In most games, damage from falling is an afterthought, and tends to follow the formula of a small amount of damage every 10 feet, capping at 100 feet. Falling is simply an inconvenience, and players are more worried about getting back up to where they were before they fell than the consequences of that sudden stop at the bottom. Now, if you want everyone to be able to leap off a building and hit the ground in a Terminator-esque crouch, only to rise up and continue kicking ass (and possibly stealing clothes), read no further. If you want to inject some realism into the nature of falling, here are some ideas.
First, some benchmarks for falling onto hard surfaces: at around 25-30 feet (8-9 meters) is when serious injuries begin to manifest. Death is rare, but possible, though fractures and organ damage are likely. At around 50-60 feet (15-18 m), death is very likely. Beyond that distance, there isn’t a strong correlation between mortality and the height of the fall. What this means is that while falling damage doesn’t have to max out at 50 or 60 feet, it should be enough to more than likely kill someone. Additionally, at 25 or 30 feet, the amount of damage should be enough to produce debilitating injury. If the system for health you use only tracks wounds in an abstract manner, you may want to consider adding more descriptive wounds, as discussed in the latter part of the Death By a Thousand Cuts article.
Another factor to consider is the surface onto which a person is falling. Damage is caused by sudden deceleration; the harder the surface, the less it deforms, and the less time the body has to absorb the force, resulting in more damage. The above numbers are for hard surfaces such as concrete, stone, or metal. Softer surfaces, such as deep water, snow, or soft ground, will cause less trauma from the same height, but still have the potential for serious injury. This can be represented by the fall causing less damage or a less severe type of damage.
Undoubtedly, the most important factor in surviving a fall is the orientation of the body when it hits the ground. Falling on your head from even 10 feet up is worse than landing on your feet from 30 feet up. Some of this is determined by the nature of the fall itself – being tossed off a ledge is going to be worse than an intentional jump. The worst way to land is inverted (head first); landing prone (face down) is not quite as bad, supine (face up) slightly less bad, lateral (on your side) slightly better than that, and upright (feet first) being best of all. From a high fall, there may also be a bounce, so a secondary impact also has to be considered. To represent this in a system, some sort of roll involving athletic or acrobatic skills can be allowed to land in a less disastrous position, or to roll when hitting the ground, helping to dissipate some of the energy. Success with this roll should reduce the disastrous consequences of the fall, allowing nearly certain death to be avoided by good luck. Landing in a worse position can be reflected by targeted damage to the head, vital organs, and/or arms. Even the most favorable position may call for targeted damage to the legs.
Another factor to consider is damage to any object that is fallen onto. While landing on concrete may not cause significant damage, landing on a car can collapse the roof at the least. The easiest way to handle this is to invoke Newton’s third law of motion and give the same damage to the object or surface as if it had fallen that same distance, with the landing surface considered to be the thing that had actually fallen. Consider a flesh-and-blood person to be a soft surface; if a person falls 50 feet onto another person, they’ll both take damage equal to falling 50 feet onto a soft surface (although they may have different orientations at impact, as the point of impact on a person standing erect is the head). However, if a person falls 50 feet onto rocks, the person will take damage equal to falling 50 feet onto a hard surface, and the rocks will take damage equal to falling 50 feet onto a soft surface (not likely to be worth considering).
As a result, these same rules can be used to calculate damage from something of significant weight falling from height onto a person. In this situation, the best orientation a person can hope for (assuming the falling object isn’t avoided) is lateral, as taking the impact feet-first isn’t a possibility. A person who has concrete fall on them from 30 feet up will take as much damage as falling 30 feet onto concrete. Note that when a person is involved in the damage from falling (either by falling themselves or having something fall on them), heights past 50-60 feet can be treated the same, as they are not significantly more dangerous despite increased velocity. When it’s necessary to determine damage to objects more durable than people, from objects that are more durable than people (such as concrete falling onto a car), damage can be increased for more height or more weight. A good rule of thumb is that greatest amount of damage that one of the objects can withstand is the most that the other will take. Fragile items can’t impart much force.
Large Polyhedron Collider 
Directed here from Shortymonster, wanted to toss my two cents in. I like what you’ve done here, though there’d be a bit more work to figure out exactly how to apply the benchmarks you’ve laid out. For example: by my reckoning, D&D 3.5 needs to have *less* damage for falling.
Here’s my thinking, based on some assumptions that I feel are inherent to 3.5.
The typical person in 3.5 is a 1st Level Commoner, giving them an average of 3hp, 6hp on the high end. A battle-trained warrior will have 5hp, 10hp on the high end. A person will have plus or minus 1hp if they’re particularly tough or fragile. An exceptionally tough, battle-trained guy might have as much as 15hp. By 3.5 rules, a creature takes 1d6 damage per 10 feet fallen, to a maximum of 20d6 at 200ft or above. Minimum damage is 1 (up to 20 at 200ft), average or expected damage is 3 (up to 70 at 200 ft), and maximum damage is 6 (up to 120 at 200ft). A typical (3hp) person is expected to be at 0 hp after a 10ft fall; a creature at 0 hit points is considered dieing and probably only has a few minutes to live, unaided. Even if you assume a roll of 6 indicates landing on your head, this feels extreme.
A creature can reach a negative score equal to their CON score (10 for regular people) before they are simply dead (no chance for medical aid). For a regular person, that means that 13 damage is absolutely fatal; that’s almost possible on a 20ft fall (12 max), is expected at about a 40ft fall (14 expected), and is guaranteed at a 130ft fall (13 minimum).
