D&D 1E 5e Play, 1e Play, and the Immersive Experience

[The Crimson Binome]

So in your “rules as world physics” game, don’t your PCs routinely fall off cliffs only to come back minutes later to try again? Or do you handle falling damage differently than it’s described in the books?

Surprisingly or not, it doesn't really come up. By the time someone can trivially survive 20d6 damage, they have easy ways of avoiding it, like flight. At least, that's now it's gone down in my historical experience with running 5E games at high levels.

For what it's worth, I do use alternate healing rules, which give me more freedom to describe the traumatic injury associated with taking 70 damage from a fall. Even if the characters can survive it, and they know that they can survive it, nobody wants to deal with the pain.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Surprisingly or not, it doesn't really come up. By the time someone can trivially survive 20d6 damage, they have easy ways of avoiding it, like flight. At least, that's now it's gone down in my historical experience with running 5E games at high levels.

For what it's worth, I do use alternate healing rules, which give me more freedom to describe the traumatic injury associated with taking 70 damage from a fall. Even if the characters can survive it, and they know that they can survive it, nobody wants to deal with the pain.

Fair enough. I typically just rule that at a certain height, if a character falls, they’re gonna die. Because the D&D rules as presented pretty much support the idea that a character can fall an absurd distance and walk away, and I just think it’s silly, so I don’t allow it. Not unless there are mitigating circumstances of some sort.

I suppose Wile E. Coyote is like 15th level.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

It's kind of a blanket term, and it means different things in different contexts. As far as stories (novels, cartoons, and movies) are concerned, an important aspect is in portraying the subject matter such that it is both consistent and believable.

I'm detecting some circularity here. Why is consistency important? To take the story seriously. Why is taking the story seriously important? Because it means it's consistent.

If the writers are taking a story seriously, then things will resolve according to the internal logic of the world, rather than in a way that's funny or dramatic. The most important aspect is in making portraying the events as believable, and hopefully it can be funny or dramatic within those bounds, but stuff shouldn't happen because it's funny or dramatic, at the expense of believability. If a story is taking itself seriously, then when someone asks why something happened, the immediate and sufficient response is due to internal causality (and never "because it's funny" or "because otherwise the story would be over by the third act").

Although you give no indication of it, I do hope you recognize that in the context of narrative fiction, this is always an illusion. And no, not just because the author is making you believe that something is real when in fact it isn't. The writer is choosing to tell you the story they are telling in order to make you feel something: in the big picture, everything is happening "because it's funny" (or "dramatic" or "romantic" or whatever). If you get the impression that you're hearing about a consistent causal series of events that just so happens to make you laugh out loud, then you have been, benignly, tricked. The consistency was only ever a means to an end; it is of secondary importance at best. Nobody ever won a Hugo or an Oscar for Most Consistent Story.

With role-playing games, it goes a step further, due to inherent limitations in the human brain. In a movie, you can have good stories that don't take themselves seriously, because the audience isn't actually involved in any way. But with a role-playing game, the critical limit is that the brain of the player works similarly enough to the brain of their character, that you can feed in information about what's happening to the character, and the player's brain will tell you what the character decides. Wile E Coyote does not live in a world of causality, though, so there's nothing that a player's causality-oriented brain can do in order to mimic those thought processes.

Again, I would suggest you consider the possibility that you are overgeneralizing your own individual preferences into the universal "human brain". If you've ever seen a thirteen-year-old (or thirteen-at-heart) play a chaotic neutral character, then you ought to know full well that players can and do mimic the thought processes of screwball cartoons with gusto.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I'm detecting some circularity here. Why is consistency important? To take the story seriously. Why is taking the story seriously important? Because it means it's consistent.

My argument is weak because it should be obvious. Why do I care about taking things seriously? You might as well ask why it's important that nobody cheats. It's an obvious self-truth. You shouldn't need to ask.

Although you give no indication of it, I do hope you recognize that in the context of narrative fiction, this is always an illusion.

When you're talking about a story, being serious is not a mandatory requirement. A story has to be compelling, in some way, for it to be considered good; but a good story can either be serious (by portraying strong internal logic and causality), or it can be a joke (by relying heavily on the Rule of Funny and the Rule of Drama). A role-playing game is not a story, though.

