Falling damage: all the right angles?

[Christopher]

Re: Falling damage: all the right angles?

 

I have an issue with Hero falling damage. It is not unrealistic, necessarily, but it certainly does not fit in well with the rest of the system.

 

It is certainly true that falling 200 metres will be a very different experience if you fall 200 metres and hit a perpendicular surface or if you do it all rolling and bouncing down a 45 degree slope. It certainly matters a lot given that if you use multiple impacts you will get your defence multiple times.

At 200 meters you propably reached your maximum falling velocity. At that speed hitting water is as deadly as hitting concrete.

You can't just "loose" velocity. Everthing you don't convert into impact damage, you keep for movement along the slope. Everything you don't keep for movement along the slope, you convert into impact damage.

[Manic Typist]

Re: Falling damage: all the right angles?

 

That's a lot of math. You, uh, sure you don't want to use my system for representing multiple instances of defense due to an oblique impact? Can I use oblique like that?

[Sean Waters]

Re: Falling damage: all the right angles?

 

At 200 meters you propably reached your maximum falling velocity. At that speed hitting water is as deadly as hitting concrete.

You can't just "loose" velocity. Everthing you don't convert into impact damage, you keep for movement along the slope. Everything you don't keep for movement along the slope, you convert into impact damage.

 

Belly-flopping into still water would certainly mess you up (although still not quite so much as hitting concrete, it COULD still easily kill you) but if you throw a coin ahead of you (or it the water is nor smooth anyway, like the sea most of the time) and get into a dive position you can survive a terminal velocity fall into deep water.

 

You do not fall down a slope as fast as you fall through air because friction with the ground slows you more than friction with air.

[Sean Waters]

Re: Falling damage: all the right angles?

 

That's a lot of math. You' date=' uh, sure you don't want to use my system for representing multiple instances of defense due to an oblique impact? Can I use oblique like that?[/quote']

 

This is Hero: there is more than one way. It is not a lot of maths anyway, if you look: there are two suggestions and the first just requires you to decide how steep the slope is and use that to determine how many impacts you have on the way down. Having multiple impacts in Hero is not the same as having the equivalent dice in one big impact as you get your defences against each hit, so 8 impacts is like having 8xDEF.

 

This is not meant to be 'real': tumbling down a 45 degree rocky slope may well be deadly: one smack to the skull and that is it. The thing is that I do not care if people survive falls - in fact I generally want them to in a RPG. Falling off something is rarely a heroic way to go.

 

Your suggestion is fine, if no less maths-y, it does mean that you wind up with a single die roll, which is quicker. Your way a character would take less stun and more body than my way. Depends what it is you are after.

 

I certainly understood your use of 'oblique'

[Christopher]

Re: Falling damage: all the right angles?

 

Belly-flopping into still water would certainly mess you up (although still not quite so much as hitting concrete' date=' it COULD still easily kill you) but if you throw a coin ahead of you (or it the water is nor smooth anyway, like the sea most of the time) and get into a dive position you can survive a terminal velocity fall into deep water.[/quote']

I think you forget one important factor about water:

Water can't move out of the way fast enough. It would really, really like too but you just leave it no time for that. When the waters does not moves, your skin and bones will.

 

Mythbusters once shoot a gun into water. The result was, that the bullets not even made 1 meter after impact. Most of them were destroyed by hitting the surface.

[Sean Waters]

Re: Falling damage: all the right angles?

 

I think you forget one important factor about water:

Water can't move out of the way fast enough. It would really, really like too but you just leave it no time for that. When the waters does not moves, your skin and bones will.

 

Mythbusters once shoot a gun into water. The result was, that the bullets not even made 1 meter after impact. Most of them were destroyed by hitting the surface.

 

Saw that - very cool, but there is a lot of difference between a person falling at 60 metres per second and a bullet travelling at 900 metres per second. http://kwc.org/mythbusters/2005/07/mythbusters_bulletproof_water.html

 

I'm not saying you would enjoy hitting water but, as opposed to a solid, the forces involved will definitely be less. You will still take damage, probably even fatal damage, but it will definitely be less. You would need to hit at the right 'body angle' i.e. feet first or in a dive position, and the surface would need to be disrupted (to reduce surface tension), and it will hurt, but it is do-able. The falling chart in Hero is very good on the time and distance that you fall: you will reach 60m/s (or about 140mph) in about 6 seconds and 210 metres. Mind you you can control your speed a bit. ideally, fall like a parachutist (i.e. spread out) to minimise terminal velocity (it will save you about 20mph, perhaps, or reduce terminal velocity by about 10m/s). You don't want to HIT like that but it will slow your falling speed a little if you can tuck just at the last second.

