Falling Damage and Falling Objects: Really stupid?


Pathfinder First Edition General Discussion


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Does anyone else feel like the falling object rules in Pathfinder are...Really bad, and nonsensical? Like, they were simplified and abstracted to the point of making absolutely no sense, at all?

Here's an example; A 2x2x2 foot cube of stone would weigh, approximately, 900lbs. This is the VERY BARE MINIMUM to be considered a small object, meaning dropping it from 30ft...Would deal less damage than if you FELL from thirty feet, even thought your character is a lot lighter than 900lbs (I hope).

How about the opposite extreme? Say your character falls 100ft onto the ground, they'd take 10d6 damage. Sounds reasonable and it's not hard to follow the logic. But if you drop, say, a massive battleship that weighs 200 tons onto a character from a height of 100ft onto a character, they would...Also take 10d6. But if you fell from 140ft, say, you'd take 14d6 but a battleship dropped from that height would only deal 10d6 still.

And the maximum damage you can take from falling AND From a falling object is 20d6. On the surface this seems okay, but it's also tied to size, not distance, for the object! So if I drop, literally, a ten ton stone onto you from a thousand feet in the air, the best I could hope for with rules as written is a WHOPPING 8d6 damage for being a large object, even though that amount would turn any human sized being into red goo even if GENTLY RESTED on them, let alone dropped.

Am I insane? Are these rules unbelievably bad and beyond any relation to reality? Fore god's sake, object's smaller than small do NO DAMAGE EVER? So if a cannonball hits you at terminal velocity, it bounces off harmlessly? A sword dropped from an airship that hits you directly won't even scratch you, no damage rolled whatsoever?

What do you think about the falling object rules? Do you use house rules, or come up with your own values on the fly? Do you like them?


Probably shouldn’t attempt to use physics (or derived damage from what SHOULD happen) in the Pathfinder (D&D) game setting. Aside from approximating certain aspects (like strength needed to kick open a door) of how things work in the real world, it is not designed to mimic real world physics. At least, without taking into account other factors, like an average person (real world equivalent) would have between 4 to 7 HP (level 5 and 6 are about maximum human potential) and forces that you are describing would utterly obliterate them either way.

I think falling damage is perfectly ok as it is, keeping the other factors in mind. If you, as the GM, think the damage is too low then change it.


Your ten ton stone is being dropped from above 150 feet so damage is doubled. You're also making a ranged touch to hit, so you could potentially crit. 32d8 seems like good max damage for a 10 ton stone, enough to destroy our cube at least.

Smaller than small gives you an object that's getting more out of your strength than gravity, so it would be used as a weapon rather than a dropped object. It really should still do damage without your help though, but 1d6 doubled to 2d6 for the height is probably fine.

Your 2x2x2 stone cube is small height but large weight. James Jacobs recommends here:
http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2m2hg?Creature-size-and-heightweight
using this chart: http://dungeons.wikia.com/wiki/SRD:Table_of_Creature_Size_and_Scale
to figure general weights and sizes. I think your stone, since we're only looking at its mass, should probably get the large size damage rather than the small one.

It's not perfect, and I don't roll if survival is impossible, but it works as well as anything in a game where you can survive being immolated multiple times.


DeathlessOne wrote:

Probably shouldn’t attempt to use physics (or derived damage from what SHOULD happen) in the Pathfinder (D&D) game setting. Aside from approximating certain aspects (like strength needed to kick open a door) of how things work in the real world, it is not designed to mimic real world physics. At least, without taking into account other factors, like an average person (real world equivalent) would have between 4 to 7 HP (level 5 and 6 are about maximum human potential) and forces that you are describing would utterly obliterate them either way.

I think falling damage is perfectly ok as it is, keeping the other factors in mind. If you, as the GM, think the damage is too low then change it.

Well, I guess I was more asking what other people think of it. I do understand what you're saying, I don't want, or need, the game to mimic real physics. I think what bothers me is how much WORSE of an approximation it is than in D&D 3.5e. In that version, Objects do 1d6 damage per 200lbs of weight, AND per 10 feet fallen, which feels like a really GOOD approximation. And then the Pathfinder one is so much worse, in my opinion, that it seems almsot ludicrous? Do you actually like it, in some way or for some reason?

