Falling damage should not be connected to real quantities

Roy · Post by **Roy** » Tue Jul 21, 2009 1:41 pm

About 3 or so. It takes several rounds to set up, and you can just do 70 in that time auto attacking, without having to worry about dying before you succeed at doing anything or a 1st level spell completely negating it.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Tue Jul 21, 2009 2:32 pm

IGTN wrote:
You can head those off by arbitrarily assigning the battle environment a CR based on the EL of the encounter or on its construction (i.e., interpolated from a table of example falls).

But if you put the PCs on a bridge over a CR 8 fall at level 4, you're told what level the fall is appropriate for, and in fact had to pick that level. That's at least better than "you're ambushed on the ledge halfway up a thousand-foot cliff" at that same level, where what was meant as impressive scenery ends up killing the party.

But doesn't that lead to stupid situations where an ECL 1 party fights a CR 1/4 kobold next to a CR 12 huge fucking cliff and gets CR 12 experience?

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Tue Jul 21, 2009 3:24 pm

Yeah, the thing I don't like about this idea is that either you can't fight next to cliffs at low levels, or really big cliffs only deal 1d6 damage at low level, or you get crap-tons of XP.

I mean, if the DM doesn't want to have low level PCs falling off of cliffs, then he doesn't need to include cliffs, but I'd rather have the damage just scaled on height.

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Tue Jul 21, 2009 3:39 pm

RobbyPants wrote:Yeah, the thing I don't like about this idea is that either you can't fight next to cliffs at low levels, or really big cliffs only deal 1d6 damage at low level, or you get crap-tons of XP.

Yeah, that's pretty much my objections in a nutshell.

I would be more sympathetic to having falling damage be a low-ish DC save-or-die effect, with a successful save doing X% of your max hp in damage (say). Then it would more naturally scale with level. But there would be problems balancing that system, too (what DC is "low-ish" enough? and how much damage is enough to discourage jumping of cliffs vs. climbing down cliffs, but not enough to make falling damage the preferred method of killing people?).

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Sat Jul 25, 2009 1:24 am

Yes, first level characters should not fight in as deadly of situations as high level characters. Mooks fight in the yard, the highlanders fight on the bulwarks.

-Crissa

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Sat Jul 25, 2009 2:22 am

hogarth wrote:
RobbyPants wrote:Yeah, the thing I don't like about this idea is that either you can't fight next to cliffs at low levels, or really big cliffs only deal 1d6 damage at low level, or you get crap-tons of XP.
Yeah, that's pretty much my objections in a nutshell.

I would be more sympathetic to having falling damage be a low-ish DC save-or-die effect, with a successful save doing X% of your max hp in damage (say). Then it would more naturally scale with level. But there would be problems balancing that system, too (what DC is "low-ish" enough? and how much damage is enough to discourage jumping of cliffs vs. climbing down cliffs, but not enough to make falling damage the preferred method of killing people?).

As soon as you tie a save DC to it, one set of classes (those with good Fort or Ref saves; whichever is used) will have falls be trivial and the rest will find falls deadly.

I guess you'd also have to define the point at which a fall goes from dealing X damage to flat out killing you. It's not that bad, and I suppose even that distance could be a sliding scale based on level.

It might be more simple to just reflect this with damage dice though. Just have it scale faster than d6 per 10 feet. Perhaps the first 50 feet works as d6/10 ft, then the next 50 feet goes 2d6/10 ft and continue this progression. This would end you up at 50d6 at 200 feet (175 avg.). I guess that's still not a certain death at 20th level, but it's closer.

Although actually rolling 50 dice could be a serious pain in the ass

hogarth · Post by **hogarth** » Sat Jul 25, 2009 3:07 am

Crissa wrote:Yes, first level characters should not fight in as deadly of situations as high level characters. Mooks fight in the yard, the highlanders fight on the bulwarks.

-Crissa

Also, rain is wet. And cows go moo.

-hogarth

IGTN · Post by **IGTN** » Sat Jul 25, 2009 4:27 am

RobbyPants wrote:I guess you'd also have to define the point at which a fall goes from dealing X damage to flat out killing you. It's not that bad, and I suppose even that distance could be a sliding scale based on level.

It might be more simple to just reflect this with damage dice though. Just have it scale faster than d6 per 10 feet. Perhaps the first 50 feet works as d6/10 ft, then the next 50 feet goes 2d6/10 ft and continue this progression. This would end you up at 50d6 at 200 feet (175 avg.). I guess that's still not a certain death at 20th level, but it's closer.

Although actually rolling 50 dice could be a serious pain in the ass

There's actually nothing good about that idea. Like, at all.

1) Seriously, a 200' cliff is nowhere near the highest cliff that a PC is likely to fall off of, so the rules shouldn't cap there.
2) Heroes are supposed to survive falling off cliffs, anyway.
3) We're trying to make the falling object and dropping people rules less exploitable, not more.
4) That's not even how real physics works. Acceleration goes with time, and you spend less time in each distance interval the further you've fallen, so your impact speed increases slower than linearly (actually, with the square root of distance). Energy is linear with distance, though. There's no quantity faster than linear.

Basically, the only design goals that idea fits are "I'm a killer DM who likes to kill PCs" or "I want your dragonslayer to die from a falling off his Pegasus, and the current system means that you can stop this by flying low."

If anything, we want the interval for a single die to decrease with longer distances, so that we can have a reasonable amount of damage dice when people fall off of tall cliffs, or out of floating cities or cloud giant castles, or off their griffons. Because those things actually happen in actual games, and "have Feather Fall or DIE!" is not a good solution to it.

Seriously, the picture of Edinburgh Castle posted earlier? That's actually off the scale of the current system. It's too high.

At minimum the system needs to be rescaled, and the real distances should be gone entirely without making the game worse for it.

Psychic Robot · Post by **Psychic Robot** » Sat Jul 25, 2009 4:38 am

Here's a dumb question:

Why not just disallow Damocles' Ingot? There are already weight restrictions on flying monsters, so that doesn't much matter unless you're fighting against a giant dragon (in which case you're already high enough level that 20d6 damage isn't going to bother you that much).