Gravity

[Tarek]

As I understand it, the falling rules were miswritten back in 1st edition. The original intent was to make it cumulative damage. +1d6 per ten feet, to a maximum of +20d6 at which point you've hit terminal velocity.

So, first 10 feet is 1d6. A twenty foot fall would be 3d6. A fifty foot fall would be 15d6. A 200 foot fall would be 210d6. A 500 foot fall would also be 210d6.

 

[Tewligan]

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

Getting stabbed with a short sword 10 times does 10d6 damage? Really? That's an average of about 35 damage. The fighter in my party could get stabbed 30 times and still be ok. That makes NO SENSE.

Fix this, 4e!

The fighter in my party could meet the gaze of a basilisk and be petrified. Not only is it impossible in real life for flesh to instantly turn to stone, there's no such thing as a basilisk. That makes NO SENSE.

Fix this too, 4e!

 

[Mort]

Because in real life, all other things being equal, someone who's taken a non-superficial wound doesn't fight as well as someone who's unhurt.

I wish I could find the link I saw a while back, but apparently this isn't exactly true. Because of adrenaline and various other body reactions many fights tend to go something like: fine, fine, fine, fine, - down or dead.

Even if they didn't - I don't like death spiral effects in my heroic fantasy.

But to the OP:

Let’s assume a 10th level fighter with 15 con and average HP's so 82 HP's. Now by 10th level the fighter is significantly above just about everyone else in the realm he's seen and done a whole lot and presumably knows how to take a fall.

He falls 100 ft - average damage 35 max damage 60 - he'll survive at various levels of ok but unless a cleric gets to him he will be significantly weakened by the ordeal. Is this a problem in heroic fantasy - not to me, I consider a 10th level character to have build up a little karma and or know how to slow a fall to a huge degree.

If he falls a 200+ feet his chances are much worse. Now he only has a much smaller shot of walking away from it and even if he does, he'll be at a huge deficit. And again I just don't see the problem for heroic fantasy, if anything chance of death is a little too high.

If you want grim and gritty, lower the massive damage cap and increase the fort save for massive damage from the fall.

If you want a really random maybe ok maybe not feel, just take 1 die and multiply instead of rolling all the dice (so 10 feet 1d6, 50 ft 1d6x5 100 ft 1d6x10 and 200+ 1d6x20) most players will take this kind of chance only in an emergency.

[edited to fix faulty math]

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

An even easier fix... tweak the Massive Damage rules as follows:

A character that takes 50 or more hit points in one shot also suffers 1D6 damage to all stats.



Special, you can negate 10 hitpoints of damage by increasing this stat damage by 1 die type....for all stats.

Definately ain't going to just stand up and walk away from that one!

j/k!!! {....maybe }

 

[Plane Sailing]

But that's not what D&D is designed to do "out of the box" - it's designed to piortray heroic fantasy where people who fall off cliffs survive.

Hmmm. I agree that D&D is designed to portray heroic fantasy out of the box, but I don't think that is supposed to include falling off cliffs and surviving as a regular thing (it certainly isn't a factor in any heroic fantasy I've ever read, for instance!).

I do think that there is a problem with falling damage. I can see two solutions.

Less extreme:
Don't cap falling damage at 20d6. Let it keep on going up (so it is 30d6 for a 300ft fall). Hitpoints are abstract, so why cap falling damage at some arbitrary figure? Still doesn't help for the 100ft falls though, let alone the 30ft falls.

My favoured method:
Stick with 1d6 per 10ft fallen, BUT a fall inflicts 1d6 injuries on you, and you roll the falling damage per injury. (most people who die as a result of falls are reported to die from 'multiple injuries')

Vesna the air hostess was lucky. She rolled 1 on the 1d6 so she only took 1 lot of 10d6 damage and rolled minimum damage too! That doesn't happen very often!

Somebody falling 30ft might land really badly and get 5 or 6 on the initial d6, taking 5 or 6 lots of 3d6 damage.