ErichAD wrote:

Your ten ton stone is being dropped from above 150 feet so damage is doubled. You're also making a ranged touch to hit, so you could potentially crit. 32d8 seems like good max damage for a 10 ton stone, enough to destroy our cube at least.

Smaller than small gives you an object that's getting more out of your strength than gravity, so it would be used as a weapon rather than a dropped object. It really should still do damage without your help though, but 1d6 doubled to 2d6 for the height is probably fine.

Your 2x2x2 stone cube is small height but large weight. James Jacobs recommends here:
http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2m2hg?Creature-size-and-heightweight
using this chart: http://dungeons.wikia.com/wiki/SRD:Table_of_Creature_Size_and_Scale
to figure general weights and sizes. I think your stone, since we're only looking at its mass, should probably get the large size damage rather than the small one.

It's not perfect, and I don't roll if survival is impossible, but it works as well as anything in a game where you can survive being immolated multiple times.

By the normal rules of size, a ten ton stone would be large sized. So it would deal 4d6 normally, but a maximum of 8d6, or if I got extremely lucky, 16d6. But yes, you're right!

I do like some of those rules, I'll look over them again in a bit. I am also fond of the rules from 3.5e itself, as I said. IT feels like a way better approximation.


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LordOfTheFatties wrote:
Well, I guess I was more asking what other people think of it. I do understand what you're saying, I don't want, or need, the game to mimic real physics. I think what bothers me is how much WORSE of an approximation it is than in D&D 3.5e. In that version, Objects do 1d6 damage per 200lbs of weight, AND per 10 feet fallen, which feels like a really GOOD approximation. And then the Pathfinder one is so much worse, in my opinion, that it seems almost ludicrous? Do you actually like it, in some way or for some reason?

Realism-wise, it's stupid.

But I don't think I want my high-level characters to be instantly killed by a rock (whether thrown by a giant or rolled off a cliff by kobolds). And I don't want "drop an anvil on it from a flying carpet" to be an instant win technique against dragons, etc. So game balance might be better the Pathfinder way.


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Poor representation of the physical world... ish. Good game rules? Oh @#$% yes.

So you're absolutely right, objects should do more damage based on weight... and shape, and rigidity, and probably a dozen other factors. It might be worth modeling it but I can't imagine it comes up enough that it'd be worth the dozen pages you'd need for full rules. Their version (does damage for size, does more for denser, falling farther) is a nice quickie version. Now, that being said, it actually makes sense that people would take more damage from falling than from falling objects. "Falling" doesn't mean you jumped off and landed on your feet. It also includes compound fractures, neck and spine injuries, or just going head first into the ground. Honestly, those are probably all more damage than "large object falls on you". They'd probably also best be represented with separate conditions and not just damage but that's a different "realism" problem with HP. Oh, and if you're going to complain here then you also need to complain that a higher level "rolling boulder trap" doesn't actually have to use a larger or heavier boulder but still somehow does more damage.

Why they changed it was because of Hulking Hurler (and did it have any ilk?). If you can get infinitely scalable damage based on weight then Major Creation and an engineer is a tactical nuke. You could actually do the "rods from god" thing (make a giant heavy object in space, bombard planet) but hilariously it would only hurt the single target you aimed at (instead of destroying the entire area around it). Either way it was awful for game balance. I'm quite happy they did away with it even if it makes the game less realistic. Instakills are no fun for anyone.


The last thing I want to do as a Pathfinder GM is try and calculate the weight of an arbitrary large object on the fly so that I know how much damage to deal. Now if we were talking GURPS, . . .


Matthew Downie wrote:

Realism-wise, it's stupid.

But I don't think I want my high-level characters to be instantly killed by a rock (whether thrown by a giant or rolled off a cliff by kobolds). And I don't want "drop an anvil on it from a flying carpet" to be an instant win technique against dragons, etc. So game balance might be better the Pathfinder way.

I suppose. I guess I just preferred the rules before, and it seemed like a lot was lost from 3.5 to here, and for no clear reason.

I am also gonna talk about the "Instant win" thing below, i jsut didn't want to repeat myself.

