I’d argue that BECAUSE there was a decent chance he would survive anyway, the featherfall is completely and totally fair, and just removes the annoyance of having to find Belkar a bunch of healing potions on an empty mountain.
You seem to be confused. We’re talking about games of Dungeons and Dragons, here. Not 'Toon. A mile high drop, or a bath in a pool of lava, or having a mountain dropped on you, are not survivable things. Letting someone walk away from a drop like Belkar’s had fundamentally breaks the fiction of the setting.
Though they’d already set it up with Tarquin’s drop from the Mechane (however its spelled) – still at full hit points? You’ll live. Belkar was only lightly wounded before his fall, as opposed to Roy who had just been through combat and eaten a Meteor Storm to the face before dropping off Xykon’s zombie dragon. Even Roy was hoping to drink a potion and take minimum falling damage to survive.
Except that he was heading towards a solid, hard road.
On the other hand, since hit points are often considered an abstraction of lots of things (luck, skill at avoiding damage, fatigue effects, and others) besides raw physical durability, you can make the argument that having more hit points than the damage cap for something means the character managed to break the fall/avoid the lava/whatever in some cinematic fashion. They just exhausted themselves/used up their luck to do it.* I have actually tied a Cinematic rule to the Chunky Salsa rule on occasion–“This is a Chunky Salsa situation. Describe an action sequence for us that will get you out of it if you want your stats to save you.” Systems that have Edge/Moxie/Fate points lend themselves to this. My LARP has a similar mechanism for avoiding character death; you can burn some of the points you earn for NPCing, explain how you caught yourself on a root sticking out of the cliff, and you survive the deadly situation with 1 hit point left above the unconsciousness threshold.
The straight-up Chunky Salsa rule is a perfectly valid way to play, though.
*It’s a stretch, but not totally unsupportable, that part of Belkar’s hit points actually represent preparing for the contingency of a deadly fall.
Good point, but OotS is a parody of D&D. It’s often meant to be ridiculous, so including the ridiculous rules about falling damage doesn’t hurt the setting, no more than that one time they found themselves on a hex grid. If you’re running a “funny” D&D game, you can get away with a lot. If you’re trying to do a serious game, stuff like the falling damage rules seriously break things. I mean, look at the Lord of the Rings movies. Remember when Aragorn fell off that cliff when they were attacked by worgs? By strict D&D rules, there’s no way a drop like that would be a serious threat to a ranger of his level. But in the film, when he shows up after the fact all hale and hearty, it looks dumb. Particularly given that there’s about six scenes in total where someone falls from a clearly fatal height, and walks away largely unharmed. (I think that’s why they set Denethor on fire first: otherwise, based on past experience, the audience would spend the rest of the trilogy waiting for him to show up again.)
Yeah, that totally works for me, too, but coming up with a plausible, in-story reason why you didn’t fall the entire distance, and therefore survive, is different from looking at your HP total, shrugging, and just taking the hit because you know the numbers work out in your favor.
Even in the snow, I note, he still wears no shoes or socks.
The Free Parking jackpot rule is extremely common too. Doesn’t mean it’s not stupid.
Barbarians get D12 Hit Die as a class feature. It is explicitly spelled out in the rules that they are capable of surviving more damage than your average mook. If you refuse to accept that the Barbarian gets to use his class features because it’s “unrealistic” but ignore the guy who can teleport people straight to hell, you should not be DM’ing a D&D game.
If you choose to play a non-magical character in D&D, you’re still playing Captain America, not John Smith the Accountant.
To be clear, I was just saying that Belkar surviving the fall would have been believable (perhaps even expected) in the context of OotS. I don’t have any issue with house rules about massive fatal damage and agree that fighting on a crumbling stone bridge over a river of lava loses something when it’ll be 8d6 fall damage and 1d6 burn damage per round until you swim to shore.
Huh.
I guess I should tell my gaming group that a person on the internet told me I’m not allowed to run our game anymore.
It will never cease to amaze me how some people will not only attempt to dictate to others how magical pretend playtime should be arbitrated, but actually insult folks who have fun in other ways.
The Mechane has a large supply. Belkar should have stocked up with several of them. And he would have if the Order did things in anything remotely resembling optimal play. Or course, it would remove a lot of drama and humor if they did, which is why they don’t. But getting things like the FeatherFall item and the Cloak Clasp of Protection from Evil is optimizing, so they’re moving in the right direction.
BTW, Belkar’s fall was probably not more than about 200 feet and probably significantly less. Yes, I know it looks like a lot more, but that was the narrow path down there, not a wide river. Burlew was teasing his fans with that.
