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Anyone else bothered by the falling rules?
- Thread starter scadgrad
- Start date
Yes I'm bothered by the falling rules.
In the campaign I play in we have house rules for falling with additional 1d4/(10' above 15') in severity on the blunt weapon criticals from AD&D Combat&Tactics critical hit list, ST. for half severity and such (don't wanna go into details).
The result is that almost any character in the campaign would die from a fall of 60' or such, and it works fine. People tend to avoid falling in our games.
In the campaign I play in we have house rules for falling with additional 1d4/(10' above 15') in severity on the blunt weapon criticals from AD&D Combat&Tactics critical hit list, ST. for half severity and such (don't wanna go into details).
The result is that almost any character in the campaign would die from a fall of 60' or such, and it works fine. People tend to avoid falling in our games.
Plane Sailing
Astral Admin - Mwahahaha!
The current falling rules which I use are the factorial system outlined above by someone else.
We had long discussions about this a year or so ago
although I can't remember much of what was said back then. I believe that one person used the standard number of d6, but applied one point of ability damage per 10ft fallen, to be applied to one of Str, Dex or Con (determined randomly) - accounts for sprained limbs etc.
Another (simple) option that could be used to make falling more unpredictable and dangerous... Most people who die in falls suffer from multiple injuries. When someone falls, roll 1d6 for the number of injuries they take, and then roll the appropriate number of dice for each of those injuries. Thus a 30ft fall might do as little as 3d6 damage or as much as 18d6. In these circumstances a tumble or jump check could possibly be used to reduce the number of injuries rather than reduce the effective distance fallen.
Cheers
We had long discussions about this a year or so ago
although I can't remember much of what was said back then. I believe that one person used the standard number of d6, but applied one point of ability damage per 10ft fallen, to be applied to one of Str, Dex or Con (determined randomly) - accounts for sprained limbs etc.Another (simple) option that could be used to make falling more unpredictable and dangerous... Most people who die in falls suffer from multiple injuries. When someone falls, roll 1d6 for the number of injuries they take, and then roll the appropriate number of dice for each of those injuries. Thus a 30ft fall might do as little as 3d6 damage or as much as 18d6. In these circumstances a tumble or jump check could possibly be used to reduce the number of injuries rather than reduce the effective distance fallen.
Cheers
I'm not trying to be an ass ok.... but seriously folks?
A "hero" with no armor and 100 HPs has a good chance to live when 20 1st level Warriors open up with Crossbows at 20 feet.
I could go on and on....
A little falling REALLY seem that outrageous?
A 12th level fighter can fight a Multi-Ton Dragon, get swatted, get bit, grapple with it a bit, and live.
Falling from a little cliff REALLY that scary?
A "hero" with no armor and 100 HPs has a good chance to live when 20 1st level Warriors open up with Crossbows at 20 feet.
I could go on and on....
A little falling REALLY seem that outrageous?
A 12th level fighter can fight a Multi-Ton Dragon, get swatted, get bit, grapple with it a bit, and live.
Falling from a little cliff REALLY that scary?
dcollins
Explorer
It's too bad that I'm getting into this late-ish, but I've been bitten by the "can't login" bug and unable to post for two days.
Gygax asserted in an old issue of Dragon magazine that the 1d6 per 10 ft. fallen is actually due to a printing error in the 1st Player's Handbook which took out the word "cumulatively". That is, that Gygax played it as 1d6 for 10 ft; 3d6 for 20 ft.; 6d6 for 30 ft.; and so forth. This was again implied in the Thief-Acrobat text for Unearthed Arcana. It's the way that I like to run it in my campaign.
(However, I'll point out that I've recently realized that Gygax's classic modules G1-3 have encounters which explicitly contradict this statement, having a 90 ft. fall do 9d6 damage, etc.)
You can read more about this issue on this web page: www.superdan.net/environs.html
Personally, I feel that the "Massive Damage" rule is one of the worst blights on the game retained from the 2nd Edition era. It's an incredibly ham-handed attempt at responding to the "characters survive falls from far too high!" issue. The preceding solution (supposedly Gygax's original) scales much more smoothly. (In my house rules, I exchange the two rules.)
