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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9557192" data-attributes="member: 4937">Most people playing D&D have always struggled with this very example in various ways depending on how they conceive the hit point.  When a person is hit with a spear they are not necessarily stabbed with a spear in the sense of being impaled.  When in combat any weapon does damage to a target we compare the targets hit points to the damage done by the spear to determine what the narrative is regarding that blow.  If in combat a spear does 3 points of damage to a human target with 30 hit points, we might say that the target mostly parried aside the thrust, or that the armor prevented a deep penetration, or that the target jumped back from the thrust so that it was not deep.  So we would equate 3 points of damage to being in some fashion just nicked by the spear or bludgeoned by it or whatever we could use to justify 3 points of damage.  What we would not say in this situation is that the character was impaled by a spear thrust and therefore took 3 points of damage, since intuitively we understand that getting impaled ought to be debilitating at the least and likely life threatening.  Our knowledge of the fiction is created after the knowledge of the hit point loss.If out of combat in D&D you just stood still and took a spear thrust, this counts as a lethal attack.  In 1e AD&D you are just dead, no saving throw.  In 3e D&D this is an automatic critical hit (triple damage) and you must save or die.  This is a very different situation because we know before the damage is dealt approximately what the fiction is thus we change how we model the damage done compared to the abstraction of combat.Falling is like this later case.  We know for certainty that the character fell and so we must now model that falling rather than applying some damage and then inventing a narrative to go along with it.  Knowing the fiction but not the damage is different than knowing the damage but not the fiction.  We might refine our knowledge of the fiction somewhat once we roll for damage yet we do know that they fell.  So from the very early days of D&D, DMs have been trying to make the model for falling more like what we would expect from the fiction - an 80' fall is potentially very serious indeed. Similar cases apply to things like touching lava or emersion in acid.  What's going on here isn't like combat.Now, if you are happy inventing the fiction on the fly regardless of what has been prior established, this goes away.  You can always just make up some new circumstance that wasn't prior established and apply luck to the situation, but this can be silly even with the most imaginative and inventive DM trying to come up with new narrative devices to explain the damage mechanic.  In some cases it's best to just accept that the fiction has been established and make the results model that fiction.So, no, in fact both falling and spear thrusts don't do 1d6 damage in D&D despite what you might first think.</blockquote>

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