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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4023450" data-attributes="member: 4937">Yes, and no.First of all, almost all the explanations you give are 'haystacks' of one sort or the other.  Almost all of them are going to start looking like divine intervention by the third time that they happen, they are in literature 'deux ex mechina', and to a certain extent that's ok.   So let's accept that by suggesting swimming pools, haystacks, and snow banks that I knew ahead of time that I could disguise the haystack in different clothes.Secondly, let's not make this a discussion about dragon's breathe because I have other specific issues with dragon's breath and I don't want to get sidetracked.  The more common example is, 'Why did so-and-so get a saving throw versus a fireball when there was nothing he could have done to escape it?', and if it's ok, I'd rather stick to that one.  If not, I'll delve into dragon's specifically.Thirdly, one of your examples is a cheat.  'Catching on to a branch' implies that the character didn't fall.  There is nothing game breaking about having a character not be damaged if they didn't actually fall, but the notion of falling otherwise implies you are now down at the bottom of the drop.  In almost every falling circumstance, I tend to give players a chance to make a climb check to grab on to the surface that they are falling off of or down.  If they succeed, they don't take damage, or don't take damage for a full fall.  This works out well, in that it creates cinematic action and in as much as I've made falling more of a nuisance I don't want to create single roll save or die situations out of falls.  So, players generally get 'second chances'.  But this really has nothing to do with the problem of the current falling rules.OK, so, back to the question of 'How is this different than a fireball?'.  First of all, falling was as deadly as Dragon's Breath or Fireball has historically been, I doubt the question would have come up.  Particularly in earlier editions, either was a save or die situation.  Historically, the damage from this sorts of attacks has been high, rather than low.  (In fact, 3E explicitly nerfed the fireball it had been such a problem, and I still have the opposite problem with Dragon's Breath which is why I don't want to get side tracked.)Secondly, we really don't know how hot a fireball is.  Certainly it is potentially lethally hot, but we have no real measure of how hot it is and how well a reasonably experienced person might survive that sort of fire (say by not sucking up a big lungful of flame).  We can't really say that Fireball burns up everything in the environment, because for one thing according to the rules it doesn't in fact, and for another because average 35 points of fire damage is not enough to burn up all the objects in the environment even if we ruled that fireball effected objects.  Likewise, we don't know that everywhere in a fireball (or a dragon's cone of flame) is equally hot.  Perhaps some areas are randomly hotter than others?  So, the point is that the damage inflicted by fireball is abstract in way that, 'I was at the top of a 100' cliff and now I'm at the bottom.' isn't. But, you are right that the question of, 'Where did you find miraculously find cover from the attack?' is a good one, it's just that I don't think that its a good criticism of the amount damage done by fireballs or dragon's breath.  How hot either is is somewhat arbitrary, and can be accepted at that level.  (In the novelization of Dragon Lance there is a scene where they come upon a melted stone town that always annoyed be because it implied dragon breath was so scorching hot that it should never be survivable.)  What it is though is a good criticism of the saving throw mechanic, but I agree with Gygax's justification in the 1st edition DMG - heroes should always have some chance of surviving.  It's not that I think 100' falls should be invariably lethal to a hero.  It's that I think that they shouldn't be invariably safe. The problem people have with falling isn't that it could allow a saving throw.  The problem that they have is with the magnitude of the damage that is usually at stake, and hense, the correspondingly silly depth pits tend to have in D&D in order to make them some sort of threat.</blockquote>

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