Gravity

[AffableVagrant]

Correct me if I'm wrong here, but...

Falling 100 feat does 10d6 damage? Really? That's an average of about 35 damage. The fighter in my party could fall 300 feet and still be ok. That makes NO SENSE.

Fix this, 4e!

 

[Scribble]

make him fall into a pool of lava... then see how much it DOES need to be fixed.

 

[Pale]

I'm guessin' you don't use the massive damage rules.

 

[mhensley]

Yep, this is a pet peeve of mine as well. Of course, you might as well add other types of damage as being wimpy as well- like fire doing 1d6 a round or taking forever (in D&D time) to drown. Falls over 20 feet onto hard surfaces are routinely fatal in real life.

 

[Rechan]

I'm guessin' you don't use the massive damage rules.

If he did, then an enemy fireball would just kill the party wizard.

And if I recall, the Massive Damage rule is a fort save, and the fighter is the most likely to make the save given his high fort.

 

[Malhost Zormaeril]

Friends, this is an artefact of the hitpoint system. To work around this: falling damage is now 1d6 x character level for each 10' fallen. There, you'll find now that pit traps are consistently fatal from level 1 through 20. Your players will hate you, as well.

 

[Patlin]

Falling 100 feat does 10d6 damage? Really? That's an average of about 35 damage. The fighter in my party could fall 300 feet and still be ok. That makes NO SENSE.

If your Fighter can take 105 hp (or 70 hp, as I seem to recall it maxing out at 20d6) and still be OK he's verging on the superheroic to begin with. The problem is that these thing seem designed for characters of about 3rd level. A 3rd level fighter, who might have 31 hp, wouldn't be walking away from the fall in your picture without extreme luck.

4e might present a lesser disparity in hit points between high level and low level characters, but the disparity will still exist to some degree, and rules for falling damage and other such things will tend to be off in one direction or another for characters of various levels.

 

[Kwalish Kid]

Honestly, you should just rule that falls of a certain height are fatal.

Or you should figure out some formula that includes the mass of the falling character. Mice can fall a lot farther than horses, and not just proportionally.

 

[The Little Raven]

Falling 100 feat does 10d6 damage? Really? That's an average of about 35 damage. The fighter in my party could fall 300 feet and still be ok. That makes NO SENSE.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesna_Vulovic

A flight attendant can fall 33,316 ft. and survive, yet your heroic fantasy fighter shouldn't be able to survive a 300 ft. fall?

The real problem is that the hit point system never really had something like the SW Saga condition track applied to it, and it sounds like 4th edition will finally have something of that nature (they talk about you being Bloodied at 50% hp). So, in 4th edition, your fighter will survive that fall, but it won't be something he can just get up and start sprinting away from.

 

[HeinorNY]

I don't see any problem.
If a normal human being can survive a 12,000 ft fall, what's the problem with an almost super-hero character surviving a 300 ft fall?
Sometimes it happens.