Gygax asserted in an old issue of Dragon magazine that the 1d6 per 10 ft. fallen is actually due to a printing error in the 1st Player's Handbook which took out the word "cumulatively". That is, that Gygax played it as 1d6 for 10 ft; 3d6 for 20 ft.; 6d6 for 30 ft.; and so forth. This was again implied in the Thief-Acrobat text for Unearthed Arcana. It's the way that I like to run it in my campaign.
(However, I'll point out that I've recently realized that Gygax's classic modules G1-3 have encounters which explicitly contradict this statement, having a 90 ft. fall do 9d6 damage, etc.)
You can read more about this issue on this web page: www.superdan.net/environs.html
Personally, I feel that the "Massive Damage" rule is one of the worst blights on the game retained from the 2nd Edition era. It's an incredibly ham-handed attempt at responding to the "characters survive falls from far too high!" issue. The preceding solution (supposedly Gygax's original) scales much more smoothly. (In my house rules, I exchange the two rules.)
dcollins said:
Interesting, no? I tried twice to post a reference to this, but had the same cookie bug ... I've got the article around here somewhere; the specific claim is that Gygax wrote "1d6 per 10' for each 10' fallen," and the printer unilaterally decided that the apparent redundancy was an error. I will offer no opinion on Gary's memory or veracity ...
Still, he never repudiated the 20d6 damage cap for falling, and this is a big part of the problem. It's even a bigger problem now, as 3rd Edition characters have more hit points. Hit point bonuses kick in at 12 Con instead of 15 (and Con can be increased with the bonus attribute points every fourth level), and hit dice no longer max out (a 1st Edition fighter rolled hit dice only up to 9th level; at higher levels, he got a flat 3 hit points, no rolling and no Con bonus). Along with the factorial damage progression, increasing the damage cap might be a good solution.
Celebrim
Legend
In most 1st edition groups I was familiar with, falling damage was computed by the UE method, that is 1d6 per 10' cumulative (a fall of 30' was 6d6). Some groups also played 2d6 per 10' (a fall of 15' was 3d6, and a fall of 30' was again 6d6). Max damage tended to be 30d6 (roughly 105 damage on avg.), so that an infinately long fall had a good chance of killing most high level characters. (Early published modules stuck to 20d6).
I don't believe Gygax's assertion that this was the way it was played in his campaigns all along. As has just been pointed out, all of his classic modules treated damage in a linear fashion. For instance, in 'Tomb of Horrors' a fall of 30' was 3d6. Of course, back in those early days there seemed to be nothing like consistancy in the rules. In the same module, a fall of 100' does 10d10 damage. I suspect that Gygax adopted the 1d6 cumulative rule sometime between the printing of the DMG and UE, much as many groups had already done, and probably for the same reasoning. Falls of great distance didn't have much chance of killing mid to high level PC's. This has always been a source of concern for those that like realism.
Since converting over to 3rd ed. I've modified my house rules further, so that a falling creature subtracts its AC modifier due to size from each dice of damage. In this way, diminutive creatures realisticly take minimal damage from falls. A fall of 20' would do them 3d6-12 (avg. 0), whereas the same fall for a large creature does 3d6+3 (avg. 14). The bigger they are, the harder they really do fall. In real life, a mouse will probably survive a fall of 80' (or indeed a 1000') without serious harm, and a cat (a tiny creature) will probably live though be seriously injured. To take this into account, I'm considering adjusting the terminal velocity (measured in dice) for creatures of different sizes. For instance, maybe limiting diminutive creatures to 3d6, tiny to 5d6, small to 20d6, but large to 40d6, huge to 50d6, and so forth. I'm a little worried about play balance since small PC's (unrealisticly) have the full Con of medium sized ones, but its alot more realistic to scale damage from a fall to size. If a Cloud Giant falls because Jack cut down his beanstalk, he takes 50d6+100 damage (as a opposed to the 20d6 he'd otherwise take). Splat!