 

Also you can potentially slow yourself it you are wearing your trusty cape Wingsuits can slow vertical freefall to 25mph! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingsuit_flying - although you will be moving at a considerable lick horizontally, that would make a water landing easily survivable.

 

The thing is that even if you decelerate over a few feet to zero, the forces are a lot less than decelerating over no feet at all. This is also why, incidentally, someone wearing armour would get little or no protection from falling damage*: it is all about change in velocity over time, or deceleration, and the only difference would be that the person in armour would squish against the inside of their armour rather than whatever they hit.

 

*/Rant On AND STANDING ON A BLOODY SHIELD will not protect you from a fall either, goddammit! /Rant Off

[Christopher]

Re: Falling damage: all the right angles?

 

People have died from as little as 20 meter falls (wich means less than 20m/s falling speed):

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080428144625AAfwm08

 

Unless you are a super, there is no chance to surive a fall at 60m/second.

[Ragitsu]

Re: Falling damage: all the right angles?

 

The outcome also depends on how "larger-than-life" your campaign is.

[Christopher]

Re: Falling damage: all the right angles?

 

The outcome also depends on how "larger-than-life" your campaign is.

Yes, the Soft Water from Holywood. Funny that the trope page describes how really dangerous it is:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SoftWater

[Sean Waters]

Re: Falling damage: all the right angles?

 

People have died from as little as 20 meter falls (wich means less than 20m/s falling speed):

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080428144625AAfwm08

 

Unless you are a super, there is no chance to surive a fall at 60m/second.

 

People have broken their necks falling over and people have survived terminal velocity falls (not many, I'll grant you, but they have - and also there have usually been some special circumstances). There was a window cleaner recently (well in the last couple of years) who survived a 47 storey fall (OK that won't quite be terminal velocity, it is about 150 metres so you are 'only' doing 50m/second not 60!) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jan/04/usa

 

A Heroic character with 8pd and more than 12 Body should survive a terminal velocity fall, at least for a short time, just using average damage values and the rules as they stand. Such a character will be at -12 Body and dying, but they survived the fall, and could live if they got immediate medical attention. In Hero, anyway.

[Christopher]

Re: Falling damage: all the right angles?

 

There was a window cleaner recently (well in the last couple of years) who survived a 47 storey fall (OK that won't quite be terminal velocity' date=' it is about 150 metres so you are 'only' doing 50m/second not 60!) http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jan/04/usa.[/quote']

From the article yo quoted:

"The death rate from even a three-storey fall was about 50%, Barie said, and people who had fallen more than 10 storeys almost never survived."

And don't forget that his brother who fell the same lenght died on the spot.

[Lucius]

Re: Falling damage: all the right angles?

 

I seem to remember, in my childhood, an article of playground equipment we called a slide.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Falling from a palindromedary

[Christopher]

Re: Falling damage: all the right angles?

 

I seem to remember, in my childhood, an article of playground equipment we called a slide.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Falling from a palindromedary

That a playting, just small enough that you can't rotate on it wile sliding. It has a very limited height and you normally don't start sliding on it after falling 40m.

[Markdoc]

Re: Falling damage: all the right angles?

 

At 200 meters you propably reached your maximum falling velocity. At that speed hitting water is as deadly as hitting concrete. You can't just "loose" velocity. Everthing you don't convert into impact damage' date=' you keep for movement along the slope. Everything you don't keep for movement along the slope, you convert into impact damage.[/quote']

 

Just a note: people keep saying "hitting water is as deadly as hitting concrete", but it is not true. It is true that hitting water at terminal velocity is very likely to be fatal, anyway - but your average-sized person will be doing 95% of terminal velocity after falling 200 meters, and there are documented cases of people falling/jumping more than 200 metres and surviving. Just not onto hard flat surfaces.

 

Far more frequently, people survive falls taht would always be fatal onto hard surfaces if they land in the water. For example, around 30 people are known to have survived jumping the 70-odd metres off the golden gate bridge into the sea. I know of no-one who's survived free-falling 70 metres onto concrete - still less, surviving it fully conscious, functional and with only some bruising.

 

However in every case, people who have fallen great distances survived by landing on a surface that was softer than concrete (or earth, for that matter) and often sloped (it's also incorrect that the angle of the slope is irrelevant: it's very relevant). What determines the amount of injury someone sustains is how rapidly the accumulated energy from the fall is discharged - and into what. If you jump 50 metres onto concrete, you'll go splat as all that energy is translated into tissue deformation in your body (and a teeny bit into deformation of the concrete) over less than a second. If you jump 50 metres into water - which professional high divers do - and you have a decent chance, as as most of that energy is translated into deformation of the water (and a bit into deformation of your body) over a period of a few seconds.

 

Of course height has an effect - accumulate enough speed (kinetic energy) and even if most of it is transferred into the water, what's left over is still going to maim you, which is why high divers stop around 40-50 metres.

