Why a 20-die cap on falling damage?

[jgsugden]

20d6 is the damage because somebody pulled it out of their butt in older editions. It remains 20d6 because it comes up so rarely, nobody bothered to work out a better mechanic.

It gets the job done. If your game is likely to have a lot of really big falls, it might be worth your time to revise the rules for your game. Unless there is an excpetional reason to expect a lot of big falls, I wouldn't bother wasting time on it.

 

[Gort]

In the case of the seven league fall from the cloud giant city, you could also apply cold damage, couldn't you?

I forget, but isn't exposure one of the major dangers to parachutists and suchlike?

 

[slingbld]

In the case of the seven league fall from the cloud giant city, you could also apply cold damage, couldn't you?

I forget, but isn't exposure one of the major dangers to parachutists and suchlike?

I never thought of it that way. In the case of falls from severe heights, let the cap stay. So you take 20D6 falling damage & oh, say 10D6 cold damage

 

[TheAuldGrump]

how about b/c one of the optional rules works better.

20d6 does on average 70hp of damage.

the 50hp optional instant death rule makes taking 70hp of damage from a single fall pretty much fatal.

Death from massive damage isn't optional - it is core.

The Auld Grump

 

[Scion]

While we are busy thowing around math, why does a halfling take the same falling damage that a human does? Taking your 180 lb human vs your 30 lb halfling, you have 1/6th the mass so you will have proportionally less energy and thus damage. This can be seen in real life by the fact that small animals more regularly take falls and run off that would seriously hurt or kill a person.

Everyone knows that the world hates halflings, therefore it tries to kill them in any way possible

'There is no such thing as gravity, the earth just sucks'

 

[AeroDm]

In a Midnight campaign we used harsher rules for falling because, hey, it's midnight.

We used the incremental damage (3d6 @ 20, et al) as well as another variant. You had to roll a reflex saving throw DC 10 + distance fallen/10 or suffer dexterity damage equal to distance fallen/10. This didn't have the 200' cap. Also, as a convention we said that you only suffered damage equaling how much you failed the save by so as to avoid situations where you took 10 dexterity damage instead of 0. Were I to use it again I would ditch the incremental damage.

As an example, a ftr falls 40 feet and takes 4d6 damage. He then must roll a DC 14 reflex save or suffer a maximum of 4 dexterity damage.

We found that this fixes most problems because although the fighter may have survived his leap from cloud city, in the given example, but he would have been at -100 dexterity and would be going no where for the next month or so.

 

[James McMurray]

Death from massive damage isn't optional - it is core.

The Auld Grump

Everything "core" is optional.