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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 2130836" data-attributes="member: 30001">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.</blockquote>

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