Humpty Dumpty Should Die: Fixing Falling Damage
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D&D rules for falling damage often fall short of my admittedly high expectations. There are usually two ways different systems handle falling damage: Either the traditional method (1d6 damage per 10’ fallen) or a more “realistic” approach where the damage increases geometrically. Both have their advantages. The traditional method is very easy to remember and apply, while the realistic method has the advantage of conforming to players’ expectations, which improves the players ability to solve problems (not realism for realism’s sake, but realism only to the extent it improves player agency, as I’ve mentioned recently with respect to the new Zelda game).
I do want to mention, however, that this isn’t the only divide on how to handle the situation of plummeting to one’s death in TTRPGs; there is also the distinction between “Instant Action” vs “Tangible Obstacles”, as described by my colleague Michael Prescott at the Trilemma blog. This post is firmly in the Tangible Obstacles approach, where the rules create an environment with hard edges and players respond by balancing risk with reward and inventing solutions to overcome obstacles.
None other than Gary Gygax is the sole cause for the divide between the traditional and the realistic approaches to falling damage. Or more accurately, whichever editor was working for AD&D when Gygax wrote his falling damage rules inadvertently caused the split. According to Dragon Magazine #70 (1983), “Gary has always used a geometrically increasing system for falling damage” and tried to codify these rules by writing that falling damage is “1d6 per 10’ for each 10’ fallen.” If that sentence sounds a bit wonky to you, Gary’s editor agreed. What Gary meant by writing that was that falling damage would be 1d6 for the first 10’, plus 2d6 for the second 10’, plus 3d6 for the third 10’, etc., etc., cumulatively. This all is to take into account “inertia, the effect of acceleration on a falling body, and other ‘real’ principles that [still] apply in the ‘fantasy’ world.” However, because Gary phrased this rule so obliquely, the editor “removed the ‘per 10 feet’ [language] as being (so it was thought) redundant” with the “for each 10 feet” language. Gygax seems to have been steamed about this, having his employee write “[p]lease understand first that when Gary writes something, he assumes that no important changes are being made between manuscript and printed product. (I’m sure most, if not all, other accomplished, best-selling authors assume the same thing.)” Reading the article in Dragon, you can feel TSR searching for who to fire over this snafu. I find the whole incident rather amusing. Although the author (Frank Mentzer, you may have heard of him) proposes new falling rules even deadlier than Gygax’s, adding a system shock roll and a death saving throw (good god, more than just heads were rolling from this article), the article concedes that the traditional method, born of misprint, has already become the consensus. Though it gives the only reason as “the social inertia of Custom,” which ignores the fact that the traditional method is much simpler and much easier to remember. But there is still a desire for a more Gygaxian, geometric mode of falling damage.
I sought a synthesis, a rule that was as simple as the traditional approach but adding a bit of the realism of the realistic approach. So here it is:
A falling character takes 1d6 damage per 10 feet fallen, but if 3 or more of the dice roll natural 6s, the character dies upon impact.
This is basically the traditional approach but you just have to remember one thing: look out for 666. This type of instant death goes from impossible at 20’, to incredibly unlikely at 30’, steadily increasing in likelihood as the distance increases. Obviously this doesn’t work as well for games where players are unlikely to ever have 18 hp, since triple 6s would already be enough to die, but in those systems the 1d6 per 10’ rule already seems too harsh, so I might modify it to 1d4 damage (as a note, the above-referenced Dragon article says that “1d6 is appropriate in the first place because the gravity of Oerth (Gary’s ‘world’) approximates that of our own planet” and that “for worlds with weaker gravities, 1d4 might suffice.” This is obviously nonsense. Whether to use 1d4 or 1d6 depends more on average hp and factors of the system, not on the gravity of the fictional world).
In games I’ve run where falling damage was insufficiently deadly, the physics of the world felt cartoony. In games like 5e where player-characters can easily exceed 120 hp, even a 200 foot fall would not put the fear of god into them–they would just brush themselves off afterward, maybe drink a healing potion or an electrolyte beverage, and be off on their merry way. With my simple added rule, a 200 foot fall now comes with a 69% chance (not a joke, but my math may be wrong) of dying for any character. This doesn’t make survival impossible, but it makes it more meaningful. Surviving a fall like that would be akin to Vesna Vulović, the Serbian flight attendant who fell 33,330′ without a parachute (who is described in the comment section of this The Alexandrian blog post as “a perfectly average level 1 or 2 flight attendant, who should have at most 8hp”).
However, maybe the falling rules are both insufficiently deadly and not deadly enough. After all, a level 2 flight attendant (surely someone has made a flight attendant class somewhere) would never survive a 33,330’ fall if it meant 3,333d6 damage (an average of 11,666). Even the traditional backstop of limiting falling damage to 20d6, a highly reasonable rule in 1983, before the widespread availability of dice calculators, would not save this 2nd level flight attendant. So here is an additional rule, a saving grace, allowing any fall to be survivable with enough luck:
If every single die of falling damage rolls a natural 1, the falling character survives with at least 1 hp, even if the damage would have ordinarily reduced them to 0 hp or below.
With this addendum, we have saved Vesna Vulović’s life a second time. Now it is still exceedingly impossible to survive such a fall (AnyDice’s system broke down each time I attempted “output 3333d6”), but I’m telling you there’s a chance. If I were to use this rule, I would also require the player to describe just how they managed to survive their great fall. In Ms. Vulović’s case, it was from being being trapped by a food cart in the DC-9's fuselage, which landed at an angle that cushioned the impact, combined with Ms. Vulović’s low blood pressure (low enough that she only passed her medical examination to become a flight attendant by chugging coffee before the test), which caused her to pass out as the cabin depressurized, keeping her heart from bursting on impact. Though in D&D, I wouldn’t expect such an answer. Instead, perhaps the player-character was grabbed by a swooping pterodactyl but discarded from a lower height when the dino-bird realized the falling creature wouldn’t be very tasty, or perhaps a strange wizard cast feather fall on them from afar, expecting a favor in return down the line, or even divine intervention. In a fantasy world, surviving such a great fall should be incredibly rare and requires far more than simply all the king's horses and all the king's men to avert death.
My adventure, Barkeep on the Borderlands, is nominated for Best Supplement in the 2023 ENNIE Awards! However, whether it wins depends on YOU, because the ENNIE Awards are decided by online voting. Luckily Boaty McBoatface wasn’t nominated in the Best Supplements category, but Barkeep is still a bit of an underdog, so I would really appreciate your support. You can go vote here.
If you aren’t sure what Barkeep on the Borderlands is, it is a pubcrawl adventure I wrote alongside a team of the best bloggers and writers of the OSR/Post-OSR, including Luka Rejec, Chris McDowall, and Zedeck Siew. You can get PDF copies on itch.io or DriveThruRPG, or physical+PDF copies at Evil Cave, and [many more stores, coming soon].
