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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9225483" data-attributes="member: 7026594">As folks have talked about, the use of hit points here is as plot armor, simulating the luck protagonists have in surviving high falls.  Some editions of D&D have, of course, attempted to compromise on this, for example with the Massive Damage rule in 2E (IIRC, Save vs Death or die anytime you take 50pts or more at once).Of course, some other games take other approaches. I've talked recently about how The Nightmares Underneath is basically a extensive D&D variant which uses Disposition as its Hit Points replacement, but it only applies to combat, when you're defending yourself.  Damage when you're not defending yourself and not from combat goes directly to Health (its Constitution replacement), and can cause serious injuries and and/ unconsciousness immediately.Dan "Delta" Collins did some interesting exploration of falling damage on his blog and on falls in real life, noting that there's a bimodal  distribution to survival of real-life falls which basically comes down to a question of "did you hit your head or not?"  And that one could potentially simulate this in D&D with... (drum roll) ...a saving throw.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />[URL unfurl="true"]http://deltasdnd.blogspot.com/2018/02/falling-revisted.html[/URL]This is, IMO, falling into the trap of treating D&D as a physics simulator rather than a fantasy fiction simulator.  The rules are not intended to represent real-world physics.  The player who deliberately walks their character off the roof of a building or a cliff every day for yuks is missing the point and sabotaging the illusion.  They are a heckler at a magic show.Trying to read the rules in this way is an approach Gary had already run into and was addressing directly in 1979 in those quotes Snarf put in the OP.  If the situations arise in the game that the same character somehow has two mortally perilous falls on consecutive days through sheer chance or ill fortune, but survives thanks to the hit point mechanic, that's representing the same kind of heroic luck and extraordinary circumstances of the occasional real person who survives being struck by lightning multiple times.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />At my table if a player were saying "I'll jump off this 100 foot cliff to get down there faster- I have more than enough HP to guarantee survival!" I might answer that in one of two ways, depending on the tone of the game, the context and the established fiction.One might be "Well, we've already defined that it's a jagged rocky surface down there, and there are no branches or awnings or anything else to use to slow your fall.  IF you jump, I'm going to rule that it's going to be an automatic death", or "...that it's going to be a saving throw to determine if you're dead or merely unconscious and dying."  Of course I'd advise the player of that before the jump as it should be obvious to the character.On the other hand in a different context it might be "Well, we haven't discussed the terrain here in much detail yet, and the adventure doesn't define it, so sure; we'll assume there is a bit of a slope you can SLIDE down, or that you're jumping into those trees there, and they're some really thick evergreen trees and you can use their boughs to break your fall.  We'll roll damage as normal and you'll land prone as per the rules."</blockquote>

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