D&D 5E Why is there a limit to falling damage?

[Laurefindel]

LOL @doctorbadwolf I know we have little common ground (it has been that way between us for a while now ) but that is cool with me. I respect your input and style, despite our "creative" differences.

People disagreeing and remaining civil about it!?! In 2020??! Must be full moon or something...

 

[DND_Reborn]

People disagreeing and remaining civil about it!?! In 2020??! Must be full moon or something...

Actually, it is waning crescent.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Thanks for the reminder! Got a ritual I need to do on the new moon, and my prep is already a bit behind what I wanted it to be.

 

[Gammadoodler]

Thanks for the reminder! Got a ritual I need to do on the new moon, and my prep is already a bit behind what I wanted it to be.

Speaking of daggers...

 

[Hriston]

I think we're getting pretty deep into difference of opinion territory, which is fine but where I doubt there is going up be any kind of conclusion.

That said, my take on it is that the ability to develop those expectations enables players to confidently develop plans and declare actions. They are key enablers to the play loop.

Regular significant deviations from this turn the world into a slot machine where one action is as good as another.

I honestly think you're asking the rules to do too much work here. I like players to know the rules, I do! But I think having a table-consensus regarding genre convention is a far more effective means of giving the players a solid grounding in the fiction and keeping the game from feeling like playing a slot machine. I think a player knowing the falling damage rules and forming an expectation that his/her character can simply drop off a 1,500 foot cliff and survive without any narrative justification whatsoever is dysfunctional at best. I also think the fact that the player in my game thought it was his job to apply the Unconscious condition to the target of his own attack runs in the same vein. It's the sort of thing that disrupts the basic pattern of gameplay because the player is narrating the result of his/her own action.

 

[Gammadoodler]

I honestly think you're asking the rules to do too much work here. I like players to know the rules, I do! But I think having a table-consensus regarding genre convention is a far more effective means of giving the players a solid grounding in the fiction and keeping the game from feeling like playing a slot machine. I think a player knowing the falling damage rules and forming an expectation that his/her character can simply drop off a 1,500 foot cliff and survive without any narrative justification whatsoever is dysfunctional at best. I also think the fact that the player in my game thought it was his job to apply the Unconscious condition to the target of his own attack runs in the same vein. It's the sort of thing that disrupts the basic pattern of gameplay because the player is narrating the result of his/her own action.

I just find the whole idea of a 'narrative justification' for a character to be able to do the things they mechanically can do kind of trollish, since in practice it seems to only be applied to the mundane classes. (Not saying this is true of you personally, but it has been my experience)

No one asks the caster what makes them think they should be able to cast a spell to outrageous effect. They do it because they can, and the game moves on.

Yet the mundane class who can just do things because they're tough enough or skillful enough, or whatever gets to play the 'give the DM the right answer' puzzle game, and if they win, their class gets to function at full capacity, and if they lose, they have to go talk to the caster.

But then perhaps I'm just yelling at clouds.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I just find the whole idea of a 'narrative justification' for a character to be able to do the things they mechanically can do kind of trollish, since in practice it seems to only be applied to the mundane classes. (Not saying this is true of you personally, but it has been my experience)

No one asks the caster what makes them think they should be able to cast a spell to outrageous effect. They do it because they can, and the game moves on.

Yet the mundane class who can just do things because they're tough enough or skillful enough, or whatever gets to play the 'give the DM the right answer' puzzle game, and if they win, their class gets to function at full capacity, and if they lose, they have to go talk to the caster.

But then perhaps I'm just yelling at clouds.

Pretty much this.

The Barbarian is a legend, by the time jumping off a mountain won't kill them. The wizard can change reality. The Cleric can raise the dead. The Druid can reincarnate people and animate half the countryside. The monk can run up waterfalls or especially solid sheets of rain. The Paladin can (ancients) shrug off powerful spells passively.

But the Barbarian can't be similarly legendary, because mah realism? Really? nah.

 

[Tormyr]

I had similar annoyances, so I wrote up some alternate falling damage rules a while back. They are loosely based on falling velocity over distance for a 6-foot-tall person. The damage is a fixed number based on distance. A falling creature can use its reaction to reduce the damage by the value of a Dexterity (Acrobatics) check. Creatures that fall on purpose have advantage on the check. Creatures take more damage the larger they are, cats and winged creatures take damage based on one size class lower than their size.

The end result is that falling is more deadly, but there is a decent chance of taking little to no damage over short falls. A commoner has a 50% of taking no damage from a fall, or it could kill them. Only the fighters or Barbarians with highest Constitution who are high level (or high-level monks) will survive a 1500-foot drop at 174 damage.

The system is not perfect, but I have used it for several years successfully. The house rule integrates well with things like monk slow-fall, raging barbarians, and becoming prone from taking falling damage. It has instilled a sense of danger in elevated scenarios and has inspired heroics to rescue allies that have fallen as well as trying to get flying creatures knocked prone to get them to fall. I do need to update it to eliminate the extraneous lines though. My updated version fits on a single sheet or two of paper.