 

Likewise, if you fall and land on a sloping surface, only some of that energy is diverted into deformation - by definition. If it was all converted, you'd stop moving. You get some more conversion on your next bounce, and so on. Your body can survive multiple small deformations far better than one large one.

 

Like Sean, I deal with this by simply splitting the damage up - I don't do it by angle, but simply by number of bounces, which I simply estimate by rule of thumb, depending on surface, angle of slope, etc. I should point out that is not - at all - accurate. In real life, most of your energy is transferred on the first bounce, and progressively less on each subsequent bounce, but that's too much math for a situation that occurs rarely. In this case, the unrealistic way is an easy way to deal with the situation and it's "reasonably" correct.

 

Something that's much more common is falling onto different surfaces. Here I rule of thumb it again, with the idea (inaccurate, but good enough for my purposes) that humans are mostly water and therefore deform like meat bags of water. So if you fall into water, you split the damage equally - essentially, you take half, the water takes half. For hard surfaces like earth, iron or stone, you take 100%. Everything else is in between. For a fall of 200 metres, a fall into water is still going to kill your average human outright. Even a really, really tough guy is going to be critically injured, unconscious and drowing, but as in real life, you take less damage falling on something soft (or breakable) than falling on the ground, and it works with falls from any height.

 

cheers, Mark

[Bloodstone]

Re: Falling damage: all the right angles?

 

Presumably, if a character tumbles/slides down a steep enough surface, they will still take some sort of falling damage.

 

But...is there an angle they can coast down on and land without hurting themselves? Are any special traits needed to pull off this stunt?

 

It depends on a lot of factors.

 

How controlled is the initial tumble?

 

Did the ground they were standing on just drop from under them and turn into a slide or are they hitting this slide with some serious momentum behind them?

 

Are the characters wearing any sort of protective gear at all?

 

I can do a fall down a flight of stairs and take no appreciable damage because I've got the training to do that particular trick. Of course, that doesn't mean that if I slip and fall down a flight of stairs it's not going to hurt. One is a controlled stunt the other is a accident that I'm not prepared for...

 

Generally speaking, sliding down a smooth surface like glass (or the nice waxed floor of a shattered office building) will inflict little to no damage. Might not want to do it in shorts and a tank top though... by contrast, the abrasion from something like concrete will tear up your up pretty good if you aren't wearing appropriate gear. Thick, properly padded clothing like a motorcycle jumpsuit will prevent the worst of it though. There are things I imagine you generally don't want to do in the process of such a slide, like try to slow yourself with your bear hands or flip over so that you are face down... that's going to leave a mark...

 

Of course, in a cinematic campaign, concrete might inflict no damage from being slid across, other than maybe some cosmetic effects like shredded jeans and slightly bloodied up hands or elbows. Probably some dust kicked up on the heroes face for good measure. Heck, how many movies have featured the hero slipping down the side of a mountain, crashing into a pool of water (usually with majestic shot of him in free fall next to a waterfall) and walking away completely unharmed?

 

Mind you, I'm only talking about a clear, relatively controlled and unobstructed slide. Hitting something on the way down or twisting the wrong way can certainly inflict harm, though I think minor obstructions like small tree branches and such can be ignored.

 

So if this is just a cool action hero stunt that you expect to come up from time to time, I'd probably just figure out how difficult I want it to be, request a Breakfall/Acrobatics/DEX roll and let anyone pull it off competently safely on a good roll. Fail the roll, and you take some falling damage in the process. And of course if you then fall off something at the end of the slide you have to worry about the impact with the ground that come after, so possibly another bit of falling damage afterwards.

 

Now, all that said you might want to check out the rules in the Ultimate Speedster on Uncontrolled Movement. Pretty detailed stuff in there, but it might be more than what you are looking for.

 

Along those lines, you can always buy some very limited defenses only to protect against Skidding/Crashing damage, some limited Flight to more quickly reduce Uncontrolled movement and/or you can grab some Environmental Movement so you can act without penalty while skidding about (as seen in the Uncharted clip where Nathan is firing his gun quite competently while sliding to his doom...)... but I'm not sure this sort of thing would come up often enough that I would want to charge my players points for it.

[Lucius]

Re: Falling damage: all the right angles?

 

That a playting' date=' just small enough that you can't rotate on it wile sliding. It has a very limited height and you normally don't start sliding on it after falling 40m.[/quote']

 

I have Ragitsu on ignore, so I didn't see the original post. I wasn't aware we were discussing a situation of falling 40 m straight down onto an angled surface.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary didn't tell me.

[gojira]

Re: Falling damage: all the right angles?

