Players come up with crazy solutions to problems and I find myself often googling different scenarios like "what is the ignition point of fabrics" or "what are the military ranks of the UK Air force".

What is the most interesting bit of science you've learned as a byproduct of playing or running a game?

For me it was the mechanisms behind the infamous crocodile "death roll". I found out its used in croc vs. croc fights for territory or breeding or whatnot and it is speculated that it first came about as that function as part of its "combat" repitoire but then adapted it for feeding time.

Also every species of croc and alligator do it (except for the dwarf caiman). So that was interesting as well.

I ran a sci-fi game that was set in the existing solar system (but where the planets and Jovian moons had been settled).

Uranus has an axial tilt where the pole faces the sun.  It rolls around like a bowling ball on its orbit.  The pole that faces the sun gets the light, and the pole that doesn't ... doesn't.

Neptune has an orbit that is so long [165 years] that it has barely completed one rotation around the sun since its discovery in 1846.

There are a ton of really cool naming conventions for the various planets' moons as well.  There are the obligatory Greek/Roman references ... but Shakespeare shows up a lot as well.

I tend to learn a lot more history from RPGs than science, so I'm going to hijack with some fun history facts.

First:  Bass Reeves.  Look that up.  Absolutely amazing story.  Thank you Deadlands.

Second:  Some leading figures in nineteenth century spiritualism were the Fox sisters, who were I believe 14 and 11, happened about the middle of the century.  Basically these kids duped everyone into believing they could commune with the deceased and other bizarre things and became prominent celebrities.  Learned about them researching a character who was a confidence artist.

Third:  I wanted to find an idea for a strange way to attack with a sword that had some historical plausibility to it.  Lo and behold there is actually a passage in a German manual of arms (circa 1400s AD) which describes a swordfighting technique that translates into English as "end him rightly".

The attacker unscrews the pommel of the attacker's sword and throws it at the opponent, who must either dodge it or block it, leaving them open to a ferocious attack with the (presumed rest of) the sword.

Some interesting YouTube videos on it.

I used it once to describe an Agility Trick/Wild Attack combination in a Savage Worlds game...

Bonus fact:  Apparently at some point, it was an orthodox technique to grab your sword by its blade (this presumed your hands were protected by gauntlets) and beat your opponent with the hilt, essentially using it as an improvised sledgehammer.  This was, apparently, a desperation tactic if your sword just wasn't a heavy enough weapon to defeat the enemy's armor.  I have yet to use it in a game but I learned it exploring the above fact.

That was quite the list! I think it was the Fox Sisters who would do things like crack their toe knuckles and pretend it was ghosts rapping at the door.

If you want strange sword fighting check out Indian sword whips. Exactly what it sounds like. A long flexible metal blade you whip around like...well...a whip.

I hadn't heard of the "use a sword like a hammer" but a quick google search reveals: Mordhau

https://www.thevintagenews.com/2019/02/17/mordhau/

Literally translates as "Murder Stroke" it is also the name of a medieval royal rumble fighting game. Interesting indeed. I wonder if you can mordhau while playing Mordhua!

Well...I'm not sure I could pick a 'most fun fact' out of the list, but the thing that comes to mind...

I was introduced to the gravitational constant playing the original Ravenloft module in AD&D.  There's a tower with a crystal heart in the top of it, and the tower is alive, tries to shake loose anyone who's making an unauthorized ascent.  Someone in our party levitated up to the heart, and cut it free from the top of the tower...

The game paused at that point, as we spent the next half hour figuring how just how long it would take the heart to fall to the base of the tower, how fast it would be travelling, and how much time the characters had to find cover of some sort.  Thinking about it now, I'm not sure you were actually supposed to be able to do that (cut the heart loose)...but we had a GM who was great at the whole "Well, there's no rule for that, but I'll make something up." And he was really good at explaining it so that you understood what the dice rolls actually meant when you made them.

Kinda spoiled me for playing D&D with most other GMs I've ever tried...also, one of the truly nerdiest moments I've ever had in any role-playing game, ever.

I've had to do a whole lot of weird searches for my games (I once spent an entire day reading about bioluminescent fungi, for example). Most of it just comes down to things like tensile strength, material density, or average force exerted. I once had a player who insisted that his natural 20 Strength check was enough to lift a 30' tall statue made of solid granite. Some quick math showed the statue to weigh just over 170 tonnes. I don't care that you rolled a crit, your Elf isn't lifting that!

Probably my favorite one came from a group encountering an oak tree made of solid gold. The rogue (of course) wanted to remove a leaf to sell. The amount of force necessary to remove the solid gold leaf? 134 psi. Their reactions when they found out the tree was protected by a dryad made of solid gold? Priceless.

While trying to find out how much force 134 psi is I discovered something that said ounce-for-ounce bones are stronger than steel. Huh...

In reply to aguy777 (msg # 6):

hehe. Yeah, I completely agree. It reminded me of the GM of a face to face group ran our highest level game of D&D that "ended" (?) about a year ago. In it, I played a half elf that got to 48th level. Even at low epic, like 24th I think, he had a high 40's low 50's strength, and used a belt that doubled his lifting load and a feat that did the same thing; essentially making his lift load triple. Even then, with all that strength, he had to chop a statue of Lolth into smaller chunks to remove it; because it was too heavy. xD

Eventually though, as implied, he was able to lift quite a bit more. One thing he would do is lift naval ships out of water. The GM, however, didn't take into account, that realistically the wood would just shatter to my character's grip, since it was hand sized. So he was able to do shows and events lifting ship out of water and putting them back down. Later it occurred to me that if the grip didn't crumble, the whole ship would have just snapped.

So I looked up information about ships and went down the rabbit hole that led to Noah's Ark explained by Bill Nye. Fascinating, and all because I had more strength than I knew what to do with. ;p

@V_V at that point you're leaving fanatsy and entering the super-hero genre.

The most fun fact I ever learned from playing an RPG... I learned funny things about Canadian geography, such as how Newfies have landmarks called tickles, and... another thing that's arguably adult. Newfoundland has some weird village names.
This message was last edited by the user at 07:58, Fri 13 Mar 2020.

Newfies have a culture all their own!  LOL

Not something I learned but the players in the game did.  GM was a physics teacher, so that when the PCs dropped something, I think it was a gelatinous cube, from the high ceiling height on the villains'lair on a small island, instead of going over by some means themselves, the GM educated them in the results of a large object dropped at distance.  It did indeed destroy the lair, totally.  Too bad there used to be some very nice loot there too.

There is no height from which you can drop a gelatinous cube that would do more than, say, 6d6 damage to anything but the cube itself.  Your physics teacher obviously used potential energy calculations and didn't take terminal velocity into account.  If they actually were to drop the cube from outside the atmosphere, where terminal velocity is not yet an issue, it would burn up long before reaching the ground.

Not a physicist, but I would imagine 5he mass of the cube, itself, would have a great deal of importance in determining the damage...even with terminal velocity being a factor, a hundred pounds is going to create more force at impact than twenty...

What you are essentially dropping is a cube of acidic napalm that will burn everything organic in a splatter area, or even worse coalesce into scores of mini-cubelets that will hunt and eat and grow.
This message was last edited by the user at 18:40, Fri 13 Mar 2020.