Alternate Falling Damage

I wanted to make a falling damage and speed system that was (very) loosely based on falling speed and terminal velocity. This is something that mechanically stops monks and barbarians from being able to fall arbitrarily long distances with little...

www.enworld.org

I just had to use this house rule last night. One of my players is an 18th-level tiefling Cirqueliste Bard in our War of the Burning Sky game. He uses dimension door along with his Abduct feature to turn an enemy into a willing participant in the teleportation. He casts the spell and makes a melee spell attack. On a hit, the target must succeed on a Charisma saving throw or be taken along for the ride. They teleport 500 feet straight up, taking 5d6 fire damage (campaign rules for teleportation, which the tiefling resists), and then he pushes off and uses feather fall to return safely while the other creature craters. So a hefty bit of damage that most creatures struggle to stop for the cost of a 1st- and 4th-level spell and a bardic inspiration for the Abduct.

Last night, the party was fighting a group of humanoid-appearing enemies that had resistance to all damage (outside of a special situation) but only an AC of 11. There was also a leader who was a different creature with high AC, flight, and excellent use of a long bow that they could fire 3 times with multiattack. The bard decides to abduct one of the highly resistant creatures that had been stunned by a monk. They teleported up and he started falling with feather fall. Then things started to not go to plan.

What he did not know was that the creatures could fly (hover). So the creature floated when he let go. Then the leader on the ground started shooting him at disadvantage. The first shot hit, and he made his Concentration saving throw, but his health was starting to get low. When the second shot hit, I gently suggested to the player that he might want to fail the saving throw on purpose. The leader had one more shot, and the floating creature would soon stop being stunned. One of the other player's realized that if the bard stayed up in the air until his hit points reached 0, the falling damage would exceed his max hit points and instantly kill him. So he fell and took 134 falling damage. He narrowly avoided an instant death but was pretty shattered on the ground.

One of the other PCs applied a quick cure wounds, and the bard crawled over to some cover and cast regenerate on himself. The rest of the party mopped things up, and the bard was able to walk home after a couple of minutes.

 

[Fanaelialae]

I just find the whole idea of a 'narrative justification' for a character to be able to do the things they mechanically can do kind of trollish, since in practice it seems to only be applied to the mundane classes. (Not saying this is true of you personally, but it has been my experience)

No one asks the caster what makes them think they should be able to cast a spell to outrageous effect. They do it because they can, and the game moves on.

Yet the mundane class who can just do things because they're tough enough or skillful enough, or whatever gets to play the 'give the DM the right answer' puzzle game, and if they win, their class gets to function at full capacity, and if they lose, they have to go talk to the caster.

But then perhaps I'm just yelling at clouds.

I think that's a false comparison. Both the wizard and the cleric can attain sufficient HP to survive jumping off the cliff. However, I'm fairly certain that everyone here would not apply different consequences to them. They'd go splat right alongside the barbarian. As I said before, this is not a caster vs martial argument.

If the barbarian has a parachute, or got special training from an ancient warrior-sage and learned Meteor Fall (which allows him to ignore falling damage when intentionally falling) then the barbarian would be fine jumping off the cliff.

As I see it, this is an HP thing, and a genre convention thing, and a don't metagame thing.

HP (IMO) are not a force field. If they are a force field in your campaign, then I see no issue with barbarians jumping off cliffs. In my games, they are skill and luck. Skill isn't going to save you from free fall. Luck has limits.

Conan falls from many high places under many circumstances, but never because he simply thinks he's tough enough to take it. It reeks of bad fanfiction, and that's not the kind of tone I want in my game. It isn't something my players want to see either. It wrecks everyone's suspension of disbelief.

Lastly, I don't think characters should have a sufficient awareness of their HP, much less the falling rules, to be able to game the system this way. If they do have such an awareness, then they ought to be aware of plenty of other meta information as well. Level 1 characters should just go out and hunt 30 x CR 0 critters each. That's a much safer way to level up than actual adventuring, and the hop from level 1 to 2 is one of the biggest jumps in capability that characters ever get.

As far as I'm concerned, characters don't even know that HP exist, much less how many they have. A character with many HP would likely be confident, recognizing their own achievements, skills, and luck. They'd be aware as their own hp diminish that they're coming ever closer to losing. However, I disagree that they'd look at a 1500 ft fall and think, "I can take that". IMO, that's unabashed metagaming.

I'm not sure I 100% agree with @Hriston 's scenario. However, I do agree with the idea of narrative justification. The player doesn't have all of the information. Just because they think the NPC is asleep doesn't mean they are. The NPC could be pretending. Or the PC might not roll well enough on their Stealth check and the NPC might wake up. The player doesn't know whether the NPC is unconscious and shouldn't simply assume that they get those benefits.

This impacts casters as well. Magic won't function in a dead magic zone, and it's unreliable in a wild magic zone, just to give two obvious examples.

To reiterate, I strongly disagree that this is a caster vs martial argument, as you seem to want to paint it.

 

[Bagpuss]

Force = mass * Acceleration, and the acceleration due to gravity is exponential.

No it isn't. It's 9.8 m/s/s and often gets rounded to 10 m/s/s for simple estimates, acceleration is a constant.

But the falling damage the acceleration involved isn't directly related to gravity anyway. It's the deceleration you are suffering from impacting the surface and how much it gives, the more it gives the longer it takes to reduce your speed to zero. Hence the damage you take from falling onto a stunt air bag is considerably less than what you take falling onto concrete.