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.

Response

Thank you for the feedback and the edits.

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.

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. Most things are in tables because they would be too complex to calculate. Fall dC has the same formula for all heights and weights.

. . . .

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.

Just roll on the character creation tables that randomly assign weights.

For monsters you can use the creature size, or 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.

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 closeness to a range and a frequency of all such events.

A horse can dive 60 feet without injury. A cat can fall 65 or more feet onto hard ground.

Other methods will fail this test of accuracy and they are going to be clunky, not explained by a single formula. You don't get accuracy by basing damage on height or even velocity. Our results will be in the realm of expectations based on the situation.

> 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.

I can do 15 x a number in my head pretty easily. Even without talking about the difficulty of it, you only need to do it once... if it ever comes up, since in many games people don't even remember encumbrance as long as players don't try to abuse how much they can carry. It's very different from having to whip out a calculator every time someone falls, and especially for math where you need to square cube things. A table would be much the same - I don't want to look up or even need to memorize a table whenever something happens.

> 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.

In that case, just have a % table with modifiers. Even that would be too much, but at least it would reflect "reality" more than the calculations needed to use this variant.

Regardless, you're never going to get "realistic" numbers, and in fact, you shouldn't try to. Because D&D is far from realistic, and trying to add realism to it is a futile endeavor even from the basic fact that hp exist and how they work (getting beaten to an inch of your life multiple times, then running a marathon no problem, for example).

I wouldn't advise anyone to use this variant, and would even tell them to stay away from it in its current iteration. --Ghostwheel (talk) 12:07, 15 May 2022 (UTC)

Encumbrance doesn't change and needs to be calculated during the game? Most people can't multiply by 15, and people never use calculators in DND?

If you want to use a table for this method instead of using a calculator, it is not as efficient but it is no different than the rest of 5E. You can't know any Spell DC without looking it up on a table. Why not have a table for Fall DC?

The rulebook has a table with example amounts of fall damage, the tunnel example is realistic on page 249 DMG.

It is using a d10 terrain die with an 100 pound rock falling on your head.

The original fall system damage is based on reality, it was just a ball park estimate using a 150 pound dummy. The estimate goes haywire at around 200 feet and will start giving too much damage. Select Hero (talk) 14:06, 15 May 2022 (UTC)

> Encumbrance doesn't change and needs to be calculated during the game?

Yeah, encumbrance is 15 x your strength score. After you calculate it for the first time, apart from changes due to ASIs (+15 or +30, which can easily be done in your head) no further calculations need to be done.

> You can't know any Spell DC without looking it up on a table.

...Are you serious? It's 8 + your Proficiency bonus (you should know what it is) + your spellcasting ability modifier. It literally should take a glance at your stats to figure it out. And even more than that, it should be written on your spellcasting table. Since when do you need a table to figure out your DCs?

> The original fall system damage is based on reality, it was just a ball park estimate using a 150 pound dummy.

Could you cite a source of your this? I don't remember it saying anything about reality, seeing as a 50-foot fall will outright kill all commoners outright without any chance of survival, while you yourself have said that people have survived falls much farther than that.

I'll repeat the point again; trying to inject realism into D&D is a futile endeavor, and there's really no point to it. If you want to play an RPG that's "realistic", D&D for certain is not a good system to start with. --Ghostwheel (talk) 14:32, 15 May 2022 (UTC)

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)

I added terminal velocity, based on mass, drag coefficient, and projected area. Gravity will not impact terminal velocity beyond changing the weight of the object and density of the atmosphere. I think going further is too much detail and doesn't have enough impact on the game to bother with. Select Hero (talk) 14:04, 15 May 2022 (UTC)

I added "/s" because I was being facetious. As it is the system is too cumbersome. Adding it is redundant and doesn't matter. --Ghostwheel (talk) 14:17, 15 May 2022 (UTC)

That's fine. I had it laying around and it is extraordinarily simple.Select Hero (talk) 14:27, 15 May 2022 (UTC)