 

I know of no-one who's survived free-falling 70 metres onto concrete - still less' date=' surviving it fully conscious, functional and with only some bruising.

 

Just FYI:

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/12/nyregion/12fall.html

[Markdoc]

Re: Falling damage: all the right angles?

 

Just FYI:

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/12/nyregion/12fall.html

 

Already knew about it, and had it figured into my post.

 

There's two likely reasons he survived, both cited in the article you linked to. First, it wasn't free fall - the platform they were on fell, so they were going down fast, but not free-fall speeds. Secondly, the survivor landed on the platform, which had shock absorbing material on the underside. His brother, who fell or jumped off, it may be noted, did not survive.

 

That the guy survived, even with the tiny edge that remaining on the platform gave him, is little short of a miracle. But I still know of no-one who's survived free-falling 70 metres onto concrete

 

In the other incident cited, the guy who survived a 17 story fall also did not land on the concrete, but on an awning, which at least partially broke his fall (which is one thing that they are designed to do, generally).

 

In my own experience I saw a guy (a drunken student) sit on a balcony railing and then fall off before anyone could get to him. He only fell about 15 metres, but he landed on his head - on a concrete walkway. He also survived - he wasn't even that badly hurt, at least to initial examination - because he also landed on an overhanging glass roof before hitting the walkway and the glass panel broke away, as it was designed to do. I should note that although these things are made of shatter-proof glass: the panel was still in one piece after falling 4 metres to the walkway - it had a clearly head-shaped impact area with crazed glass where this guy hit it. Had he fallen simply directly to the walkway, I am certain he would have died. Edit: and not just died, but popped his skull like a grape ...

 

Concrete is not a landing-friendly surface.

 

cheers, Mark

[Sean Waters]

Re: Falling damage: all the right angles?

 

I have Ragitsu on ignore, so I didn't see the original post. I wasn't aware we were discussing a situation of falling 40 m straight down onto an angled surface.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

The palindromedary didn't tell me.

 

That has to be inconvenient. I'll see if I can copy all his posts for you.

 

Lucius?

 

Lucius?

 

Is this thing on?

[Lucius]

Re: Falling damage: all the right angles?

 

That has to be inconvenient.

 

Well, it was a choice between minor inconvenience and terminal annoyance.

 

Lucius Alexander

 

Is this thing on?

 

You have reached Palindromedary Enterprises. All of the palindromedaries are busy falling onto angled surfaces right now....

[Sean Waters]

Re: Falling damage: all the right angles?

 

Cool: empirical research!

[Bloodstone]

Re: Falling damage: all the right angles?

 

I wasn't aware we were discussing a situation of falling 40 m straight down onto an angled surface.

 

Actually, the OP doesn't mention falling 40m (or any other distance) and then sliding down an angled surface.

 

As far as I can tell, he was just talking about sliding/rolling down a hill or other angled surface and applying damage from doing so.

 

The video link he posted to illustrate what he was talking about:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=WZOQsdzXx8Q#t=0s

 

The falling straight down and then impacting an angled surface is an entirely separate (though interesting) side conversation...

[Sean Waters]

Re: Falling damage: all the right angles?

 

Actually, the OP doesn't mention falling 40m (or any other distance) and then sliding down an angled surface.

 

As far as I can tell, he was just talking about sliding/rolling down a hill or other angled surface and applying damage from doing so.

 

The video link he posted to illustrate what he was talking about:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=WZOQsdzXx8Q#t=0s

 

The falling straight down and then impacting an angled surface is an entirely separate (though interesting) side conversation...

 

Very cool, although any pretense at anything more than cinematic realism is lost when someone catches themselves one-handed like that and then someone else pulls them up one handed.

 

The Hero is never meant to actually fall, which is where, as story-tellers, we have to worry less about realism, or possibly more. Characters in scripts only die if they are meant to. If the idiot player rolls an 18 then he goes over and the GM has to either say: Sorry you are dead, or find some way to justify them not only surviving but being able to carry on the adventure.

 

Oh, and they probably shouldn't have picked that woman up like that. I'm just saying.

[Bloodstone]

Re: Falling damage: all the right angles?

 

Very cool' date=' although any pretense at anything more than cinematic realism is lost when someone catches themselves one-handed like that and then someone else pulls them up one handed.[/quote']

 

Well, Nathan Drake is supposed to be an amazingly skilled climber, so he's got mad grip and upper body strength:

 

 

[Christopher]

Re: Falling damage: all the right angles?

 

Actually, the OP doesn't mention falling 40m (or any other distance) and then sliding down an angled surface.

 

As far as I can tell, he was just talking about sliding/rolling down a hill or other angled surface and applying damage from doing so.

 

Well, the title still is: "Falling damage: all the right angles?" And it was not about direclty hitting the ground, but hitting a slope.