apoptosis said:
I think his worry is that if falling is so dangerous then the most obvious tactic is to levitate (or some similar method) and drop the opponent.
If you're referring to me, I'm not exactly worried about that.
Mainly because, if I were running a game of heroic fantasy, my group would be on board for that genre from the beginning, and we'd understand that levitating people and dropping them is just Something You Don't Do, even if it *would* be theoretically effective.
If someone were lame enough to try it anyway (but I can't imagine it - I know my group), it wouldn't be effective even theoretically in that situation.
If, instead, we'd decided to play a gritty, no-holds-barred dark fantasy, then we'd be on board for that. If someone wanted to use a levitation spell to drop people to their doom, I'd work out how much damage it could do, same as for fireballs and such. Naturally, using it to drop someone down a cliff would be situationally more lethal, just as fireballing someone sitting on a keg of black powder would be. But barring unusual environments, it would always do XdY+Z. Why should it be more privileged than any other form of combat spell?
Like I said, it's more a matter of "not being a jerk" - being on board with the campaign and its tone and staying consistent - than something that needs an elaborate set of rules.
And since the distance someone falls is entirely up to me anyway, what are those rules really netting me? Why do I need to know how high a cliff is to calculate the damage you take from falling off it? Does any GM
really decide to put an 80' cliff in an adventure and
then calculate how much damage it'll do if someone falls?