Post/Author/DateTime	Post
#1 shintashi Aug 03, 2015 11:51:22	Ever notice how falling damage doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense? We all have different ways of looking at falling damage, like the bounce twice survive types, and the people who fall off buildings and die, but there's a constant in nature that seems pretty ubiquitous:   Size.   Size matters, particularly, the weight aspect of Size.   When a cat falls down a chimney or laundry chute, they often take no damage. When a tiny animal or bug falls from the sky, it can take quite a distance for them to suffer anything.Meanwhile, if you drop a Hippo off a 3 story building you probably have a mess.   So here's a simplified way to adding a natural characteristic to your campaign.   First, find the normal die pool from falling, such as 4d6 or 12d6, i.e., 4 dice or 12 dice.   Next, add or subtract the size modifier from the dice pool.   -8 Tiny -4 Small +0 Medium +4 Large +8 Huge +16 Garganuan   This might lead to all sorts of weird effects, like tripping Giants to inflict damage when they fall prone. Typically, if a creature is stil on the ground when they fall over, they should only take half 'timber" damage.   If a creature is taller than 10' when tripped, they add their size modifier to the damage dice, using their height as the elevation falling, and then halve the total, as if resistant. A Dexterity save might be allowed to reduce the damage to zero (i.e., save for half or none). Thus a Trippled hill giant would be looking at 9d6/2, save for 0, while a Cloud Giant would be 10d6/2 save for 0.   Gargantuan creatures take a respectable boost to falling, up to 36d6 damage total, which is a max of 216, instead of 120, although every Gargantuan creature has something like 230-600 hit points, so it won't be as devastating as many might like.   Feel free to adjust these values, it's just a simple idea about the Bigger they are, the harder they Fall.
#2 bawylie Aug 03, 2015 11:59:40	Cool idea. Have you considered a multiplier, rather than a modified dice pool? For simplicity's sake.   Also CLIFF CLAVIN
#3 Xeviat-DM Aug 04, 2015 11:09:48	I've always liked this idea. A simpler way to do it would be to have falling damage dice be based on size modifiers, or as a modifier on the number of dice rolled as you say. Bugs basically take no falling damage. I've seen children take nasty spills and keep on going, where an adult would break a hip. Tripping a giant to deal damage to it is very in genre, and it would help balance the added difficulty of doing certain combat manuevers in older versions (where size had a +4 bonus).   Each size increase is a x2 of height, so each size increase is a x8 of weight (so long as density is the same). Force is mass times acceleration, no? Acceleration would be the same because it's all the same gravity. Thus, the force a large creature feels in a fall is 8 times that of a medium creature; no?   Now, damage isn't a strict linear increase. It's hard to decide how much damage is equal to what force. We could look at carrying capacities, but I don't think that works quite right. Mutants and Masterminds used each step as a double in force (their carrying capacity table doubled with each modifier increase). This would give us a modifier for damage of +/-3 per size. If falling damage is 1d10 per 10 feet, then a small creature could ignore the first 30 feet of falling damage, and a large creature would take an extra 3d10 ... that would get out of hand quickly.   Just an open thought process; maybe someone else can do something with it.