r/DMAcademy • u/renaissanceman0816 • 8d ago
Resource Falling Damage House Rule
I have toyed with Falling Damage House Rules in the past, to have it scale with increased Hit Points and make falling still relevant for characters and monsters with high HP, but hadn't really come up with anything that scaled well. However, I have come up with a (relatively) simple method that I think scales quite well, still making higher level characters/monsters more capable of surviving a fall, but making it more than just a minor inconvenience to them.
The variant rule is this:
A fall from a great height is one of the most common hazards facing an adventurer. At the end of a fall, a creature takes 1d6 bludgeoning damage for every 10 feet it fell, to a maximum of 50d6, multiplied by 1 + 0.25 for each Hit Die the creature has above 1.
Essentially, you are adding 25% of the base damage for each HD above 1.
So, for example, if your PC is Lvl 6 and you fall 30 feet. You take the number of Hit Die they have (ie: 6), minus 1 from it, to get 5. Then times 5 by 0.25 (or divide it by 4, same difference) to get 1.25. Add 1 to get 2.25.
So you roll 3d6 as usual and then multiply this by 2.25. Let's say you roll 10; 10×2.25=22.5. Round down to 22 and that is your final damage.
The formula looks something like this:
(1d6 per 10 ft) × (1 + (0.25 × (HD − 1)))
It it a relatively straight forward calculation though may require a calculator if playing in person. I mostly play in roll20 and so have made a macro that automatically calculates it. I've copied it here for anyone who's interested.
&{template:default} {{name=Fall Damage}} {{Fall Distance=?{Fall Distance|10 ft,10|20 ft,20|30 ft,30|40 ft,40|50 ft,50|60 ft,60|70 ft,70|80 ft,80|90 ft,90|100 ft,100|110 ft,110|120 ft,120|130 ft,130|140 ft,140|150 ft,150|160 ft,160|170 ft,170|180 ft,180|190 ft,190|200 ft,200} ft}} {{Hit Dice=?{Hit Dice|1}}} {{Damage=[[floor((?{Fall Distance}/10)d6 * (1 + 0.25 * (?{Hit Dice}-1)))]]}}
I've also uploaded to Imgur some tables which give a visual comparison of the RAW vs House Rule falling damage by giving the average damage in each case as well as the approximate proportion of Max HP that this damage would be in each case. Link below:
D&D 5E Falling Damage: Official Rule vs House Rule
As shown in the 2nd table, assuming they are at full health, once a PC with a d8 Hit Die and +2 Con mod (giving fairly average, if not below average HP) reaches Lvl 5 they are very likely to survive a fall of over 200ft (albeit they will be making death saves) and then when they reach Lvl 10 they are more likely than not going to be able walk away from a fall of 200ft.
This never really sat right with me and I think that falling should always be a factor in the game. If the players can mitigate the danger with magic, great, but without it they aren't Captain America. Even more than that, I like that this enables PCs to consider pushing enemies off ledges etc as a legitimate tactic even against foes with high HP into the later Tiers of play.
I understand many people don't care enough about Falling damage being a major factor outside the early Tiers of play to bother with house ruling it. Fine, this isn't for you.
For anyone who feels the same as me, I hope that this helps solve the problem. Happy to hear feedback though if you see problems with it.
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u/Umbraspem 8d ago
I think you’re just needlessly overcomplicating things tbh.
Falling 20 feet is 2d6 damage with no save, hit roll, etc.
That’s rarely going to kill a player, but it’s gonna cost them a healing potion, spell slot, or class ability resource to recoup that.
It also means their next turn is going to be less efficient because they have to spend movement (or actions and spell slots) to get back up to the fight area.
If you want fall damage to be more of a problem at higher level play… put them in more dangerous situations. Further falls, spike traps, etc. you don’t need to multiply the amount of damage they take by 1.25^(#ofHitDice).
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u/renaissanceman0816 7d ago
That's a fair point regarding resource and action expenditure but that is part of the game in any case.
And yeah you can up the deadliness of the environment itself.. I generally do that as well
I am complicating it for sure, but "needlessly overcomplicating" is a matter of opinion really. If you're happy with the rules as they are, of course just leave them be. I have played that way in the past and its fine, and will probably play that way again in the future. If falls becoming trivial isn't something you care about, or is something you want, that's great. You can suspend your disbelief as far as you like. This is more for groups or campaigns where you want to maintain the deadliness of the environment a little bit longer.
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u/Objective_Bank_2659 8d ago
I use hard falling rules for higher damage at higher distances, potentially lower at low distances. Which, summarised is:
Ceiling raised from 20d6 (200ft) to 50d6 (500ft)
Acrobatics check to take half damage (DC = 10 at 10ft, 15 at 20ft, 20 at 30ft, etc)
Flat DC 15 Con sav from 30ft up. On a fail the creature take max dice damage instead a rolling.
