Idea for a mechanic, (1d6)d6

[Plane Sailing]

This is the technique I use for falling damage.

i) I thought that standard falling damage was unrealistically low

ii) I wanted a chance that low level people could survive a bad fall because people do

iii) often you hear of people dying because of "multiple internal injuries"

So if you fall, you take the standard 1d6 damage per 10ft fallen... but first you roll 1d6 to see how many times you take the standard damage. A 10ft fall with a bad landing could net 6d6 damage. A 50ft fall with a very good landing might only be 5d6, but could be as bad as 30d6.

Tumble and Jump skills can be used as per normal, either to reduce the effective height of the fall or to reduce the 1d6 multiple injuries roll by 1 each (to a minimum value of 1). Player choice.

Cheers

 

[smetzger]

Here is what I do for falling damage...
d20 per 10ft / 1d6

Gives a possibility for some high damage while keeping the avg damage about the same as 1d6 per 10 ft.

 

[Asmor]

I meant specifically the ones you listed. I can do normal probabilities, and the one you gave me for the average, but is there an easy was to get probs on all of the results of (AdB)dC, like your big list.

I can't speak for how he did it, but I basically made a program to generate every possible roll of 7 dice, using the 1st die to determine how many of the other dice to count.

It results in the odd fact that you get 7776 (off the top of my head) rolls that give 1 damage, but that comes out to 1/36 overall, which is correct (because to roll 1 damage you just roll two 1s in a row)

 

[Darkness]

i) I thought that standard falling damage was unrealistically low

ii) I wanted a chance that low level people could survive a bad fall because people do

Four words: Lower massive damage threshold. I like 25 + 2*HD.

 

[jeffh]

With the mechanic proposed here, the problem is that you have two seperate rolls, one of which potentially involves a relatively large number of dice. That would get really time-consuming if it were to be used a lot (you'd be surprised how fast dice rolls add up, and how error prone multiple dice get once everyone is a little tired). So you want to use it for things that won't come up too often, like specific spells or magic item effects, as opposed to things that will happen regularly. It might make a good critical hit mechanic, and I like the application to falling damage, but I wouldn't want to use it for normal weapon damage.

One way to speed it up would be to use a smaller number of dice and a table lookup, at the cost of not having quite so wide a range of results. Or mulpiply a roll of, say, 2d6 by the result of another die, though that's at least as error-prone as the original suggestion.

 

[CRGreathouse]

With the mechanic proposed here, the problem is that you have two seperate rolls, one of which potentially involves a relatively large number of dice. That would get really time-consuming if it were to be used a lot (you'd be surprised how fast dice rolls add up, and how error prone multiple dice get once everyone is a little tired). So you want to use it for things that won't come up too often, like specific spells or magic item effects, as opposed to things that will happen regularly. It might make a good critical hit mechanic, and I like the application to falling damage, but I wouldn't want to use it for normal weapon damage.

One way to speed it up would be to use a smaller number of dice and a table lookup, at the cost of not having quite so wide a range of results. Or mulpiply a roll of, say, 2d6 by the result of another die, though that's at least as error-prone as the original suggestion.

It's not hard at all. Here's an overview, using Excel notation:

B7 to B12: =1/6
C7: =Sum(B1:B6)

Fill C7 down and across as needed. This gives you probabilities.