Falling Damage - Anyone else hopes falling hurts just a little bit more?

[Derren]

Interesting. So, per the official rules, a tanks gun can't harm other main battle tanks without a critical?

Except that MBTs don't use object stats but creature stats.
hardness 20, low AC and about 60 HP.

 

[mmadsen]

The sort of PC who can do that is akin in his abilities to characters like Achilles and Cuchulainn. Would Cuchulainn be able to jump over a cliff and walk away? Sure. Would it make sense for him to be damaged by it? Absolutely not. D&D characters, once they have a few levels under their belts, are not normal human beings, as evidenced by many of the things they can do. So why should they be restricted to normal human parameters when it comes to falling?

There are two issues here. First, you have obviously embraced the notion of D&D characters as superheroes, but most players and the game designers have not. The designers have always been conflicted, since the hit point rules clearly model superhuman toughness, but the description has always called on luck, skill, and divine intervention to explain how a human could survive what D&D characters survive.

But there's another issue, which gets back to my point that a large buffer of ablative hit points makes any one big injury far more survivable than it should be, in order to make multiple cuts and bruises as survivable as they should be. If our Achilles or Cuchulainn clone can jump off a cliff with zero chance of death or even a twisted ankle, why is he practically guaranteed to die if he immediately jumps off a second cliff? That's a peculiar artifact of the hit point system -- something that has no chance of seriously harming you can kill you if you haven't "healed" your non-wounds yet.

 

[Celebrim]

Except that MBTs don't use object stats but creature stats.
hardness 20, low AC and about 60 HP.

I don't think that damages my main point at all. So, the designers found that in order to justify the very low damage from the main gun of a MBT, they also had to make a 40-60 ton MBT be something that has about the same hit points as a large (non-fantastic) bear.

That's right. Of all the 60 ton 'creatures' you are likely to encounter, the MBT has the least durability.

 

[Stormtalon]

It was, admittedly, a calculated gamble, but one pretty much forced on me by the guy we were fighting and the place we were fighting in.

When you're 1) in a (relatively stable) part of Limbo, 2) fighting a monk with a 130' move speed who has some psionic abilities useable at range (Zerth Cenobite, to be precise) and 3) have no other way to EVER catch up to him in a totally enclosed chamber that's about 300' on a side -- well, at that point the only even remotely useable tactic is to change your subjective gravity so that he's right below you and hope to hell ya live. Honestly, I would have much rather gotten to him in a more usual manner, but it wasn't gonna happen.

That's why I clarified "when the circumstances are right," 'cause oftentimes, there really is no reason to do so.

And finally, it was a one-shot thing, done to kill time (the bad guy's name was, in fact, Time) while we waited for the rest of the group to arrive.

Oh yeah -- that character DID die the next time he changed his gravity to the other side of the room. Still, he was grappled and thought he could take the baddie by surprise by going, "Oh, think ya got me huh? Guess what? That way's down now."

 

[Derren]

I don't think that damages my main point at all. So, the designers found that in order to justify the very low damage from the main gun of a MBT, they also had to make a 40-60 ton MBT be something that has about the same hit points as a large (non-fantastic) bear.

That's right. Of all the 60 ton 'creatures' you are likely to encounter, the MBT has the least durability.

The durability comes from its hardness, not from its HP.

 

[Celebrim]

It was, admittedly, a calculated gamble, but one pretty much forced on me by the guy we were fighting and the place we were fighting in.

When you're 1) in a (relatively stable) part of Limbo....

Ok, really that says it all. Once you take the game out of the prime and you are monkeying around in the affairs of the gods, I figure you can leave gritty realism at the door.

 

[Celebrim]

The durability comes from its hardness, not from its HP.

That's an increasingly tortured explanation. The fact is that it has the fewest hitpoints of any 60+ ton creature (or object) in the game. Sixty tons of ice probably has more hit points. You say it uses the creature rules, but the MBT has 'hardness', but its not an object even though creatures don't normally have hardness. And while claiming that its hardness of 20 makes it durable works fine if we are talking about shrugging off small takes, it doesn't work so well when discussing its ability to shrug off more potent attacks. For example, a reasonably high level D&D fighter with an axe can swat a tank much more easily than they could chop down a mid-sized tree or bust through simple stone wall - both of which are also more resistant to cannon fire than said MBT.

The only thing I can say for the rules you describe is that they do explain why WWII GI's put sandbags on thier lightly armored M4 tanks - the sandbags had more hit points than the tank did!

 

[Derren]

That's an increasingly tortured explanation. The fact is that it has the fewest hitpoints of any 60+ ton creature (or object) in the game. Sixty tons of ice probably has more hit points. You say it uses the creature rules, but the MBT has 'hardness', but its not an object even though creatures don't normally have hardness. And while claiming that its hardness of 20 makes it durable works fine if we are talking about shrugging off small takes, it doesn't work so well when discussing its ability to shrug off more potent attacks. For example, a reasonably high level D&D fighter with an axe can swat a tank much more easily than they could chop down a mid-sized tree or bust through simple stone wall - both of which are also more resistant to cannon fire than said MBT.

The only thing I can say for the rules you describe is that they do explain why WWII GI's put sandbags on thier lightly armored M4 tanks - the sandbags had more hit points than the tank did!

Keep in mind that the tank comes from D20 modern, not D&D.
And it serves as an example of how though high level characters really are. We are talking about superheroes. So, why should superheroes be injured when they fall from a cliff?

 

[Celebrim]

Keep in mind that the tank comes from D20 modern, not D&D.

I'm aware of that. But the two systems have sufficient rules in common that when it comes to damage to creatures and object we can speak of them interchangably with very little loss of accuracy.

And it serves as an example of how though high level characters really are. We are talking about superheroes. So, why should superheroes be injured when they fall from a cliff?

That is one possible explanation. One explanation is that the rules as written clearly express thier actual intent. That the intention of the rules is to simulate a universe were simple masonry walls soak up more punishment than tanks, and that characters therein are superheroes that can take on tanks with little more than sledgehammers and reasonably hope to win, and so forth. One explanation is that the universe the designers want to simulate is exactly described by the rules.

The other explanation, and I think this one more likely, is that the designers had a limited amount time to produce thier design and that they made various tradeoffs in the rules and in the amount of time they spent thinking about various of the rules, and probably rightly concluded that rules about damaging objects and how much damage a 120mm smooth bore cannon with HEAT rounds did were less important than rules which would come up regularly in most peoples games. Under this explanation, the rules don't have to actually correctly express thier intent, and in particular, when the rules do illogical things in fringe circumstances its precisely because this latter explanation predicts that the rules will behave wierdly in fringe circumstances because the designers just didn't have time to consider them or felt that the problem could be ignored because solving created some other problem.

 

[Derren]

The question still stands. High level characters survive being shot at (by tanks and missiles) or being submerged in lava for several seconds. So why should they be killed by falling from a cliff?