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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5871349" data-attributes="member: 54877">Here's a possible way out I haven't seen suggested: 1. Put in some nasty, almost real-world version of falling damage (and lava damage and anything else that fits). If you fall at terminal velocity onto rock, your only way out is if your group is using some kind of optional, additional narrative plot points--e.g. a Hero Point lets you walk away from certain death with some nasty complication instead, or you can escape death N times during the campaign, or whatever. In any case, the falling itself is extremely dangerous. 2. However, there is also an optional system for using your hit points to avoid this fate. How you narrate this and what limits are on it, are up to you. The damage is more like traditional D&D falling damage--perhaps the 1d6 per 10 feet fallen. For example, if you want the heroes to be more like demi-gods, you can play this more or less the way it has always been played. You are a hero. So you invoke the heroic falling system, and don't take that nasty damage. However, you can also play it as avoiding going over the edge by scraping and clawing. This is the "Die Hard" version. On a 100 foot fall, you don't roll 10d6+modifiers for a huge fall onto rocks. You roll 10d6 to grasp the edge with your fingernails, slide over, bounce off a few rocks, grab some foliage to slow your fall, and then grab hold of a narrow ledge with your last strength. It hurts, and you are still in a bad spot. But you didn't fall all the way onto those rocks.  Then if the fiction makes this impossible--tied up, suspended by a rope head down, well away from the edge, and someone cuts the rope--well, you go back to the base, nasty version of damage. Better be really lucky. Essentially, the "Die Hard" version is that you have to lobby within the fiction to use the more friendly numbers, and how you lobby determines what nasty position you are in aftewards. Convince the DM (or table) that your action is plausible, you get to take a lot of damage and be in a bad spot. Fail in your lobbying, you get to take almost certainly fatal damage. The "Demigod" version is that your lobbying attempt atomatically succeeds by virtue of that is what the group is playing--even if tied up over the pit. Now all you have to do is narrate how it works, however implausible.</blockquote>

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