D&D 5E Request for thoughts on falling damage change

[Sunseeker]

I like this idea, but with the keeping of high fantasy heroic characters - I'd like to see an option for mitigating damage. Perhaps if you deliberately jump you have a DC 10 + #of dice acrobatic check to take half damage. So a deliberate 50' jump would be DC 18 for half damage. Maybe disadvantage with heavy armor? Maybe stunned for 1d# of dice upon landing. Maybe you have to have proficiency in acrobatics to get half damage otherwise it is 3/4 damage - just throwing out some ideas here.

Like the "hero landing"? I think most players could take average damage from 50 feet and I think that covers the majority of "epic landings". 60 is where it really starts to hurt. Maybe a custom feat would work to grant an extra 10 feet of "free" fall distance.

So yes actually. Perhaps you misundertstood what I was implying, but your table increases every 10 feet as I suggested you had forgot to mention in your previous post. This is exactly what I meant.

Oh, I wasn't clear on that. I also thought it was implied that we were just working with the standard 10 foot fall intervals.

Yep, that is a pretty unrealistic amount of damage. I prefer the OP to this.

Maybe. But the actual numbers aren't really important at 1500 feet. Noone survives that. It's more to dissuade people from jumping 100 or 200 feet on a regular basis.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

No, I just forgot to edit off the +'s.
10=0
20=1d6
30=2d6
40=4d6
50=8d6
60=16d6
70=32d6
and so on.

Yeah it hits a wall, but terminal velocity of a human on earth's gravity requires about 1500 feet. So, that's 1490 feet of falling and 149 instances of doubling, in an exponential system like this that's 1.2e^71. So you'd be taking an average 4.1^71 damage.

Exponential damage is not physically justified.
The energy you use to fuel your movement scales linearly with height. So a linear growth with a cap is not too bad.
Maybe you should habe a higher cap and maybe you should have the first feet do more damage than the last one as the op suggests.
I personally would add an actobatics check to reduce your effective distance a little.

Measured with commoner hp, a fall of 20 ft is exactly in the right place though. 2d6 damage against 8 damage to die seems nearly perfect...

 

[Caliburn101]

I would suggest the following;

Falls onto a soft surface (deep sand for instance) - as per RAW.
A solid surface (normal ground) - +2 damage per d6
A hard surface (bare rock) - +4 damage per d6

For a very rough or angular surface (sand with many stones, normal ground with heavy thorn bushes or an uneven rock surface) - substitute d8's.

For a dangerous surface (sand with glassy obsidian shards in it, normal ground covered in stakes or jagged volcanic rock) substitute d10's.

For pit traps etc. use the damage of the spikes in addition to the RAW d6's.

 

[Sunseeker]

Exponential damage is not physically justified.
The energy you use to fuel your movement scales linearly with height. So a linear growth with a cap is not too bad.
Maybe you should habe a higher cap and maybe you should have the first feet do more damage than the last one as the op suggests.
I personally would add an actobatics check to reduce your effective distance a little.

Measured with commoner hp, a fall of 20 ft is exactly in the right place though. 2d6 damage against 8 damage to die seems nearly perfect...

Again, the goal is really to dissuade people from jumping off of towers and tall cliffs in the 80-200 range, since those falls would normally kill humans and outside of my 4E games, I'm not playing gonzo fantasy. Basing it off commoners doesn't help because my players aren't commoners, they're adventurers. A person falling 30 meters (roughly 90 feet) would impact the ground at nearly 24mph (87kph). 70kg person would hit the ground with over 15000 pounds of force. What they won't do is take an average of 65 points of damage and walk away like it didn't happen. That's what the rules currently allow.

I would probably be inclined to give someone an acrobatics check to soften their landing. But really my rules are mostly to dissuade people from doing it, and mild calculatory amusement.

 

[n0nym]

The problem is that falling 10 feet shouldn't be worse than being hit with a greatsword

Actually, it should be worse.

Hit points are an abstraction, they could represent grazes, light touch, endurance or simply luck. But when you fall, you take raw damage. You can't really avoid or dodge them and luck can't really help you.

In my game I've ruled that you take 1d6 / 5 feet when falling (not jumping). When you reach 150 feet, you just die (unless you have favorable conditions, like falling on soft material). It's harsh, but then again WHY DID YOU STAND NEAR THAT CLIFF in the first place ? No sane human being with no access to Feather fall would do that.

Anyway, I like my games gritty and I've always felt that falling from a giant cliff and then getting back up to fight another day was utterly stupid, even for high level characters. You're an incredible soldier ok, but you're not the Incredible Hulk. Your swordman's skills won't help you when you hit the ground.

I think Geralt Of Rivia would agree with me.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Again, the goal is really to dissuade people from jumping off of towers and tall cliffs in the 80-200 range, since those falls would normally kill humans and outside of my 4E games, I'm not playing gonzo fantasy. Basing it off commoners doesn't help because my players aren't commoners, they're adventurers. A person falling 30 meters (roughly 90 feet) would impact the ground at nearly 24mph (87kph). 70kg person would hit the ground with over 15000 pounds of force. What they won't do is take an average of 65 points of damage and walk away like it didn't happen. That's what the rules currently allow.

