Realistically, falling damage should just be a percentage of your maximum HP. After a certain point, falling should always be lethal no matter your size, Constitution, level, or hit points.
That has a definite brutal, simple elegance!
Realistically, falling damage should just be a percentage of your maximum HP. After a certain point, falling should always be lethal no matter your size, Constitution, level, or hit points.
Barely hanging on the ledge of the 3rd floor (assume 20-foot drop) above a cobblestone street. A fall of that height wouldn't necessarily be fatal, but it would seriously hurt. Like "you're not dead but ain't going anywhere anytime soon" hurt.
That's a good one I hadn't thought of. Unless you have really excessive 'down the ravine' falls then they won't match real world scariness. I agree that's not one worth worrying about, though. Another one is that the 'bad guy has knife at the innocent's throat' technically suffers from the 5e dying rules. It's really a problem, especially since people usually have NPCs die at 0 hp instead of making death saves, I don't think anyone is going to complain about 'throat slit - dead' instead of 'throat slit - make death saving throws' on an NPC.
Barely hanging on the ledge of the 3rd floor (assume 20-foot drop) above a cobblestone street. A fall of that height wouldn't necessarily be fatal, but it would seriously hurt. Like "you're not dead but ain't going anywhere anytime soon" hurt.
I've made my peace with the abstraction of hp but as soon as the PCs are 2nd level, 2d6 damage is no longer a significant threat. I know it's not breaking the game but since we're looking for situations that should-be-scary-but-aren't, a 20-foot drop is not even remotely as threatening in the D&D world. Let alone a 30-foot fall or more.
I'm not convinced anything should be done about it; defenestration shouldn't always be a more effective solution than stabbing someone in the eye but on the other hand, it would be nice if a 10-foot pit trap was a little more than a mere inconvenience, and jumping down from the tower's roof wasn't just a more efficient way to climb down...
But I've seen people comment on this like lack of water is a major problem for all Tier 2 PCs, that it's something that should be a major plot point if it happens and not just 'oh well we'll use up 1 first level slot' or includes a caveat like 'as long as no one has a level of this common class'. It's also tier 2 modules that I've seen with the 'track your water before going into the desert' section in the start. And this isn't just an oddity of 5e, the spell has been around in the same basic form since 1e when clerics were even more likely since party size was assumed to be 6-8 and there were typically fewer classes. People in conversation seem to treat this as a lot more than a 'oh, we'll have to dedicate one first level slot to it' issue.
I've never seen an outdoor adventure where players are doing 6-8 non-trivial encounters per day for multiple days. How do you balance the real time needed to run 6-8 encounters that actually use resources per day and also have multiple days of exploration happening? If you're not having multiple days of exploration, then the lack of supplies won't catch up with you, but I really don't see how you'd throw in enough encounters that players notice the lack of a single 1st level spell and also have the exploration phase move quickly enough for the exploration part to actually happen. (This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm really wondering how you manage to pull this off without getting bogged down in tons of encounters or losing the 'exploring lots of land' feel)
Barely hanging on the ledge of the 3rd floor (assume 20-foot drop) above a cobblestone street. A fall of that height wouldn't necessarily be fatal, but it would seriously hurt. Like "you're not dead but ain't going anywhere anytime soon" hurt.
I've made my peace with the abstraction of hp but as soon as the PCs are 2nd level, 2d6 damage is no longer a significant threat. I know it's not breaking the game but since we're looking for situations that should-be-scary-but-aren't, a 20-foot drop is not even remotely as threatening in the D&D world. Let alone a 30-foot fall or more.
I'm not convinced anything should be done about it; defenestration shouldn't always be a more effective solution than stabbing someone in the eye but on the other hand, it would be nice if a 10-foot pit trap was a little more than a mere inconvenience, and jumping down from the tower's roof wasn't just a more efficient way to climb down...
All of this stuff happens in action movies all the time.
Stop thinking of D&D as a simulation of real life.