Death From Massive Damage?

[hong]

I personally would scrap the death from massive damage rule. The only reason it exists is D&D handles falling/falling objects so poorly that after a while it gets laughably unrealistic what a high level fighter type can survive.

DM: "Five hundred feet below you can barely make out the form of Shavalian, fleeing from the great tower. It appears he has given you the slip."

PC: "Not this time, he isn't. Sir Edvald leaps from the tower."

DM: "You can't be serious?!?!? I told you it was 500' down. Five HUNDRED feet!"

PC: (nonplussed) "Yeah, but Sir Edvald is at full hit points. I can take 20d6 damage no problem."

If you aren't playing CoC or the like, scrap the death from massive damage rule and use some better falling/falling object rules.

In practice, this sort of thing (people deliberately throwing themselves off great heights) is not likely to a problem. If Sir Edvald is high enough level that he can shrug off 20d6 damage, he's almost certainly going to have winged boots or some other means of flight, and so doesn't have to worry about falling at all. Heck, there's a good chance he can also dimension door, and so can skip that tedious bit about having to cover the distance in between.

At high levels, D&D is Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon but with plate armour.

 

[dcollins]

I personally do not see it as being a fix-it to the falling damage rules. Any attack that does 50 or more points of damage is as devastating and traumatic as falling from a great height.

I completely disagree. It's always been the case that hit points are abstract and represent not merely (or even mostly) physical endurance, but also luck/dodging ability/favor of the gods.

If a "hit" in combat does 50+ points of damage the DM can describe it as "an attack that would have severed a lesser man's neck, had you not twisted away". However, there is no comparable "deus ex machina" if the character just falls helplessly from a great height onto rocks -- in which no luck/dodging ability can seemingly apply.

 

[Henry]

I say it can be handled very simply. In cases where the damage isn't abstract (say, in cases of falls, lava baths, crushing boudlers you didn't make your reflex save in avoiding, etc.) the fall will do CON damage instead of hit point damage. The precedent has already been set for poisons and diseases, so why not other hazards?

Say, a fall does 1d4 CON damage per 10 feet. I GUARANTEE you won't see Sir Edvald taking that 500 foot dive without a feather fall on.

How about lava doing 3d4 CON damage per round of exposure? Two rounds, maybe three, and you have no hope. Plus, cure wounds spells are not sufficient to restore burned flesh - only restoration can restore mind and body, and really good restoration only begins at 4th spell level, not 1st. (There's the 2nd level lesser restore, but that's 1 point at the time, I think?)

 

[Celebrim]

Henry: That would certainly solve the problem, but unless you are planning on a really grim and gritty campaign it might be overkill. You also bring up the problem (again) of why are you arbitrarily separating damage based on your perception of absolutes. If lava does con damage, why don't fire spells do con damage? If falls do con damage, why don't critical hits? Why not just switch over to a vitality point system and be done with it?

Lesser Restoration is 1d3 points.

I use to solve this problem by making damage cumulative per 10' of the fall, at setting the upper limit much higher. That way, a 60' fall is an impressive 21d6 damage and the upper limit (I use to use 30d6, but 40d6 would probably be better for 3rd ed.) was enough to scare anyone.

But the more I think about this, the more I think that d20 damage per 10' of fall divided by d6 is a better system. That way a 60' fall does on average about 20 damage (not that different than the standard rules), but has a scary upper limit of 120 and a lucky lower limit of 1. The only real hestitation I have to adopting such a system is that it makes pit traps really unpredictable. A 30' pit trap doing 9 damage about half the time is mostly a nuisance, but that (roughly) one time in six that it does 30 or more damage can really disrupt your adventure. Still, it has been ages since I killed anyone with a pit trap anyway...

 

[Sm!le]

 

[aco175]

I forget if 50 points of damage was a big deal back in 3e days. I know nowadays if you are not dealing 50 points a turn by level 5-6 people think you stink. There is still the single hit part, so maybe. Anyways, I do not recall ever using it, even back in 3e days.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I've never had Death from Massive Damage because mathematically it comes up so rarely that I've never remembered about it when it has. Besides, when PCs take that much damage, they usually drop, and we've dealt with the excitement of that, without thinking of whether or not they died outright.

I'm not against it in any way, I've just never seen it happen.

 

[Celebrim]

Well, well, blast from the past. It's interesting to see my perspective back when I was just starting to GM 3e compared to now with like 20 years of experience with the system. A lot of the concerns I raised in this thread remained concerns for me, but I actually didn't go the way I would have guessed back then.

I ended up addressing both of my concerns by using falling rules that generated much more random packets of damage making all falls riskier without increasing the average damage, and by transforming the "death from massive damage" save to a "traumatic damage" save.

The "traumatic damage" save differed from the original RAW concept in two ways. First, it could be triggered not only by exceeding a damage cap but by any critical hit that dropped you into "dying" status or any amount of falling damage that dropped you into "dying" status. Secondly, failing the save did not mean death but did mean one of several potential penalties (often in the form of STR and DEX attribute loss) that represented broken bones or other serious injury. It thus became possible in the game in rare cases to actually break a bone or in some cases lose a limb, something that is almost impossible in the RAW.

The new rules around traumatic damage did rarely come up, but they did occasionally come up.

 

[Yanjidijian]

Death from massive damage happens when you take a lot more damage than you have hit points.