Falling Damage House Rule: soliciting feedback

[FormerlyHemlock]

Proposal: 1d6 per 10' fallen, up to 20d6, is the rule only for Medium and Small creatures. For every size category larger than Medium, the number of dice is doubled. For Tiny creatures, it is halved, rounded down per usual 5E rounding rules.

Implications: cats can fall out of 8' trees without injury. If you do manage to grapple and drag a grizzly bear 40' up into a tree and then drop him, it will do worthwhile amounts of damage (8d6 instead of 4d6). Mice are no longer more afraid of falling than elephants are. Managing to shoot a dragon out of the sky (e.g. by hypnotizing him with Hypnotic Gaze and riding him down in a heroic sacrifice) will do appropriately epic amounts of damage (up to 160d6 (560) for an Ancient Red Dragon, which incidentally would just barely kill him, on average) instead of negligible (20d6 (70) is 13% of his max health). Enlarge/Reduce becomes a way of manipulating falling damage.

Downsides: increases complexity. Some players might get jealous at the potential "imbalance" of being able to do 560 points of damage, especially if they're into theorycrafting more than actual play.

Benefits: increases both realism and tactical complexity/options/fun by more than the complexity increase.

 

[jaelis]

Big flying creatures will become very vulnerable to proning and other effects. Maybe that's OK, but then I would play most of them fighting on or near the ground to be safe.

But I get the merits of the idea. I think I might go for something less extreme though. What if you just changed the die size: 1d6 for med/small; 1d4 for tiny, 1d8 for large, etc. That adds some realism and tactics without it getting overwhelming.

 

[Sorcerers Apprentice]

I like it! Only issue I see is the same as jaelis; knocking big flyers prone becomes a super effective way of damaging them, and there are a lot of effects that can knock prone. Maybe add a houserule that knocking a flyer prone doesn't make it fall but only forces it to land immediately? Even if ir can no longer fly it can still slow it's fall sufficiently to land without getting hurt too much.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Big flying creatures will become very vulnerable to proning and other effects. Maybe that's OK, but then I would play most of them fighting on or near the ground to be safe.

But I get the merits of the idea. I think I might go for something less extreme though. What if you just changed the die size: 1d6 for med/small; 1d4 for tiny, 1d8 for large, etc. That adds some realism and tactics without it getting overwhelming.

Big flying creatures are already fairly immune to many proning effects, e.g. Battlemaster's Trip Attack doesn't work on Huge and Gargantuan creatures.

And I think it's actually a good thing if dragons have some incentive to fight 60' off the ground instead of just dive-bombing PCs with breath weapons from out of javelin range.

I think if you change it to just 1d10 for Huge/1d12 for Gargantuan you might as well not even bother to change it at all. That will have negligible impact.

I like it! Only issue I see is the same as jaelis; knocking big flyers prone becomes a super effective way of damaging them, and there are a lot of effects that can knock prone. Maybe add a houserule that knocking a flyer prone doesn't make it fall but only forces it to land immediately? Even if ir can no longer fly it can still slow it's fall sufficiently to land without getting hurt too much.

If I wanted a house rule here I would instead just compute falling velocities, e.g. "any fall of greater than 500' takes a full round to happen". That way if the Monk manages to stun the dragon, the dragon has a round to pull himself together before he hits the ground.

 

[cooperjer]

This might work to address concerns with dropping large creatures. In my mind I felt it was okay for a dragon or other large creature to fall, crash, get up and keep flying. After all it's an impressive beast, in my mind.

I did have a problem with characters falling from 200-ft, taking 70ish damage, then getting up and chasing the enemy. I implemented a house rule for falling that is: 1d6 / 10 feet X (step function of: 2 for 40 to 79-ft, 3 for 80 to 119-ft, 4 for 120 to 159-ft, 5 for values 160-ft or greater) to a maximum of 20d6 x 5. I added an Athletics or Acrobatics save for half. DC is feet fallen / 4, max DC 30.

I haven't had to use the new set of rules, but we're starting PotA, which may have some opportunity to use the rules.

 

[n0nym]

I did something similar to cooperjer at first but it proved too burdensome to calculate. Lately I just decided that all size small or bigger creatures took 1d6 / 3 feet if they fell on hard ground. Jumping instead of falling gave you an Acrobatics check (DC 10, +5 for every 10 feet) to avoid all damage.

Falling damage should be letal imo. There's no dodging possibility really, even for the biggest heroes.

 

[Horwath]

I would go with 20% of max HP per 10' fall
50' fall is 100% of your HP. dropped to 0
100' is 200%, dead instantly.

you can do either Athletics or Acrobatics check DC 15 to reduce the fall by 10', DC 20 to reduce by 20', DC 25 by 30' and DC 30 by 40'.

 

[Warmaster Horus]

In reality (the square peg in the round hole of RPGing) a fall of 60' onto a hard surface is nearly always fatal to a human being. That being just 6d6, less than a fireball and 22hp on average, seems a little lax.

For short distances some damage is good. Past that a Dex Save vs being taken to 0hp may be more appropriate. Say 1d6 for a 10' fall, 1d10 for a 15' fall and 2d10 for a 20' fall. Then a Dex Save with a DC of 20 for a 30' fall (save for half remaining HP) with the DC going up by 5 per additional 10' of fall.

 

[dropbear8mybaby]

I have my own house rule.

You can make an Acrobatics check against the amount of feet fallen as the DC. Success indicates no damage. For every foot fallen, you take 1 point of damage. So it's entirely possible for someone with Expertise and a 20 Dexterity at level 20 to jump 37 feet without taking damage, if they roll a 20 on the check. Otherwise, they take 37 points of damage.

But if you fall 200 feet, you're taking 200 points of damage.

So falling a big distance is highly lethal in my games, as it should be.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Big flying creatures will become very vulnerable to proning and other effects. Maybe that's OK, but then I would play most of them fighting on or near the ground to be safe.

But I get the merits of the idea. I think I might go for something less extreme though. What if you just changed the die size: 1d6 for med/small; 1d4 for tiny, 1d8 for large, etc. That adds some realism and tactics without it getting overwhelming.

Based on the idea that falling is one of those damage types where skill and toughness are of minimal value, you could base this off a creature's Hit Dice. Not only do larger monsters have bigger hit dice, but a barbarian has a roughly similar chance of surviving a fall as a wizard (assuming equivalent Constitution). This could be applied to other damaging effects as well (where you don't want one class to be better at survival than another). For example, being set on fire might deal 1dHD each round, rather than 1d6.

If 1dHD per 10' seems too low, simply increase it; 2dHD per 10' would make falling significant distances a deadly gamble for most creatures.

EDIT:
The only tricky part is how to handle multi-classed characters who might have different HD types, although I suppose you could just use whatever HD they have more of, or take the average. It's probably a non-issue unless you have players who multiclass like crazy.