The added level of randomness makes it much harder for high level PCs to say "who cares" and jump, because they might land really badly and take lots more damage than they expected. Falls happen rarely enough that the 1d6 injuries roll isn't likely to reach its statistical average of '3.5' as a multiplier.

Cheers

 

[Grog]

I wish I could find the link I saw a while back, but apparently this isn't exactly true. Because of adrenaline and various other body reactions many fights tend to go something like: fine, fine, fine, fine, - down or dead.

That's why I said a non-superficial wound.

Someone who takes a serious slash to the leg isn't going to be moving as quickly as he was before. Someone whose sword arm gets wounded isn't going to be able to hit as hard or as fast as he could before. Someone who takes a hit to their shield arm isn't going to be able to move their shield as fast to block blows.

Serious wounds don't just hurt - they also impair the body's ability to function like it should. Muscle tendons get cut, etc. It's called damage for a reason.

 

[JohnRTroy]

There are two problems with falling damage.

1) The 1d6 per 10' is flawed. Gary tried to revise this by stating every 10 feet the damage doubles. 1d6 for the 1st 10', 2d6 for the second 10', 3d6 for the third, up to a max of 20d6 at 60-70'. But that didn't stick with 2nd Ed.

2) However, the bigger problem with falling damage was the change to D&D. In the past, Hit Dice ended when you reached "name" level. That leaves a lot of crap open to power creep. For instance, Power Word Kill used to be an awesome spell--you could kill an Archmage or an Old Dragon with it. Now, it's not worth very much.

Falling damage is a victim of the power creep of PCs (and monsters) hit points being increased without increasing the damage of various things.

 

[Mort]

That's why I said a non-superficial wound.

Someone who takes a serious slash to the leg isn't going to be moving as quickly as he was before. Someone whose sword arm gets wounded isn't going to be able to hit as hard or as fast as he could before. Someone who takes a hit to their shield arm isn't going to be able to move their shield as fast to block blows.

Serious wounds don't just hurt - they also impair the body's ability to function like it should. Muscle tendons get cut, etc. It's called damage for a reason.

But that's just the point - what is a "non-superficial" wound? There are plenty of records/examples of people taking supposedly "fatal" wounds (heart shots, head shots, stabs etc.) and keeping right on going (sure they drop dead later but that's not the discussion here).

But the above is a discussion for a more realistic game, I'll still maintain that this kind of thing has no real place in high fantasy or even Conan style sword and sorcery games.

 

[see]

Your average person, walking around, has 4 hit points in D&D terms. A 20-foot D&D fall will, on average, put him at negative HP, dying of internal injuries in less than a minute. A 100-foot fall will kill him on impact the vast majority of the time. A 140-foot-or-more fall will always instantly kill him. There's no problem with the deadliness of falls in D&D.

No, the problem is that your character is insanely survivable. The solution to that would be to limit hit points to some sane maximum -- say, five times the human norm, or 20 HP.

But that would require a massive rewrite of the D&D rules, to the point you couldn't call it D&D anymore, because the game has spent thirty years assuming you're an insanely survivable hero. While you're at it, you might as well chuck the rest of the unrealistic features of the combat system in favor of something that more closely resembles reality.

And by the time you've done that, you have a product that was already published in 1986, called Man-to-Man. In which case you might as well buy its current incarnation, GURPS 4th Edition.

 

[WhatGravitas]

From Bart Carroll's blog:

Ran through an internal 4E playtest session last night, and had great fun bull rushing a goblin off a cliff. Unfortunately, it was a short cliff and the little bugger managed to survive; Steve Winter’s character then finished him off before I could leap after and crush him with falling damage.

Without getting into the mechanics of two relatively small areas, I personally really love what’s being done with a) hit points, and b) critical hits.

They seem to think of gravity as well. Either 4E becomes a rule set full of byzantine complexity or a wonder of efficiency. I'm hoping (and guessing) the latter!

Cheers, LT.