Although I've never used it, I also like the rule from Dragon that smetzger quoted because it nicely maintains the danger of heights while allowing characters to normally get away with just bruises:
"1d20 for every 10 ft divided by 1d6. So a 30 ft fall would be 3d20/1d6. With a mean of 9, minimum of 0, and maximum of 60."
While we are on the subject of falling, for the sake of elegance, the damage a falling objects does ought to be comparable to the damage it suffers from falling. The realism of the above rules I think really sticks out when we start use them to try to figure out roughly how much damage is inflicted by a falling object. We only need make a few modifications to take into account density compared to an average living creature. First we start by figuring the size of the object based on its weight (there is a handy table in MM1). Then we decrease its effective size by 1 if it is not dence (a pillow), and increase it by one if it is either highly dence (a brick) or aerodynamic (a dart or a bead) or by two if it is both. Finally, we increase the base damage by +1 per dice if it is sharp, +1 per dice if it is unusually hard, or -1 per dice if it is unusually soft.
For the two examples given, a 1 lb. pillow is a soft non-dense Tiny object, and therefore after a long fall does 3d6-15 damage (to what it hits and to itself assuming it doesn't hit another pillow). A dart is a sharp, dense, aerodynamic, fine object, and is therefore treated as a tiny object doing +1 damage per dice, or 5d6-5 (avg. 13, 8 to itself) after a sufficiently long fall. If the dart were tumbling (not aerodynamic), then the damage would be only 3d6-9 with 0 damage indicating a glancing blow.
Some other examples: a falling 6 lb. sharpened steel spike is a hard, dense, sharp, aerodynamic, tiny object and after falling 20' does 3d6+6 damage. A piano is a large object and therefore inflicts 40d6+40 damage after a fall of 90' or more. A 1 ton block of stone is a hard, dence, large object, and therefore does 50d6+150 damage after a fall of 100' or so. Splat! (Much more satisfying than righting 'instant death, no save', especially since some collosal creatures would survive this.) A reflex check to avoid (or take 1/2 damage) is I think appropriate in any of the above cases (assuming that the character can see and has somewhere to jump).
At the ridiculous end of the scale, a 250,000 lb. asteroid slams into the ground doing (very conservatively) 80d6+720 damage. I'd suspect that the CR for a trap with that for the effect might exceed the normally recommended limit of 10 by some ammount, but I'm not in to 'Epic Level' campaigning.
I don't believe Gygax's assertion that this was the way it was played in his campaigns all along. As has just been pointed out, all of his classic modules treated damage in a linear fashion. For instance, in 'Tomb of Horrors' a fall of 30' was 3d6. Of course, back in those early days there seemed to be nothing like consistancy in the rules. In the same module, a fall of 100' does 10d10 damage. I suspect that Gygax adopted the 1d6 cumulative rule sometime between the printing of the DMG and UE, much as many groups had already done, and probably for the same reasoning. Falls of great distance didn't have much chance of killing mid to high level PC's. This has always been a source of concern for those that like realism.
Since converting over to 3rd ed. I've modified my house rules further, so that a falling creature subtracts its AC modifier due to size from each dice of damage. In this way, diminutive creatures realisticly take minimal damage from falls. A fall of 20' would do them 3d6-12 (avg. 0), whereas the same fall for a large creature does 3d6+3 (avg. 14). The bigger they are, the harder they really do fall. In real life, a mouse will probably survive a fall of 80' (or indeed a 1000') without serious harm, and a cat (a tiny creature) will probably live though be seriously injured. To take this into account, I'm considering adjusting the terminal velocity (measured in dice) for creatures of different sizes. For instance, maybe limiting diminutive creatures to 3d6, tiny to 5d6, small to 20d6, but large to 40d6, huge to 50d6, and so forth. I'm a little worried about play balance since small PC's (unrealisticly) have the full Con of medium sized ones, but its alot more realistic to scale damage from a fall to size. If a Cloud Giant falls because Jack cut down his beanstalk, he takes 50d6+100 damage (as a opposed to the 20d6 he'd otherwise take). Splat!
