To all the people who dislike that high-level characters can drink acid, swim in lava, survive falls, etc., and all the people who think that a mook stabbing you to death at night should be a threat at every level: Realistic heroes are low-level. By the time you get past 13th level or so, mundane physics don't really matter to characters anymore. That's all there is to it.
By level 7, you're a mythical hero. Beowulf died fighting a dragon that works out to roughly Large size in 3e (or perhaps the smaller end of Huge), and one without a breath weapon and spellcasting at that, which puts it around CR 8-10, a boss fight for a level 4-6 solo PC. He also fought a troll, which from its description could be anything from a regeneration-less D&D troll to an ogre or one of the smaller giants, which is again in the lower CR range.
Chimerae, lernaean hydras, Pegasus, Medusa, minotaurs, fiendish (i.e. Nemean) lions, chimeric hell hounds (i.e. Kerberos), lamias, ogres, trolls, and practically every other creature faced by any Greek hero, part-deity or otherwise, are all below CR 6.
Can you see Odysseus, Herakles, Conan, and King Arthur, all working together, take out the high-flying death-ray-slinging CR 10 beholder? How about a life-draining dread wraith, a CR 11 baddy immune to normal weapons? Any of them would be squashed flat or blasted to pieces or killed with a touch fighting one of those things, and there are more where they came from. Lots of players don't realize just how unrealistic you have to be to even have a
chance to survive what mid-level PCs routinely encounter. Mundane heroes without any magic of some form to draw on become obsolete fairly quickly.
Any martial character resembling one of those guys who would be capable of reliably taking out barely-mid-level threats like the monsters mentioned is either 6+ levels higher than any of them--and therefore capable of soloing all of those characters at once, plus all of the Argonauts, Joan of Arc, Theseus, and the Knights of the Round Table together with ease--or is decked out in so much magic that they left realism behind a long time ago. I would feel
insulted if someone that superhuman and/or magical couldn't routinely survive a huge fall. Hell, Gandalf was an angel who maps better to the CR 14
planetar than to any caster class or gish build, and he survived a multiple-day-long fall into a lake, while fighting an even-CR demon, and survived that; why shouldn't a high-level character be able to do the same?
Though the above examples use 3e math since those are the books I have at hand, the same applies to BECMI and AD&D, as hit points don't start hitting caps until around name level. In fact, martial PCs were even better than the above in AD&D relative to their 3e counterparts (for instance, a 2e fighter with just mundane plate and a mundane sword he's specialized in can kill 6 trolls without dying in under a minute, while a 3e fighter trying to do the same does so much more slowly and is likely to die long before succeeding). 4e works out the same way, with PCs who start out as heroes and quickly become the best of the best, eventually being able to auto-resurrect themselves. Falling damage should cease to be a concern at all for both the Epic 4e character and the Immortal pre-3e character.
So while it's certainly possible to ask that a more gritty HP variant come around in a module or supplement, or say that you'd prefer a more low-powered standard in 5e, don't pretend that characters in D&D have ever been anything like "normal" people past low levels without extensive houseruling like the ever-popular insta-kill rules for lava and other hazards.
). That is if a Reflex (Dexterity) check is failed to keep from falling in. An Acid attack however (splashing, spray, etc.) is just Hit Point damage (IMO).