Bob Bob Bob wrote:

Poor representation of the physical world... ish. Good game rules? Oh @#$% yes.

So you're absolutely right, objects should do more damage based on weight... and shape, and rigidity, and probably a dozen other factors. It might be worth modeling it but I can't imagine it comes up enough that it'd be worth the dozen pages you'd need for full rules. Their version (does damage for size, does more for denser, falling farther) is a nice quickie version. Now, that being said, it actually makes sense that people would take more damage from falling than from falling objects. "Falling" doesn't mean you jumped off and landed on your feet. It also includes compound fractures, neck and spine injuries, or just going head first into the ground. Honestly, those are probably all more damage than "large object falls on you". They'd probably also best be represented with separate conditions and not just damage but that's a different "realism" problem with HP. Oh, and if you're going to complain here then you also need to complain that a higher level "rolling boulder trap" doesn't actually have to use a larger or heavier boulder but still somehow does more damage.

Why they changed it was because of Hulking Hurler (and did it have any ilk?). If you can get infinitely scalable damage based on weight then Major Creation and an engineer is a tactical nuke. You could actually do the "rods from god" thing (make a giant heavy object in space, bombard planet) but hilariously it would only hurt the single target you aimed at (instead of destroying the entire area around it). Either way it was awful for game balance. I'm quite happy they did away with it even if it makes the game less realistic. Instakills are no fun for anyone.

So here's the thing. In 3.5, Damage is not INFINITLY SCALEABLE. it caps out at the same distance falling damage does, 200ft. Objects would deal 1d6 damage per 10ft fallen for every 200lbs in their weeight, assuming they were relatively hard and dense. So any object from 200-399lbs would DEAL the same damage as a person would take, if both fell the same distance.

And you're ignoring all the other rules. Purposefully dropping an object on someone from above is a ranged touch attack, with a range increment of 20ft. That means the maximum falling distance is also the max distance you can actually make attacks from above with falling objects, Before it literally becomes impossible to accurately attack, and is left purely up to chance. That means, besides the hurdle of making something in space somehow, you also can't attack from that distance, any more than you could shoot someone with a longbow from space. It's simply beyond the max range.

So that means the maximum scale for damage is 20d6 for every 200lbs of the object's weight, And that's assuming that it has the 10 range increments of a ranged weapon, not the 5 of a thrown weapon. That also means, you have a -20 to hit.

So...I'm not sure where you get the infinite thing.

The problem, for ME, was not so much that the Pathfinder rules are that bad, but that they're so much WORSE than the 3.5 rules, a rare exception, and for no visible reason.

And as a random last note, Giant's who throw stones aren't dropping them, they're throwing them, with a fixed damage. Being hit with a ranged attack obviously doesn't also take into account falling object damage. That's absurd.


LordOfTheFatties wrote:


I suppose. I guess I just preferred the rules before, and it seemed like a lot was lost from 3.5 to here, and for no clear reason.

Here is a clear reason: To prevent players from trying to exploit rules and play the game as intended. You don't want to encourage someone to make a flying character that carries a bag of holding and fills it with boulders to drop. That shouldn't be on the list of expected encounters. You want a sword and sorcery game, not a physics simulator. Anything that goes outside of expectations should be simplified and not be more rewarding than what you want to happen.

Which explains why tanks are absolute crap in Battletech, because Mechs are the focus of the game. Nevermind that a human shaped tank would just be more vulnerable than a heavily armed cube in the real world, the game focuses around Mechs so they are clearly superior.

And Pathfinder focuses on class abilities and spells, not cleverly taking advantage of dropped rocks to terrorize towns and villages.


If weight isn't limited - and from what I've seen of theoretical carrying capacity builds it really isn't - then damage of 1d6 per 200 lbs. isn't limited either. It's not actually infinite but it surpasses all monster HP so it might as well be.

The mention of dragons above probably relates to their generally poor touch ACs. They'd be vulnerable to bombing by druids carrying small hills.

I think this isn't a useful paradigm to work with. There might be some way to make for semi-sensible bombing rules without changing other parts of the system, but just importing D&D's rule isn't it IMO.


And now we have Mythic Feather Fall to produce similar destruction from on high.