Although I've never used it, I also like the rule from Dragon that smetzger quoted because it nicely maintains the danger of heights while allowing characters to normally get away with just bruises:
"1d20 for every 10 ft divided by 1d6. So a 30 ft fall would be 3d20/1d6. With a mean of 9, minimum of 0, and maximum of 60."
While we are on the subject of falling, for the sake of elegance, the damage a falling objects does ought to be comparable to the damage it suffers from falling. The realism of the above rules I think really sticks out when we start use them to try to figure out roughly how much damage is inflicted by a falling object. We only need make a few modifications to take into account density compared to an average living creature. First we start by figuring the size of the object based on its weight (there is a handy table in MM1). Then we decrease its effective size by 1 if it is not dence (a pillow), and increase it by one if it is either highly dence (a brick) or aerodynamic (a dart or a bead) or by two if it is both. Finally, we increase the base damage by +1 per dice if it is sharp, +1 per dice if it is unusually hard, or -1 per dice if it is unusually soft.
For the two examples given, a 1 lb. pillow is a soft non-dense Tiny object, and therefore after a long fall does 3d6-15 damage (to what it hits and to itself assuming it doesn't hit another pillow). A dart is a sharp, dense, aerodynamic, fine object, and is therefore treated as a tiny object doing +1 damage per dice, or 5d6-5 (avg. 13, 8 to itself) after a sufficiently long fall. If the dart were tumbling (not aerodynamic), then the damage would be only 3d6-9 with 0 damage indicating a glancing blow.
Some other examples: a falling 6 lb. sharpened steel spike is a hard, dense, sharp, aerodynamic, tiny object and after falling 20' does 3d6+6 damage. A piano is a large object and therefore inflicts 40d6+40 damage after a fall of 90' or more. A 1 ton block of stone is a hard, dence, large object, and therefore does 50d6+150 damage after a fall of 100' or so. Splat! (Much more satisfying than righting 'instant death, no save', especially since some collosal creatures would survive this.) A reflex check to avoid (or take 1/2 damage) is I think appropriate in any of the above cases (assuming that the character can see and has somewhere to jump).
At the ridiculous end of the scale, a 250,000 lb. asteroid slams into the ground doing (very conservatively) 80d6+720 damage. I'd suspect that the CR for a trap with that for the effect might exceed the normally recommended limit of 10 by some ammount, but I'm not in to 'Epic Level' campaigning.
Storminator
First Post
I also use the cumulative damage, with a couple of changes. I allow a Reflex save to reduce the effective fall by 10 feet. And I allow a jump check (same method as a standing high jump) to reduce the falling distance again. In this case I still enforce the maximum jumping height even if specific magic says to ignore it.
So you could jump down 50' and make the Reflex save, and only take damage as if it were 30', which is 6d6. But 100' falls are still exceedingly deadly (56d6, even if you make the save and the jump check).
PS
P.S. It's not factorial. That would be multiplying, not adding.
So you could jump down 50' and make the Reflex save, and only take damage as if it were 30', which is 6d6. But 100' falls are still exceedingly deadly (56d6, even if you make the save and the jump check).
PS
P.S. It's not factorial. That would be multiplying, not adding.
Bonedagger
First Post
Yeah. The idea of gravity sucks.
Sorry.
da chicken
First Post
The problem with making falling more lethal than it is is twofold:
- Pit traps are extremely common and very cheap.
- Falling damage is already very lethal to most PC classes at most levels (those without d10 hit dice).
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Think about it. A 30' spiked pit trap deals 6d6 damage already and is about CR 4. All pit traps have a save DC of 20, which at low level is even dangerous to a Rogue.
Pits and falling are quite lethal at low level, and shouldn't be more lethal than they are. Death from massive damage rules will make anyone but a high-level Fighter-type balk at dropping 100 feet. Not to mention that going down is so much faster than coming back up.
Besides, you'll make reverse gravity, telekinesis and teleport even more powerful than they already are.
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