Talk:Hero's Epic Fall Damage (5e Variant Rule)

Ratings

	Ghostwheel dislikes this article and rated it 1 of 4.
	One of the system design philosophies of 5e is that things are streamlined and that they move along quickly and are fairly intuitive. Bringing things that require on the fly division, much less cube roots as this variant requires, don't have a place in 5e in my opinion. This variant is just too finagly and cumbersome to actually be used at most tables.

Hi

Thank you for the feedback and the edits.

I started with a table based on fall velocity. A better proxy for fall damage is energy. And a faster and more convenient way than using a table is using a calculator. Such tables can and have been made. There are portions of the rulebook that obviously require a calculator. Look at encumbrance and tell me it is not in the spirit of the game. And how do you know what spells they all cast, what their spell DC is, and what your save bonuses are, without just looking it all up on what are essentially tables.

Should fall damage really be any different? The calculator makes it quick and is more accurate. If you don't want to do the calculation we can put it in a table, but I don't think it is necessary.

I do understand what you are saying, we want things to be accurate and easy to perform.

To use a method without interrupting the flow of the game, that is the goal, and the DM will need to download RealCalc before playing. This has a cube root function for your phone, and they will need to obtain the weight of the characters, mostly. Kust roll on the character creation tables that randomly assign weights.

For monsters you can use the size table. I suggest making weight = height^3 in a pinch. Some monsters have known weights from earlier editions. You can find other sources online for the weight and the DM will need some general idea about the weight of things. A bullywug weighs 300 pounds, a dragon 30 tons.

The calculation of the Fall DC, once you know the weight and height, takes all of 8 seconds to perform. Then just set the calculator down and start making saves and rolls and describing things.

The DM will have to familiarize themself with the calculator. I wouldn't recommend downloading the calculator and searching for the cube root button during the game.

. . . .

The only way to know if a method is accurate is to check if it matches what happens when you fall in reality.

A world class acrobat can fall 12 feet during a performance and die. An average person can fall 100 feet and live, or 0 feet and go into a coma. These are not freak events, they are common and normal because falls are chaotic. It is not possible to give a number for how much damage a fall produces. Accuracy in this case is a range and a frequency. Hero's fall damage does that, whereas other methods do not.

A horse dives 60 feet without injury. A cat falls 65 onto hard ground and is good. Hero's does that. Other methods do not.

You don't get that at all by basing damage on height or even velocity.

Other methods fail this test of accuracy and they are the things that are clunky. Our results will be in the realm of expectations based on the situation.

Entirely Unrealistic

This variant entirely ignores terminal velocity of objects based on their mass, drag coefficient, projected area, the gravity of the plane you're in, and the density of the creature.

Entirely unrealistic, 2/10.

/s --Ghostwheel (talk) 11:44, 18 April 2022 (UTC)