I would probably be inclined to give someone an acrobatics check to soften their landing. But really my rules are mostly to dissuade people from doing it, and mild calculatory amusement.

I think the best idea is making it percentage based. Maybe a save to just being injured.
You can also invoke a massive damage rule. But if you don't want people to jump from cliffs, just tell them they die. No need to invent escalating damage rules.

Make it that you lose 1/4th of your hp per 10 feet of falling. Acrobatics check to reduce the fall by 10 ft.
That way a fall from 50ft is lethal. No matter what level....

Actually, it should be worse.

Hit points are an abstraction, they could represent grazes, light touch, endurance or simply luck. But when you fall, you take raw damage. You can't really avoid or dodge them and luck can't really help you.

In my game I've ruled that you take 1d6 / 5 feet when falling (not jumping). When you reach 150 feet, you just die (unless you have favorable conditions, like falling on soft material). It's harsh, but then again WHY DID YOU STAND NEAR THAT CLIFF in the first place ? No sane human being with no access to Feather fall would do that.

Anyway, I like my games gritty and I've always felt that falling from a giant cliff and then getting back up to fight another day was utterly stupid, even for high level characters. You're an incredible soldier ok, but you're not the Incredible Hulk. Your swordman's skills won't help you when you hit the ground.

I think Geralt Of Rivia would agree with me.

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[guachi]

Falling damage:

1d6 per 5ft
Deliberate jump down reduces damage rolled by 1d6(anyone can jump down from 5 ft without any risk, yet getting dropped on your head from 5ft could be deadly for some).

reduce damage from falling half the roll of athletics or acrobatics. So for an average person jumping down from 10 ft on purpose would deal 1d6-5 damage(5 reduction for roll of 10/2). 1 damage in 1 of 6 cases.

Yet falling from 10 story tower(100ft) would on average deal 70 damage(20d6) before any reductions.

This is my favorite system. It provides mitigation for deliberate short falls of the type adventurers are likely to do and accounts for the fact that PCs and creatures have roughly twice the HP of earlier editions by having damage be 1d6 per 5 feet.

 

[CydKnight]

Unlike many who post in this forum, as a DM there are very few RAWs that I wouldn't follow for non AL games. The cap on falling damage at 20d6 is probably the biggest one for me but fortunately it hasn't come up that often that someone has actually impacted a hard level surface after falling more than 200 feet in my games. When/if that were to occur, I would simply add a d6 per 10 feet of distance fallen. Fall 5000 feet off a sheer cliff face? Take 500d6 and instant death except in the rarest of occasions.

 

[Dausuul]

Falling damage has been a problem throughout D&D's history. The reason is that we use hit points to measure both physical toughness and a character's defensive abilities. But we also have an intuitive sense that skill at defending yourself in combat shouldn't enable you to survive a thousand-foot fall.

So I'm not sure the problem can be solved by tinkering with the amount of damage dealt. Yes, you can crank up the damage so that high-level characters must fear a fall; but then lowbies will die any time they trip over a rock.

D&D does have a mechanism for effects that bypass your defensive abilities: The saving throw, which is now basically the same as an ability check. If I were setting out to "fix" falling damage, that's where I would look. Something like:

When you fall, you land prone and must make a DC 10 Acrobatics check. If you fail, you suffer the effect listed below. If you succeed, the effect is one level less severe; on a natural 20, it's two levels less severe; on a natural 1, it's one level more severe.

0-9 feet: No effect
10-19 feet: Damage equal to your hit dice/level
20-39 feet: Damage equal to half your maximum hit points
40-79 feet: Reduced to 0 hit points
80-149 feet: Reduced to 0 hit points and 2 failed death saves
150+ feet: Instant death

 

[Fleetwood C. DeVille]

Again, the goal is really to dissuade people from jumping off of towers and tall cliffs in the 80-200 range, since those falls would normally kill humans and outside of my 4E games, I'm not playing gonzo fantasy. Basing it off commoners doesn't help because my players aren't commoners, they're adventurers. A person falling 30 meters (roughly 90 feet) would impact the ground at nearly 24mph (87kph). 70kg person would hit the ground with over 15000 pounds of force. What they won't do is take an average of 65 points of damage and walk away like it didn't happen. That's what the rules currently allow.

I would probably be inclined to give someone an acrobatics check to soften their landing. But really my rules are mostly to dissuade people from doing it, and mild calculatory amusement.

This.

The metagaming of players asking the distance of the fall and knowing they can't be killed by the current rules sticks in my craw.
We use a 5% critical chance per 10ft of fall.

And thank you to the OP for giving this old gamer flashbacks of old Dragon articles arguing over "The Physics of Falling".