Fall from a great distance and survive

2 thoughts on “Fall from a great distance and survive

  1. A lot of people cry foul on this one in every edition of D&D, but it’s totally realistic. People have survived falls from airplanes, not just thousands of feet but literal miles in the sky. The farthest fall survived without a parachute on record was over 6 miles.

    There’s an upper limit on how fast a falling body can fall (terminal velocity), and once it’s reached, it doesn’t matter how much extra distance you pile on, you’re not going to hit the ground any harder. Once you hit that point, how much damage you take is pretty much just a question of how you happen to land.

  2. Ben Coulthard says:

    Cases of people surviving massive falls are unbelievably rare. As they are at the moment the RAW max damage for a fall from any height at 20d6 or on average 70hp. This basically means that EVERY character can survive a massive fall once they reach about 10th level. The monk is practically immune to fall damage by about the same point. Also given that to kill a pc outright a fall needs to do double the hp total then it means all falls, however high, are non lethal by the time characters are around 10th level. As a mechanic that is counterproductive as it gives players nothing to aspire to AND worse still no respect for heights. This cap of 20d6 is way off the mark. It probably needs to be doubled or removed entirely.

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