D&D General How Do You Handle Falling Damage?

[Chaltab]

At the risk of further muddying the water, something occurs to me regarding the survivability of falls IRL is that falls may not be immediately fatal, but cause death through bleeding or damage to vital organs. That sort of thing can be instantaneously remedied in D&D through healing magic in a way that we have no alaogue for IRL.

Also given that a commoner's 4 hit points means that a fall of 40 feet is almost invariably fatal and 80 feet has a 100% mortality rate, the hit points of adventueres are a built-in accomodation for the small fraction of people who survive big falls through sheer luck. In the same way that a red dragon's breath deals more damage than any 'normal' person can be expected to withstand.

In that light I really don't see much of a reason to uncap falling damage.

 

[Blue]

At the risk of further muddying the water, something occurs to me regarding the survivability of falls IRL is that falls may not be immediately fatal, but cause death through bleeding or damage to vital organs. That sort of thing can be instantaneously remedied in D&D through healing magic in a way that we have no alaogue for IRL.

Also given that a commoner's 4 hit points means that a fall of 40 feet is almost invariably fatal and 80 feet has a 100% mortality rate, the hit points of adventueres are a built-in accomodation for the small fraction of people who survive big falls through sheer luck. In the same way that a red dragon's breath deals more damage than any 'normal' person can be expected to withstand.

In that light I really don't see much of a reason to uncap falling damage.

HPs are, in a way, plot armor. To enforce the heroic fantasy genre for the heroes and villains.

 

[Celebrim]

At the risk of further muddying the water, something occurs to me regarding the survivability of falls IRL is that falls may not be immediately fatal, but cause death through bleeding or damage to vital organs. That sort of thing can be instantaneously remedied in D&D through healing magic in a way that we have no analogue for IRL.

I don't think any game models actual trauma well. It's not just falling that kills like that, but everything.

 

[Chaltab]

I don't think any game models actual trauma well. It's not just falling that kills like that, but everything.

Well yes but fewer people have a problem with someone handling taking 70 damage from spell or sword and surviving than seem to have a problem with taking the same amount of damage from a 200 foot fall and surviving.

Falling beyond a certain height is expected to instantly turn you into a red smear but getting thwomped by a fire giant's maul doesn't. I'm no math expert but it wouldn't surprise me too much if someone calculated the latter as having more force behind it.

 

[Celebrim]

Well yes but fewer people have a problem with someone handling taking 70 damage from spell or sword and surviving than seem to have a problem with taking the same amount of damage from a 200 foot fall and surviving.

Falling beyond a certain height is expected to instantly turn you into a red smear but getting thwomped by a fire giant's maul doesn't. I'm no math expert but it wouldn't surprise me too much if someone calculated the latter as having more force behind it.

The issue is in the typical D&D proposition->fortune->resolution cycle. Normally "stakes" are not set in D&D and combat is abstract, so what 70 damage from a sword looks like is simply a matter of narration. We post fortune set the stakes based on observation of how much 70 damage is relative to the target. Maybe if you have 7 hit points then 70 damage from that Fire Giant's maul does make you go splatter, whereas if you had 100 hit points then maybe it makes a glancing blow as you sidestep the attack and stagger a half dozen paces with the wind knocked out of you, feeling your whole side bruised and barely keeping your feet.

But falling messes this up because the stake is set before the fortune. You fell a certain number of feet as a concrete fact known before we roll damage. Unlike the giant's blow we aren't really rolling to see what happens, because we know what happened. And this sets expectations. We know what happened, so the expectation is the resolution step will describe what we'd expect a 70 foot fall to do.

 

[Chaltab]

That's a good way of looking at it. In that case, I think the solution is to narrate fall damage just as you would anything else. If you roll low, then maybe the falling creature caught an updraft that slowed them just enough, or snagged on a branch, or hit a slope that redirected some of the force.

 

[Celebrim]

That's a good way of looking at it. In that case, I think the solution is to narrate fall damage just as you would anything else. If you roll low, then maybe the falling creature caught an updraft that slowed them just enough, or snagged on a branch, or hit a slope that redirected some of the force.

That is one of the solutions to the problem. Instead of rolling damage after the fall move the damage roll back to where it naturally is in the D&D cycle at the top of the fall, then decide what the roll means.

However, this isn't a perfect solution as sometimes previously narrated detail just doesn't give you plausible excuses why the character fell 100 feet and didn't go splat. You want your excuses to sound plausible. Personally, if I can't find good excuses in the environment, I lean into the "PCs are superheroes" thing and just assume any character high enough level to survive a fall of 100 feet is just that awesome. Martials are just made of sterner stuff, rogues are just that acrobatic, the gods are protecting clerics, and arcane types summon some panicked spontaneous magic that slowed the fall or softened the landing just enough to stop it from being crippling.

 

[Laurefindel]

Honestly, I’m less concerned about how one can survive a 200-foot fall than how negligible damage a 20-fall is in D&D.

 

[Chaltab]

Honestly, I’m less concerned about how one can survive a 200-foot fall than how negligible damage a 20-fall is in D&D.

I mean 2d6 still averages 7 damage which is enough to drop the average person.

 

[HaroldTheHobbit]

Handling and winging fall damage in D&D is easy imho. My beef is that in many other games a character with top physical stats may take crippling injuries jumping from sidewalk to street. In fact, I think my most common house rule across games is letting chars move vertically in a reasonable way. But that's stuff for another thread.