If we demote falling damage to d4s, the numbers become: Minimum damage 1 to 20, expected damage 2 to 50, and maximum damage 4 to 80. A regular person is expected to take severe injury from a 10ft fall but probably won’t die; they could die absolutely from about a 30ft fall (12 max), will likely die from a 60ft fall (15 expected), and will die from a 130ft fall (13 minimum).
The issue of falling damage not meaning anything comes from the fact that people measure the game from the perspective of PCs, and expect to calibrate the world based on what a PC is capable of, but this fails to recognize (1) that PCs aren’t regular people, and (2) regular people rarely make 2nd Level, let alone 8th or 12th. A 12th Level PC can be expected to have on the order of 54hp (depending on class, etc) and so could walk away from a 200ft fall — but a 12th Level PC is also on par with Hercules, killing Hydra and Dragons.
Sorry, this is a long, system-specific tangent attached to your well-done, system-agnostic post.
I appreciate the post, Jack, and look forward to reading your blog. Hit points are probably my biggest pet peeve in RPGs. I already made a post about it (linked in this post), so I won’t reiterate it, except to say that I think the concept of hit points and the ideas presented in this post are mutually exclusive. A lot of games take their cue from D&D, including regarding falling damage, and I think that’s a shame in any game that is not supposed to encourage the same play style as D&D. That’s the reason I started researching it in the first place.
I think the scaling is extreme with D&D, and so calibrating a realistic system to a 1st level commoner is a futile exercise, because things get well beyond the initial bounds so quickly. As you pointed out above, a 1st level warrior can have twice the hit points of a commoner, and at second level, that warrior can have four times the hit points. Establishing a system whose bounds can easily by surpassed up to four times by a character means that you might as well not have a realistic system at all.
I agree with you in large part; hit points are one of the things I’m still wrestling with. Unlike the rest of the 3.5 system, I’m not yet *sure* that there’s a rational way to frame it, especially in terms of increasing hp vs static damage. Its been said that hp is just a tool Gygax used to make combat play out the way he wanted it to, and maybe there’s nothing more to it, but I haven’t given up yet.
I think that measuring the system based on an average commoner is appropriate, because he’s the Everyman and of the system is realistic for him than it should be realistic for everyone. I think tossing it out because Class X *can* have twice as many hit points is, at best, throwing the baby out with the bath water. The system has extremes that need to be resolved, but unlike character generation life isn’t based on dice; a tough soldier is tough because of natural talent and intense training, not because he got a lucky roll. It’s unreasonable to say that 1 in 10 soldiers is going to be übermensch just like its unreasonable to expect that 1 in 10 will have a single hp. But there’s a longer discussion there.
Finally (sorry, I do go on…) the D&D system DOES have a huge scope, from regular people up through the gods themselves. I prefer to stick in the first few levels myself and play “regular people”, but the fact that the system CAN model more is a strength in my opinion. Arguing whether characters at 6th or 12th level are “realistic” borders in silly, because there are probably few people in the world that qualify as 2nd or 3rd. No one complains that Hercules isn’t realistic, because demigods are beyond that.
If you stick to the first few levels, I could see how calibrating on a 1st level commoner would be beneficial. Although the 3.x system can model a wide range, I don’t think that it does it well. In my experience, there tends to be a sweet spot in the middle levels (maybe 6-10). Before that, the result of the die outweighs the bonus, and after that, the opposite occurs. At low levels, nontrivial tasks depend mostly on luck. At higher levels, the result of the die matters less and less, and the gap between “impossible to fail” and “impossible to succeed” narrows.
Except for the monsters within your CR, of course, but I have a whole other beef with D&D combat in general, and 3.5 specifically.
The way I see it, calibrating to a 1st Level Commoner allows you to establish a world with rules that are meaningful to the majority of folks. If basic DCs are set so that characters of lower quality than PCs are always failing then the world is unsustainable (or everyone is PC-quality, which has it’s own issues). I think individual groups may have a sweet spot, but I don’t think the system does. I like Levels 1-3 because I like gritty, regular-joe type adventures, but that doesn’t mean I get upset that a 12th Level character is hardly phased by my adventures. They should be on 12th Level adventures.
To that point, yes, higher level characters are going to be better at doing things, to the point where they hardly ever fail at common tasks. No one expects Hercules to have trouble opening a stuck door or jumping over a fence. So you stop paying attention to the stuff mythic character don’t have to worry about (the same way we don’t roll to see if my character can walk down a level hallway without stumbling) and you focus on the things that are challenging. These should either be Impossible Tasks with DCs so high that “mere mortals” could never accomplish it, or have such major penalties that the odds of success for anyone but a mythic hero are almost none. This makes the bonuses that a PC has meaningful, and since the world is calibrated to mundane folks those high bonuses allow the high-level PCs to do amazing things.
To your last point, I think there’s an absurdly unbalanced focus on combat in D&D in recent editions, and I think a lot of people approach the mechanics in dysfunctional ways, but I don’t think I have a problem with the combat system per se though sometimes I want Initiative to work differently).
I don’t think that the focus on combat in D&D is recent or unbalanced – it’s pretty much inherent in the genre. My problems with the combat system are outlined in my other posts.
Older editions had much more baked in to them regarding exploration and treasure hunting; you fought monsters as obstacles to get to treasure. In 3.X, if not beforehand, the bulk of XP and advancement comes from killing monsters, so that becomes the main focus of the game. 4E is little more than a tactical miniatures game as far as the rules are concerned. but that’s neither here nor there.
Your Combat posts have been on my to-read plate for a while now; just overloaded on other things so far. I look forward to finally getting to them…
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I like the simple rule you give of the damage done to the falling object could be counted as the damage dealt to the object dropped upon. It makes quite a good bit of sense and is a nice bit of rule of thumb.
Thanks. I tend to naturally complicate things, so I have to make a conscious effort to simplify.