How fast do you fall?

[arbados]

I can't seem to find a rule regarding what the speed of a falling pc is per round? The situation is involving a flying pc (with wings) being paralyzed. As per the rules they begin to fall. However, how many feet do they fall per round? It says in the feather fall spell that the falling speed is reduced to a mere 60 feet a round, but what is routine speed without the feather fall spell. This is important because in a situation which may happen in my game I want to determine if the paralysis spell effect would wear off before the player eventually hits the ground below approximately 200 feet. I think that they would probably hit the ground before the 6 rounds of the spell wear off, but I just want to try and get a number for reference. Any help would be appreciated.

 

[Darklone]

The last calculations here I remember yielded something around 1500ft in 6 seconds. Much too much for one round and the big reason why Feather Fall can be cast so easily.

 

[Pyrex]

That's neglecting air resistance and terminal velocity of a humanoid body.

It's listed in the dmg as 150' in the first round and 300' in the second and consecutive rounds (which is actually pretty close to accurate for a tumbling human).

 

[AGGEMAM]

It's listed in the dmg as 150' in the first round and 300' in the second and consecutive rounds (which is actually pretty close to accurate for a tumbling human).

Those listed speeds are for a creature that has natural flight IIRC, ie it has wings thereby reducing falling speed. I think you should double those figures for a falling human sized creature.

 

[mmu1]

The formula for distance fallen is d=1/2at^2, which works to 16 feet (time spent falling in seconds)^2.

So one round's worth of falling is 576 feet.

And 300' per round isn't even remotely close to the terminal velocity of a tumbling human. That's only around 30mph, when a human falling in the slowest way possible - arms and legs fully outstretched for maximum air resistance - has a terminal velocity of around 120mph (200 mph for falling "standing up")

 

[Piratecat]

Here's how fast you really fall. I think people fall slower on D&D worlds.

 

[0-hr]

Probably the same effect that causes falling damage to be linear rather than cumulative.

 

[Vinyafod]

mmu1 got it quite accurate.

Terminal velocity is around 120 mph if one tries to achieve maximum air resistance.
As air resistance is also a function of air density it heavily depends on the altitude you drop from.

You can assume the 120 mph correct for the first 15000 feet above sea level.
At 30000 feet it is around 180 mph.

There was once a guy who dropped from 40000 meters. He tried to fall faster then speed of sound. He reached 821 mph just below 30000 meters.
That only as an example of how fast one can fall.

Following a grahp of height and velocity from the fall the guy did:

 

[Piratecat]

Vinyafod, I'm pretty sure that terminal velocity is 293 feet per second. Your numbers seem really low to me... although I don't know enough about air resistance to argue intelligently.

821 mph is something like 1200 feet per second, which seems bizarre. Can someone explain how is it possible to fall faster than terminal velocity?

 

[Vinyafod]

Well, as terminal velocity is very dependant on air density, one can or will fall faster in "thin air"

The higher up you are, the thinner the air gets, thus the faster you fall.

I have edited my previous post and included a graph that shows the velocity the guy who dropped from 40000 meters achieved over the course of his fall.

You can see that for below 5000 meters the velocity starts to level out at around 60 meters per second, which is just below 200 feet per second.