hawkeyefan
Legend
This isn't an illogical extreme, it's the rules functioning as intended.
Ragnar would not "almost assuredly" die from falling off an 80 foot drop, because he has 132 hit points, or less succinctly because he's a name-level warrior whom you would expect to walk away unscathed from the first couple of times he falls off a cliff in a given day.
How is this different than being able to tank a Colossal dragon's breath weapon and then beat the same dragon to death with his bare hands?
Captain America thinks parachutes are for girls. It's a feature.
I get your point, and it certainly depends on your approach to the game, but I don’t know if I agree that this situation is the logical conclusion.
The rules are meant to portray a fictional world not govern it. So for me this is a tail wagging the dog kind of situation.
For me, I think that barring use of magic or some kind of special ability like the monk’s slow fall, a fall from that height is simply lethal.
Now, when this kind of stuff has come up in my game more recently, I’ve never had someone’s pc fall off a cliff and I just say “oh he’s dead...make a new guy.” I’m very open to the possibility of a hero surviving such a fall by whatever combination of skill, desperation, and fortune will work. I’d prefer to set it up as a series of saving throws or skill checks or something similar. And narrate the condition the character is in at the end based on the results of the rolls.
But to simply have falls from that height just do a few HP damage doesn’t make any sense. That kind of fall should be dangerous.