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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5356164" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm not singling out falls.  So, just so you understand the rules.1) Falls do 1d20 damage per 10' of falling, divided by the results of 1d6.  This generates an average damage very near to 1d6 per 10' of falling, but as you might expect has a very broad multimodal distribution where 'anything is possible'.  2) Any single blow/attack of any sort which does 50 or more points of damage forces a traumatic damage save.  This is a DC 15 fortitude save.  If it fails, you roll against a table with results varying from things like broken limbs, to internal hemoraging, to crushed skulls.   Since a 30' fall can conceivably do 50 damage (50+ on the result of a 3d20, and a roll of 1 on the mitigation die), and since any saving throw can be failed on a roll of 1, any character that falls 30' unexpectedly is at risk of dying.  This greatly increases at greater heights.  Falling off of great heights is almost never automatic death, but it is always the risk of it.  Both are highly desirable traits as far as I'm concerned. 3) Any fall which reduces you to zero or less hit points is automatically considered traumatic damage.  This is also true of any critical hit which does so, so I'm not particularly picking on falling I just don't want to make resolution any more complex than it is by treating the ground as attacking you.4) PC's have a stock of 'destiny points' which can be used to buy rerolls or to force critical blows to become non-critical as well as many other useful things.  So, in general, bad luck can be mitigated unless you make too much of it for yourself.The results of this are pretty straight forward.  The results of falling are on average pretty much exactly what you'd expect if I had used the standard rules, but exactly as I desire, every player is very much careful around heights because any mishap means potentially burning all important destiny points or outright death.  Death is always lurking just a round away, but so far the players in my current campaign have managed to avoid it - though at least once (involving the harpoon trap in the shrine of the traps god) I was certain that they wouldn't.  And the simulationist in me likes that you can fall out of an airplane an live, or fall out of a tree house and die.Errr..... yeah.  Right.  So, I continue to feel like this conversation is going to become more and more pointless.How about, 'Very'?  I'm having a hard time relating this request to anything real people know about real situations.I'm not sure you can state anything definatively about what is or isn't high level except with respect to a particular campaign.  What was 'high level' on Krynn was low level on Faerun.  High level for Eberron is probably different than high level for Planescape.Maybe.  I am making some assumptions here, but I note so are you about how D&D plays as if there was one answer to that question even in published works to say nothing of homebrews.  I'm not even sure that characters that you envision as the default D&D character exist in my worlds.You want to play a reckless devil may care sort of character, I'm perfectly fine with that.   But unless you are a particularly skilled role player, chances are you are going to end up dead in a hurry trying to personify that.  More importantly though, I find your argument to be a bit spurious because you don't seem from your discussion to be the sort of person who leans strongly toward 'role playing your character is more important than success' much less one that deliberately chooses less than optimal strategies because 'its what my character would do'.  In fact, the some of your statements convey to me exactly the opposite.  You want to play 'strong' characters.  You want to have full knowledge so you can choose the winning strategy.  You talk about knowing whether something is useful is critical to your enjoyment.  You seem to me to be inventing this notion of the reckless character to justify precisely the opposite sort of play.Look, you are talking to the guy who spent most of his 1st edition career playing a thief - a class with virtually no advantages at all in 1st edition, with an attack progression worse than a 3e mage, poor hit points, bad saves, and no class abilities that weren't obseleted by spells before 10th level.  Your talking to a guy who cut his teeth as a player in a game system where you weren't that worried about the save or dies - it was the die no saves that you had to be particularly careful of.  You are talking to a guy that played the game at a time when reading the DMG as a player was considered somewhat less than bad form.   I just have hard time being sympathetic with your position that you need all this control and metagame information to enjoy the game.  And in any event, I don't think that that is the way you nuture up new players.</blockquote>

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