a bit. Though it's all down to the one running the game, and you never really know if they're even 'accurately' interpreting the valid roles you do know about, if they're good enough story-tellers with a decent sense of how to make a mission not seem like it's quite so much on-the-rails as they planned it to be all along... I suspect that there are as many opinions about this as there are editors here, however. If not more, given that many of us have acted under multiple different playing situations, and perhaps even from both sides of the Dice Screen. (I'm not even sure I've ever played raw, vanilla D&D, for example, and couldn't even tell you which Edition I've most played. Plus all the other things like Star Wars (only ever the original D6 version), Babylon 5 and others for which I'm not even sure of their canon-base.) So, yeah, interpret the comic in any one of several ways! 172.70.85.238 16:23, 26 December 2024 (UTC)

I find the claim that a player would be allowed to specify a weapon and "roll again" strange. Firstly, in my experience most players only have one primary weapon at a time (to not unnecessarily carry around the weight and space of excess weapons), meaning generally there's no need to specify (only maybe if they're equipped with a secondary/parrying weapon, which people usually only use as a sneak/second attack). As such, no, I don't think this is Cueball's error, the joke is that this is Ponytail's mistake thinking he wants his character to throw dice, and/or this is a goofy game where the characters are actually carrying around dice. Secondarily, what kind of dick DM/GM would make them roll again? Unless it's a terrible roll and they're using the excuse to generously offer a re-do roll (and 18 is generally great in most contexts). The point is for this to be fun, such a terrible nit-pick would fight against such fun. I must not be alone since someone put "actual citation needed" on that, for which I think the only possible citation would be to find an online resource of a DungeonMaster manual IF it actually says this somewhere, but this seems like an unwritten thing up to the individual person. NiceGuy1 (talk) 04:34, 26 July 2025 (UTC)

I hope it's not improper wiki etiquette to ask things like this, but I need to ask User:NiceGuy1, what the HELL did I do wrong this time?! I made one dumb edit, apparently, which was then reverted, so any harm was undone there. Then I made another edit, which added nothing but factual information which I have checked for myself, and now I've "screwed up the Trivia and [undone] the error where it was named", whatever that sequence of words means. And you re-added one of the lines from my first edit! What's with the aspersions? Revolutionary girl euclid (talk) 04:28, 16 August 2025 (UTC)

Restored. I don't understand the reverts either. --FaviFake (talk) 21:04, 17 August 2025 (UTC)

Thanks, appreciate it. I do think my comments were starting to get a bit melodramatic at a certain point there, lol (it was late at night for me so I was getting irritated and tired). Revolutionary girl euclid (talk) 20:30, 18 August 2025 (UTC)

Oh no you were very polite, if i were you i'd have been a little more (passive-)aggressive. --FaviFake (talk) 10:51, 19 August 2025 (UTC)
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