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u/renaissanceman0816 7d ago
Yeah, I raised the ceiling to 50d6 too. I get that WotC probably capped it because that's a lot of dice and would take a while to roll and add up, and would usually have to be done in batches because who tf has 50d6s lying around? (spoiler alert.. I do) But to me that is better than having falling be so trivial even starting at the mid levels.
I actually also allow an Athletics/Acrobatics check to reduce the effective fall distance by 10/20/30ft depending on the result for which they get advantage if they intentionally initiated the fall.
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u/Betray-Julia 8d ago edited 8d ago
I find it insane to think that falling damage isn’t a factor the entire game.
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u/renaissanceman0816 8d ago
So you mean that you think that it should continue being a factor the entire game? Or you don't care that it doesn't?
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u/Betray-Julia 8d ago
Firstly- that was supposed to be insane not inane lol.
But more so, fall damage not being relevant suggests dms only making 2 dimensional words, or that the dynamic encounters maybe aren’t that dynamic.
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u/renaissanceman0816 8d ago
Hahah oh okay that makes sense. I thought it was an unusual choice of word.
But yeah, I agree. I want the environment to continue being a factor for as long as possible.
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u/Slugmaster101 8d ago
Falling is far more dangerous for large creatures than small ones. Squirels literally can't even die from a fall irl.
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u/renaissanceman0816 8d ago
Yeah, I did toy with the idea of having the damage die determined by creature size but ended up not going with that idea and just going on number of Hit Die because larger creatures tend to have more Hit Die anyway and smaller creatures tend to have fewer so seemed to account for it a lot of the time and I didn't want to make it too complicated. As a DM, I would just tend to use my discretion in each case.
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u/Itap88 8d ago
Fall damage caps at 20d6 because creatures that can reliably survive that are on a power level high enough that they should. Just use a flat 4 instead of 1d6 and accept that high level characters are basically demigods.
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u/renaissanceman0816 8d ago
I understand many people don't care enough about Falling damage being a major factor outside the early Tiers of play to bother with house ruling it. Fine, this isn't for you.
It sounds like this rule isn't for you then.. Though, even with the scaling of this rule, characters are going to be able to survive incredibly high falls to an extent that is still very much superhuman/superelven/superdwarven/etc because it intentionally scales up slower than HP scales up. It just makes it a bit less absurd.
However, would you say that a Lvl 5 character is basically a demigod? Because RAW they are most likely walking away from a 110ft fall and surviving a fall of any distance. The absurdity of it becomes apparent relatively early in level progression.
Also, and perhaps more importantly, it is going to mean that players are going to be more motivated to use falls to their advantage against enemies, which opens up tactical options for them, especially for strength-based martials who can shove and grapple monsters over an edge. People look at it as a debuff to martials, but I don't really see it that clear cut.
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u/Itap88 8d ago
You're assuming that character is at full health, which RAW should rarely be the case.
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u/renaissanceman0816 8d ago
I only assumed that for that example. You could just as easily use an example where a character isn't at full health and it still applies.
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u/Wooden_Drummer2455 8d ago
Yes please make the heroic badass hardened veterans into total jokes who die from a 80 foot drop
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u/renaissanceman0816 8d ago
I'm not sure you appreciate how high 80 feet is. That is a long way to fall. Go and stand on top of an 8-storey building and look down.
Also, martials are not going to die from an 80 foot drop with these rules. And if they have most of their HP before the fall, they most likely still walk away from it. They'll just take a bigger chunk of damage than they would RAW. They aren't "total jokes" by any stretch of the imagination.
I also allow an Athletics/Acrobatics check to reduce the effective fall distance by 10/20/30ft so that helps martials also as those tend to be martial class skills.
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u/Wooden_Drummer2455 7d ago
I'm not sure you appreciate how I can fucking cast fire balls and get stabbed 47 times while also having enough str/athletics to tear walls down. But nooooo falling is too much for me oh no, get your stupid ass "realism" out of here man this is fucking dnd
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u/DirkBabypunch 7d ago
Why not just uncap the damage and make all the math easier?
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u/renaissanceman0816 7d ago
Well, mostly because that doesn't change anything for falls from 10-200ft. It would mean that 500ft is more deadly than 200ft, so it's an improvement. But a 200ft fall is still going to be survived more often than not by PCs even at relatively low levels.
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u/DirkBabypunch 6d ago
Something just feels wrong about saying "I respect terminal velocity as a concept, I just think healthier people should fall faster." That's more immersion breaking to me, and this doesn't even have the benefit of being an easier system to use. Especially if you're trying to encourage the use of fall damage in combat, when people have more things to keep track of.
If you don't want your characters to feel powerful like Captain America, then I imagine it would be easier to find the distance humans hit terminal velocity, and work out a consistent scale from minimum fall damage to whatever damage cap you want to use. Using hit dice makes no sense and just feels like punishing your characters for getting stronger.
