Gravity

[Rechan]

I knew there was something wrong:

The basic rule is simple: 1d6 points of damage per 10 feet fallen, to a maximum of 20d6, not 10d6.
Average damage is 70.
The chances of dying from massive damage is quite good.

Unless you're a fighter, with Fort as your good save, and a decent Con.

 

[szilard]

But Hitpoints are abstract. So the fighter isn't stabbed.

Does it then follow that the fighter doesn't fall 300 feet, either?

-Stuart

 

[HeinorNY]

Quite good?

Any fighter who can consistently survive 70 damage in a shot can probably also make a DC 15 Fort save in his sleep.

Spiderman can survive that fall, I don't see why my super heroic 10th level fighter shouldn't be able to.
You and me? Yeah we should die. Superhero character? nah.

 

[Stone Dog]

But under the rules of D&D, a high level fighter can take that freakishly long fall as many times as he wants and it will never, ever kill him. So long as he gets healed between each jump, he can pitch himself off a 10,000 foot high cliff once an hour, every hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for an entire year, and he cannot die under the current rules. That's a (EDIT)feature(/EDIT).

Sometime when I play D&D I will absolutely want to emulate this. High level characters will fling themselves off cliffs like lemmings, confident in the fact that they will be pretty combat worthy when they land.

 

[Rechan]

Yeah. It models real life combat well, but IMO it's not fun for a game.

'He hits me for x damage; the cleric heals me for x-2 damage' isn't very fun either.

The "Death spiral" fights are, if nothing else, tense. They also emphasize "Don't get hit" or "Wear armor big enough that it soaks up the damage coming in so you're only scratched".

 

[Grog]

Yeah, I know. But it sounded better. My point was that a sword attack that would kill you or me is totally survivable by that character, as is a fall.

But the high-level fighter isn't taking the sword attack that would kill you or me. He's dodging it or parrying it and only taking a little scratch instead of a stab wound to the gut. That's why, after getting hit for 10 damage (or whatever), he still has tons of hit points left, while most ordinary people would have taken a mortal wound.

It's easy to handwave combat like that. It's not so easy to handwave falling - you either hit the ground, or you don't. That's why the falling damage rules are problematic IMO.

 

[Rechan]

Spiderman can survive that fall, I don't see why my super heroic 10th level fighter shouldn't be able to.
You and me? Yeah we should die. Superhero character? nah.

I am glad someone agrees with me that high level characters are superheros.

 

[Stone Dog]

Does it then follow that the fighter doesn't fall 300 feet, either?

-Stuart

Not straight down and go splat, no. Freak wind, branches, haycarts that were off screen, sliding down the cliffside instead of plummeting through the air and alien aircraft scooping them up and crashing back down after a high speed interplanetary police chase would all be fair assumtions for loss of hitpoints through falling.

 

[HeinorNY]

I am glad someone agrees with me that high level characters are superheros.

They are already superheroes by level 6-7, IMO. At high levels they are almost demi-gods.

EDIT: Okay, maybe they are superheroes by level 9-10.

 

[Grog]

The "Death spiral" fights are, if nothing else, tense.

Says you. I don't like to have things decided after the first round of combat (which is why I also don't like save-or-dies). That's not tense, that's annoying and anticlimactic.

And "death spiral" fights turn things into even more of a "he who wins initiative wins" situation than D&D currently is.

They also emphasize "Don't get hit" or "Wear armor big enough that it soaks up the damage coming in so you're only scratched".

The same thing could be said of just about any fight.