Falling damage -- the leaping off a cliff example

[JamesDJarvis]

Fallign Damage and Con drain doesn't do it for me. Sure an infection related to a fracture could do you harm and maybe cause CON damage but the fall itself is going to cause mobiliy related health issues, like broken bones. Maybe STR or DEX would be better candidates.

 

[takyris]

As for "flavor," sometimes there simply isn't room for flavor. If someone falls 100 feet into a featureless pit and lands on a stone floor, there's not much way to "flavor" out of that.

Your assumption that the pit is featureless is what's hurting the flavor. That's just like if you said "If someone gets stabbed through the heart with a barbed spear, there's not much way to "flavor" out of that." Except that you wouldn't say they were stabbed through the heart with a barbed spear if they were hit for 9 points damage, taking them from 217 to 208 hit points.

If it's somehow vital to the game that that pit be featureless and not contain jagged outcroppings to grab onto on the way down, a hanging rope left by previous adventurers that the falling person uses to slow his fall, only to have the rope break and send them the rest of the way down, or something along those lines, then you still have options. If they're at the level where they have the hit points to survive a 100' fall casually and safely, then they're at the level where they can do heroic things. The fighter or barbarian can drive his axe into the wall to briefly slow his fall before the axe tears free. The wizard can channel some of his magical energy into negating the force of the fall, the cleric can offer a brief prayer and land with little in the way of injury through a tiny miracle, and the rogue can toss out a grappling hook, catch on a tiny imperfection in the wall, and slow his fall a bit before the grappling hook is pulled free.

If you refuse to alter the environment in small, inconsequential ways to make good flavor text, and you refuse to let the heroes do heroic things to make good flavor text, then the problem here isn't that the hit point system doesn't work. The problem is that you don't want to use an abstract and heroic damage system. (Which is fine, but you shouldn't be playing D&D then. There are other systems out there that do a much better job at capturing what you're looking for.)

 

[Bloosquig]

During a game me and some friends were playing in my friend bullrushed a minotaur off the edge of a bridge overlooking a deep chasm. After watching the minotaur fall somewhere between 100'-200' the minotaur got up badly injured but alive. So my friend (who was some crazy homebrewed dwarf fighter / berserker combo) thought to himself, well if that fool can survive that fall I can to and jumped down after the minotaur. As he landed he swung and got a natural 20 and killed the minotaur. That has got to be the best and most cinematic death blow I've ever seen in all my years of gaming.
And yes he survived the fall with about two million of his hps left.

 

[gizmo33]

Using Gygax's intended falling damage of 1d6 per 10 feet, cumulative, makes falling a very deadly prospect:

10--1d6
20--3d6
30--6d6
40--10d6
50--15d6
60--21d6 (maximum velocity)

I apologize to anyone with a good dragon mag archive, who is probably familiar with the following reasoning, but for the rest:

Professor Gizmo's Physics 101: You accelerate when you fall, but at a constant rate. That means VELOCITY increases linearly, and distance fallen is non-linear. Your damage above is non-linear, which would make sense if you took damage based on distance fallen - but fortunately for people who wear parachutes, that is not the case. The case in the real world (for what it's worth) is that damage is probably a function of the energy imparted into your body by the fall, and that's proportional to velocity (speed)/force. Since velocity increases linearly with time, 1d6/10 ft fallen is probably a close approximation (and probably still too harsh at the higher ends since I would need an increasingly greater distance to add a unit of velocity) Of course all of this assumes that the damage you take is proportional to the force that the ground exerts on you, and that gravity works the same in the campaign world as it does in this world.

I'm with the camp that thinks that the subject is not worth worrying about for my campaign - I've never seen someone purposefully fall a great distance (my PCs commit suicide by spooning their eyes out). But falling damage is bothersome because I find it harder to abstract. It's one thing to say "because of your characters great fighting skill, the sword swing that would have skewered a lesser fighter just nicked you". But explanation is there when you know that the character is hitting the stone bottom of a 30 ft pit? For 3E, perhaps, doing CON damage for a fall is reasonable. It explains why window washers and 20th level fighters would be almost equally frightened of a 200 ft drop. In the case where the surface they're falling onto is unknown, perhaps some random rolls, or a fortitude save would be in order.

 

[Quasqueton]

One need only look at the rules for the Thief-Acrobat to see what Gary really intended for falling damage.

I hope that was sarcasm. The falling damage "information" in the thief-acrobat class description is complicated enough to give Einstien a headache. After you fight your way through the Gygaxian prose, you have to use a calculator to figure out the result. *And* the falling damage information makes no sense with itself. It either contridicts itself, or it assumes some strange, unexplained formula for falling damage.

It makes no sense.

Quasqueton

 

[Storminator]

A friend of my dads fell about 5,000 feet when his parachute didn't open. He landed in a freshly plowed field, got up and walked about 2 miles to the nearest house. (This was during WW2). He had a broken back and didn't get out of bed for about 6 months, but he survived just fine. So, yes, you can survive falls of great distances.

Your dad's friend just had a wimpy DM. I'm sure that after he learned nothing could kill him he lost all interest.

PS

 

[Enkhidu]

I have the Dragon magazine where it is said that Gygax originally wrote "1d6 per 10' per 10'", and the editor took off the second "per 10'". But in the AD&D1 PHB, it actually says, "1d6 for each 10' of distance fallen to a maximum of 20d6". But I've seen nowhere Gygax say officially that the rule should be as said above (although I like it)---and he had plenty of official outlets to make that rule clear; he did not personally write the "article" in Dragon I mention here.

This is either a myth/D&D legend, or another example of passing the blame for something in the rules that many D&D gamers disliked.

Quasqueton

Now I;m going to have to pull mine out of storage - I was sure that EGG made this remark in one of his bylined articles (which, in the early days of Dragon, were considered canon).

 

[Quasqueton]

I just did a quick search through some my Dragon mags. In issue 69, EGG states (in a sidebar) that the damage should be cumulative. The next issue, 70, Frank Mentzer has a full-page article saying that an editor changed what EGG originally wrote, and that somehow that same [supposedly erroneous] info got mentioned (before copy and paste editing) in the DMG as well as the PHB.

So, EGG did state the damage was supposed to be cumulative. But the explanation for the "mistake" is pretty weak. Anyway, I was wrong in my original statement.

I do like the cumulative damage better; I just wish it was the official rule.

Quasqueton

 

[Gentlegamer]

I do like the cumulative damage better; I just wish it was the official rule.

Quasqueton

What's stopping you from using it in your campaign?

 

[Gentlegamer]

I hope that was sarcasm. The falling damage "information" in the thief-acrobat class description is complicated enough to give Einstien a headache. After you fight your way through the Gygaxian prose, you have to use a calculator to figure out the result. *And* the falling damage information makes no sense with itself. It either contridicts itself, or it assumes some strange, unexplained formula for falling damage.

It makes no sense.

Quasqueton

In the same Dragon article that introduced the Thief-Acrobat, the intended falling damage is explained since the abilities of the character are predicated on the d6 per 10, cumulative method.