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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4023288" data-attributes="member: 4937">Even though I recognize that its directly at the class of players I belong to, and not me specifically, don't worry about hurting my feelings by saying that you don't understand or agree with my position.  I'm tough.  I'm a grown up.I think that that is part of it.  Falling and hitting a hard surface is more concrete than most sorts of D&D damage, and we all know how it ought to hurt.  But I think as much as anything it has to do with the nature of D&D's abstract damage system.  Most of the time, you can quite easily describe the action in such a way that the hero escapes most of the damage where the same attack would have killed an ordinary person.  But falling is one of those cases where the heroes incredible heroics doesn't seem like it ought to help.  In particular, I can roll an attack from a Frost Giant and figure out the damage and whether its going to drop the PC before I describe the event.   But falling or being emmersed into something deadly are cases where the event is described explicitly before the damage is generated in so much as the event of falling involves moving from the top to the bottom of the fall regardless of the damage taken, and being emmersed involves being emmersed regardless of the damage taken.  Conditions other than the character's hit points have changed in concrete ways.Let's contrast that.  Suppose someone throws a beaker of acid at a character.  There are all sorts of explanations for how this doesn't involve the character's face melting off.  The beaker could have been swatted aside, partially dodged, could have held a fairly weak acid, the character could have been partially protected by his armor or even clothing, most of the acid could have ended up on the floor, and so forth.  Note, how much differently this attack works in D&D if the character is actually helpless.  Then, it is 'coup de grace' and is very likely to involve something like the character's face melting off.Falling isn't like that.  Essentially, falling or being emmersed in something deadly contains in it the idea of helplessness already, in so much as the condition change required by the event precludes explaining it away (completely).  Something concrete happened, and the expectation is for concrete rather abstract damage and the character's heroic skill just doesn't seem to apply except to avoiding the situation in the first place.  Note in fiction that heroes don't normally fall off precipices or into extremely deadly things - villains do.  Heroes are threatened by these things, but avoid them and thier foe is sent hurtling to thier doom.  The expectation of the story is that if you don't avoid them, it is bad.  With falling, you can occassionally handle unexpectedly low damage by ruling that the character 'fell into a haystack/swimming pool/snow bank' or some other convienent soft thing that happens to be there.  But after the third or fourth time this happens, you have a problem with genera blindness in as much as, "Where did that haystack come from?  It wasn't there before?"  This is a particular problem when the surface being fallen on is well described, ei, "I KNOW that haystack wasn't there before!".</blockquote>

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