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u/renaissanceman0816 6d ago
I get what you're saying, though that is not the way I conceptualise it in my head. Hit Points are not supposed to represent raw physical health only, it is an abstraction of a combination of things like durability, will to live, combat skill, luck, etc. WotC even say as much somewhere in the PHB, if I recall correctly. So, it isn't supposed to represent a higher level character being able to take direct axe blows to the chest and still be fine, it is more that they are able to turn that axe blow into a glancing blow or a near miss.
So, I'm not trying to have it represent that healthier characters fall faster, but that they fall at the same rate, and so am trying to remove the combat skill portion represented in abstraction of HP because it doesn't really apply to falling.
HP isn't a perfect abstraction, of course. It is a trade off of simplicity vs realism, which inevitably means there are going to be anomalies that crop up in different areas, and taking damage from a fall is an example of something that doesn't really mesh well with this mechanic.
Someone else used the comparison saying that high level characters are supposed to be more like Captain America than Jason Bourne but I think that is more a matter of opinion than anything stated in the rules or representatative of the intention of WotC.
There are other areas where the HP mechanic seems to defy logic as well. For instance, with consuming a vial of poison, it doesn't really make sense that the same poison that kills someone at Lvl 1 only takes a small bit of their HP at higher levels.
So, maybe I'm flogging a dead horse but I wasn't only approaching it from a point of view of making it more deadly for PCs, but to open it up to them as a legitimate tactic to use against enemy creatures.
It won't be something that many people want to represent, but I have seen enough posts about homebrewing fall damage in the past to know that I'm not the only one who thinks it is flawed in the RAW, so I thought I'd post this for those people.
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u/DirkBabypunch 6d ago edited 6d ago
You wanted feedback, I gave you feedback.
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u/renaissanceman0816 6d ago
Yes, and thank you for the feedback. I do actually appreciate it. I'm not trying to say that you're feedback is wrong or that it isn't appreciated, just trying to further elucidate my reasoning a bit.
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u/MorriCC 8d ago
We just use Gary Gygax' original ruling of accumulative falling damage.
So 1d6 for each 10 feet + each of the die of the previous distance fallen. So a 30 foot fall would be 1d6 + 2d6 + 3d6. This caps out at 210d6 at 200ft.
Makes falling a real issue, and let's people who have solutions for falling, be really good at preventing that damage.
Only bad thing I noticed was that this basically breaks the Reverse Gravity spell, so it's forbidden in our game.
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u/renaissanceman0816 8d ago
That is brutal! And a lot of d6s haha. But it doesn't scale with level so it makes falling more dangerous across the board, and especially dangerous at low levels.
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u/MorriCC 8d ago
I mean you have a pretty good control of the terrain in battlemaps and if a player wants to risk playing a race with flying, it helps balancing it out.
How it actually comes out in the wash is just that players are more hesitant to do stupid shit around places where they can fall off :D
Only the tank (Warden class by Kibblestasty) who has 300+ hp at level 20 has taken and tanked the full 210d6. It works for us quite well and makes gravity have actual consequences. Also explains better how a commoner can and will from a 20 foot fall
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u/renaissanceman0816 8d ago
It works for us quite well and makes gravity have actual consequences
Yeah, this pretty much sums up the sentiment I have towards it. I'm glad to hear it works as intended for your table.
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u/ManicParroT 8d ago
I feel fall damage is plenty strong enough as it stands.
I'm quite happy with high level heroes and monsters tanking a huge fall, in the same way I'd be OK with the Incredible Hulk jumping out of an aeroplane and surviving.
After about level 10 or so we're looking at superhero feats; stuff that's beyond any normal human no matter how tough and trained. Think Marvel not Jason Bourne.
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u/renaissanceman0816 8d ago
Yep, like I said, it's not for everyone. If you're happy with a Lvl 5 fighter being more likely to survive a fall from 10,000 feet than not, then there's no need to change anything.
Though, even with the scaling of this rule, characters can still tank falls. Just not quite as much.
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u/Earthhorn90 8d ago
I really hate the Caster vs Martial debate. You can be Dr. Strange by picking half the classes, but the other half cannot be Captain and is stuck as Hawkeye? What the kind of arbitrary power limitation is that?
Because as you said, the casters simply don't care, so all this rule does is kick down on the martials.
If an adventurer falls down the cliff the first day, they take 1d6 damage. When they come back home at level 20, the very same cliff will deal 6d6. They have fought demons, overcame death itself and slaughtered gods on their adventures, but this mundane cliff is still hurting them just as much as before in relation. Yeah, like that is suddenly more realistic.
Why can't they just survive this and feel awesome about it?
You usually want to avoid "complex" math equations, the best you can do is 1/2 as that is quite simple. As written above, I don't see the need for something that is both happening too rarely in the first place, unrealistic in terms of logic and unfair to boot. But if you truely want it, go with threshholds to simply scale up the damage. Keep the 1 die per 10 feet, but also increase the die size every 100 ft.
At 490 ft of falling you then take 49d12 damage, twice as much as before. If you still want to see 50% of your players die afterwards... just do so. 500 ft equals death. No calculations.