LordOfTheFatties wrote:

So here's the thing. In 3.5, Damage is not INFINITLY SCALEABLE. it caps out at the same distance falling damage does, 200ft. Objects would deal 1d6 damage per 10ft fallen for every 200lbs in their weeight, assuming they were relatively hard and dense. So any object from 200-399lbs would DEAL the same damage as a person would take, if both fell the same distance.

And you're ignoring all the other rules. Purposefully dropping an object on someone from above is a ranged touch attack, with a range increment of 20ft. That means the maximum falling distance is also the max distance you can actually make attacks from above with falling objects, Before it literally becomes impossible to accurately attack, and is left purely up to chance. That means, besides the hurdle of making something in space somehow, you also can't attack from that distance, any more than you could shoot someone with a longbow from space. It's simply beyond the max range.

So that means the maximum scale for damage is 20d6 for every 200lbs of the object's weight, And that's assuming that it has the 10 range increments of a ranged weapon, not the 5 of a thrown weapon. That also means, you have a -20 to hit.

So...I'm not sure where you get the infinite thing.

The problem, for ME, was not so much that the Pathfinder rules are that bad, but that they're so much WORSE than the 3.5 rules, a rare exception, and for no visible reason.

And as a random last note, Giant's who throw stones aren't dropping them, they're throwing them, with a fixed damage. Being hit with a ranged attack obviously doesn't also take into account falling object damage. That's absurd.

No, this is wrong, and the whole reason the Hulking Hurler worked.
SRD wrote:

For each 200 pounds of an object’s weight, the object deals 1d6 points of damage, provided it falls at least 10 feet. Distance also comes into play, adding an additional 1d6 points of damage for every 10-foot increment it falls beyond the first (to a maximum of 20d6 points of damage).

Extra damage from distance is capped. If you can find a way to drop a moon on someone (and they did) then it does a bajillion d6s.

Also you're only quoting half of the rules with falling objects. Intentially aiming at someone is a ranged touch attack. If you aren't aiming it's a DC 15 reflex save for half damage. At least, that's the only way I can parse:

PRD wrote:
Dropping an object on a creature requires a ranged touch attack. Such attacks generally have a range increment of 20 feet. If an object falls on a creature (instead of being thrown), that creature can make a DC 15 Reflex save to halve the damage if he is aware of the object.

I mean, if you drop something it has to hit the ground eventually, right? There's no rules covering it in either game (as far as I know) but any boulder you throw has to hit the ground sometime. And if you're dropping from orbit you can just keep throwing with impunity, few monsters can hit a couple miles away.

Most importantly, the rules you quote for hitting someone with a falling object are Pathfinder rules. As far as I'm aware there are no rules in 3.5 telling you how to actually hit someone with a falling object. You cannot call a rule better if it doesn't exist. You're telling me how great a car with no engine is. Pathfinder is still somewhat vague but at least it's a whole car you can take and drive right away. 3.5 requires that you put in an engine (rules) to make the car go before you can use it. How can that possibly be better?


Since falling damage as well as object damage has never been particularly prevalent in games I have led or played in, I personally don't see problems with the damage scaling. In particular there are aspects of any game which will stretch realism for the purposes of challenge and fair play. If I were to hazard a guess on why fall damage in most instances is a greater threat then falling objects, I would assume it is because in the framework of Pathfinder adventurers should be more cautious that their character will fall from a great height and prepare for this then what amounts to a normal attack against them (ie falling objects hitting them). Since resources are available so that players can mitigate or remove the threat (Feather Fall or Acrobatics to negate the first 10 feet) of dying from falling, they intended falling to have graver consequences then objects falling from great heights. Also I assume many other factors that have already been listed, but that is just my perspective on the design decision.


The Sideromancer wrote:
And now we have Mythic Feather Fall to produce similar destruction from on high.

Yeah, reading the original post on that subject had to make for a fun day in the Paizo office.


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If anyone's interested, Spheres of Power has rules for dropping objects on people.

(Brief Version: Damage is based on the size of the object, with double for hard materials like stone and half for soft materials like cloth. Objects falling a short distance do less damage, objects falling a long ways do more. Regardless of modifiers, damage caps at 20d6. It deals splash damage around the target based on size.)

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