The idea that there’s a threshold of damage which nobody can survive is not in any way in tension with the idea that barbarians have more hit points than any other class. Five guys with swords come at a barbarian, I expect him to be able to laugh them off, just like Conan, or Fafhrd, or any of the other fantasy literature antecedents to the class would. But Conan or Fafhrd can’t just throw themselves off towering cliffs and expect to walk away when they hit the bottom. If they did, nobody would take those stories seriously. Likewise, a D&D game where a barbarian can shrug off a mile plunge onto jagged rocks is not something that can be taken seriously. If you’re not playing a serious game of D&D, that’s fine, but just because some people prefer a minuscule increment in the realism of the game doesn’t mean they “shouldn’t be playing it.” That’s just an amazingly asinine, self-centered statement. The only “wrong” way to play D&D is if people aren’t enjoying themselves. If everyone at the table has fun, then they’re playing the game exactly right.
Captain America, incidentally, being someone else who can’t survive mile high plunges onto jagged rocks.
That’s your whole takeaway?
The only time I’ve seen someone fall extreme distances and live was a 4E epic level where the character had one of those ‘The first time you die each day’ things.
Big battle on a 200’ tall tower. Gets pushed off. Falls.
DIES.
Epic thing kicks in, he gets up. Decides tower is too tall for him to climb up and get back into the battle, walks across street to the tavern to have a beer.
Beyond that, characters not dying from ludicrous situations just because ‘it’s D&D’ is NOT actually D&D. If you think it is, you’re not playing the same version of D&D that everyone else is playing, and you’re probably singularly unaware of the death traps and meat grinders that filled Gary Gygax’s version of the game. You know, where this all started.
Cinematic rules say that a fall of that height should be survivable. See, for instance, Captain America casually jumping out of a plane without a parachute, or Indiana Jones landing on a mountainside in an inflatable raft.
Real-world rules also say that a fall of that height should be survivable. People really have survived falls from extreme heights. Yes, it’s incredibly rare, but that’s just because people that high level are incredibly rare. They still don’t do it deliberately, if they can avoid it, because who knows when you might need those HP later?
And according to the D&D rules, falls of that height are also survivable. Falling damage quite explicitly maxes out at 20d6, quite contrary to any supposed “chunky salsa rule”, and high-level martial characters have more HP than that.
So if you’re not going by cinematic rules, and you’re not going by real-life rules, and you’re not going by the printed D&D rules, then just where are you getting that rule from?
We’re not talking about someone who has a magic shield that can absorb a blow from Thor’s hammer, or using an inflatable raft to land on a downslope. Neither are we talking about someone falling and having trees or other cushioning objects break the fall. We’re talking about falling off a cliff and landing on a hard surface…whoosh, splat.
And if you’ve not been lucky enough to play D&D with house-rules, then you really don’t know what you’re missing. One of the cardinal rules of the game is that you don’t just quote rules to the DM as an explanation. If the DM says that a monk doesn’t have the ability to roundhouse kick an Ancient Red Dragon and get a 25% chance of knocking it unconscious, you don’t present him with the rulebook telling him it will work. The DM has made that decision for a reason.
Likewise, if you tell the DM that your barbarian jumped off the cliff but has some special reasons (grabbing exposed tree roots, etc) why he would not die from the fall, you might get a better result than just “Well, the rules say the damage maxes out at 20d6.”
Captain America has a 70-year run so I’m sure there are wacky exceptions, but he usually does not casually jump out of a plane flying so high that he’ll reach terminal velocity before he hits the ground. Either he’s intending on doing something crazily heroic on the way down (which is always successful because he’s the main character), the plane is flying low enough that he won’t die, or the terrain below allows him to somehow arrest his fall. Sometimes he also uses his shield as a glider because comics are wacky.
Cinematic action dictates that characters are mortal, even when they regularly do unrealistic things. They don’t look down at the ground, say “welp, I have enough hitpoints to survive any fall,” and let go of the cliff. Maybe they say, “my god, there’s a painter’s scaffold two stories below. If I time this juuussst right…”
And that’s a lot different. And that’s why it’s a roleplaying game and not a spreadsheet simulator.
As mentioned above, some games have rules that allow for characters to defy death (Edge/Moxie/Fate points). That covers stuff like Indiana Jones landing on a raft instead of dying.
At the end of the day, though, the problem here isn’t falling rules. It’s that some people will look at a group of players they don’t know, who are having fun, and say “You guys are idiots and shouldn’t even be playing this game.”
I honestly don’t care how anybody else plays D&D. My way works for me and the people I play with have fun and have been having fun for years. Who the hell is Grumman to say otherwise?
Since we were talking about “cinematic rules”, I assumed we meant the cinematic version.