Long jump is higher than High jump

[Lord Sessadore]

Afraid not. The Athletics skill specifically says high jump clearance is how high your feet get off the ground, and to see if you can reach something above you you add your height plus one-third to the height of the jump.

Yeah ... which means that essentially they're assuming you're jumping like a pencil, not being bent at the hips or knees when you reach the apex of your jump. If your feet get 3' off the ground, and you are 6' tall, you then are able to grab something 11' above you. In order to reach that high with your feet 3' off the ground, your legs must be extended. Meaning that you could clear more if you tucked your legs.

I know that's not implied in the rules, but it just makes sense. I'm tempted to use the long jump clearance calculation for jumping over or onto something because of this.

 

[Mengu]

You don't jump hurdles, you run over them.

That's kind of my point. The height of a *long* jump can be thought of as the hurdle you can run/jump over. I'm not saying hurdles are high jumps. High jumps should be how high you can go above 4/3 your height (mainly for the purpose of grabbing a ledge).

When the Athletics skill talks about the height your feet clear, they really aren't taking into account the fact that you may pull your knees up and the like. Again it's a matter of how high you can jump to grab something. If you're 6 foot tall, with a running jump, you can reach something 12 feet high (8 foot reach + 4 foot jump) if you make a DC 20 check.

 

[Craw Hammerfist]

Yeah ... which means that essentially they're assuming you're jumping like a pencil, not being bent at the hips or knees when you reach the apex of your jump. If your feet get 3' off the ground, and you are 6' tall, you then are able to grab something 11' above you. In order to reach that high with your feet 3' off the ground, your legs must be extended. Meaning that you could clear more if you tucked your legs.

I know that's not implied in the rules, but it just makes sense. I'm tempted to use the long jump clearance calculation for jumping over or onto something because of this.

This is how I understood the rules for jumping. As for straight-up clearance where height is more important than distance, I'll be using the high jump result plus half height. A check of 30 for a 6 foot character would yield a clearance of 6'. About right for a reasonably athletic person with training.

 

[mvincent]

I'm curious what I'm missing.

Your previous post said:
"some people want to jump up without going more than 1 foot forward. Having rules for both options is an excellent and valuable thing."

However, jumping without going forward wasn't really the crux of the issue (as the issue was equally applicable to running high jumps)

If say, a PC wanted to perform a running jump onto a 4' tier, he would be better off saying it was a running long jump rather than a running high jump.

I grasped the presentation in the PH instantly.

Sure, but mnemonically: it contains a whole lot of unintuitive formulas that can be hard to remember.

3.5 did this also (though not as bad), but it got much simpler once I realized that it was basically "check result = feet jumped"... no math or formulas for the most part (other than halving or quartering for certain circumstances). Using it with this mnemonic was faster and easier, which I had thought was the paradigm for 4e.

Word count reduction was not the goal of my suggestion, merely changing how the rule is memorized.

 

[LostSoul]

That's kind of my point. The height of a *long* jump can be thought of as the hurdle you can run/jump over. I'm not saying hurdles are high jumps. High jumps should be how high you can go above 4/3 your height (mainly for the purpose of grabbing a ledge).

I'm saying you shouldn't use the Jump rules when you're not jumping.

Use Athletics checks and make the DC 15 for each square that has a hurdle in it; failure means you have to treat that square as difficult terrain.

 

[Lord Sessadore]

This is how I understood the rules for jumping. As for straight-up clearance where height is more important than distance, I'll be using the high jump result plus half height. A check of 30 for a 6 foot character would yield a clearance of 6'. About right for a reasonably athletic person with training.

I like your fix better than mine, haha. It's more intuitive, I think.

 

[Lord Sessadore]

I'm saying you shouldn't use the Jump rules when you're not jumping.

Use Athletics checks and make the DC 15 for each square that has a hurdle in it; failure means you have to treat that square as difficult terrain.

That definitely works, though most people (or at least most people I know) would view hurdles as jumping. When your character clears that 3' wall, you don't usually say they "ran over it", you say they jumped over it. Either way you look at it, though, by the rules, jumping overclearing a 3' tall obstacle is a DC 15 Athletics check. However, if you do as Craw Hammerfist said and add 1/2 height to vertical jumps to get over things, then you only need a 0 for a 6' tall character

 

[Andur]

This is how I understood the rules for jumping. As for straight-up clearance where height is more important than distance, I'll be using the high jump result plus half height. A check of 30 for a 6 foot character would yield a clearance of 6'. About right for a reasonably athletic person with training.

Really? Most people can only "high jump" (like the field sport) to their shoulder blades. 8'.5" is the current world record for the High Jump, it is held by a man who is 6'7" tall, he is a world class athlete.

Another example is Hollis Conway:

Considered short in stature by world-class high jump standards, the six-foot tall Conway has held a distinction with four others in track and field history for jumping over their own heights. Conway's best jump was 22 1/2 inches greater than his height.

This is the current U.S. record holder for the High Jump. So your example is already not a reasonably athletic person, but a world class athlete, and if they jump higher than their hieght they are one of the elite jumpers in the history of the world.

 

[mvincent]

if they jump higher than their hieght they are one of the elite jumpers in the history of the world.

... or merely an average combatant in a Chinese fantasy flick.