Again, I would suggest you consider the possibility that you are overgeneralizing your own individual preferences into the universal "human brain". If you've ever seen a thirteen-year-old (or thirteen-at-heart) play a chaotic neutral character, then you ought to know full well that players can and do mimic the thought processes of screwball cartoons with gusto.

I would disagree that their brain is following the same internal processes. The likelihood is much higher that they are simply mimicking certain behavior, based on their external observations. They act that way because they don't understand, rather than because they understand too well.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Fair enough. I typically just rule that at a certain height, if a character falls, they’re gonna die. Because the D&D rules as presented pretty much support the idea that a character can fall an absurd distance and walk away, and I just think it’s silly, so I don’t allow it. Not unless there are mitigating circumstances of some sort.

Does a fall from 100 feet cause 10d6 damage, while a fall from 110 feet cause instant death? Do you tell your players what the rule is, so that their characters know how to act?

I suppose Wile E. Coyote is like 15th level.

If it was just surviving the fall, then it would be a good example of alternate physics, but it wouldn't be cartoon physics in the sense that I was getting at. I was talking about how he doesn't fall until he looks down; or how he can be standing on a cliff, while sawing a wooden plank in half (with the roadrunner on the other end of the plank), and when he finishes sawing, it causes the cliff to fall while the plank remains suspended in mid-air.

 

[Lanefan]

Does a fall from 100 feet cause 10d6 damage, while a fall from 110 feet cause instant death? Do you tell your players what the rule is, so that their characters know how to act?

Something not everyone realizes is that back in the day there were two ways to interpret the original falling-damage rules:

1d6 per 10' fallen, linear (thus each 10 added but one more d6)
1d6 cumulative per 10' fallen (thus 10' = 1d6, 20' = 1d6+2d6, 30' = 1d6+2d6+3d6, etc.)

Later versions of the game settled on the first method above, but the second is more realistic in that it better reflects your acceleration. The real issue with both versions is the 20d6 cap. Take that off and use the second version above and falling becomes dangerous for high-level characters again: a 100' fall would be 55d6 for an average of about 190 points damage. Or, to make it a bit simpler and avoid having to roll fistfuls of d-sixes, for any fall greater than 20' you save or die at -1 per 10' fallen beyond the first 30' and if you make the save you just take a pile of damage which could still kill you.

If it was just surviving the fall, then it would be a good example of alternate physics, but it wouldn't be cartoon physics in the sense that I was getting at. I was talking about how he doesn't fall until he looks down; or how he can be standing on a cliff, while sawing a wooden plank in half (with the roadrunner on the other end of the plank), and when he finishes sawing, it causes the cliff to fall while the plank remains suspended in mid-air.

Roadrunner's a demigod, he can make stuff like that happen whenever he wants. Wile E. just hasn't realized this yet.

 

[Sadras]

I'm detecting some circularity here. Why is consistency important? To take the story seriously. Why is taking the story seriously important? Because it means it's consistent.

Perhaps, a better answer to the second question is "So that it has meaning."

 

[Maxperson]

Fair enough. I typically just rule that at a certain height, if a character falls, they’re gonna die. Because the D&D rules as presented pretty much support the idea that a character can fall an absurd distance and walk away, and I just think it’s silly, so I don’t allow it. Not unless there are mitigating circumstances of some sort.

I suppose Wile E. Coyote is like 15th level.

It does happen.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/16313217/...survives-free-fall-landing-bush/#.XCG6hVxKiUk

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-435377/The-man-fell-12-000-ft---survived.html

 

[The Crimson Binome]

The real issue with both versions is the 20d6 cap. Take that off and use the second version above and falling becomes dangerous for high-level characters again: a 100' fall would be 55d6 for an average of about 190 points damage.

Although it may be getting off-topic, I wonder, why would you want falling to become dangerous for a high-level character?

If you're playing a high-level character, like Beowulf, the you can laugh at a dozen warriors with spears pointed at you, because you know with relative certainty that they can't actually do you any real harm (at least, not anytime soon). Why should such a powerful being be afraid of a mundane threat, like falling? At that point, if a fall could easily kill you, then it would drag you down out of the power fantasy.

 

[Sadras]

Many of us have different levels of expectations about high level characters - how super they are expected to be. It's a tricky business with many things to consider.

Although I like [MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION]'s variation, other options might include every x feet or x falling damage adds one level of exhaustion or a roll on the lingering injuries table.