"I'm finding it very hard to describe credible attacks of greatswords and arrows not outright killing unarmored people"
This is your real issue, right here.
You already dislike how the basic combat is handled, I can guess how you cringe at every time either a peasant of 3rd level survives a massive strike of a sword or the greatword damage results in 2 or 3. Not to mention how a battle between an armored warrior and a monk is looking to you I imagine.
For balance reasons, if you plan to change environmental damage, you should also increase damage of other sources like weapons and spells, and after that increase the AC and maybe damage resistance armors grant to balance that out, then of course give classes like the monk higher AC too.
Sure, it would basically end up right where you started, but currently, the amount of damage you write about is absurd, especially as many low level methods allow people to be thrown off edges or set creatures aflame. Mere fireballs would become obsolete as example.
You want to punish characters for being higher level by them taking more damage in the same situation a low level one would get less, this is something I would call unacceptable.
I'm finding it very hard to describe credible attacks of greatswords and arrows not outright killing unarmored people... let alone being on fire or falling off a cliff.
Amen, brother!
I'll just leave this houserule link here for ya.
It doesn't necessarily solve your environmental damage issues, but it does lead to satisfactory, engaging descriptions for combat damage; and there's ample discussion of other damage types, including falling. There's not a clear-cut answer.
Personally, I dread subjective damage like you suggest here. It just doesn't sit right with me.
Indiana Jones is much more likely to survive falls from a cliff or a fight with a crocodile, or being thrown into a sand/snow storm than a businessman or cop. HP increase per level includes gained experience to handle things, and also represents the growth of characters as heroic/legendary entities which are more likely to survive battles with giants and dragons, and can even win. A hero, a player character is supposed to be harder to kill than a commoner, with or without magic intervention, Because if you make it magic dependent you basically slap with an iron gauntlet in the face of non-casters life Fighter, Rogue, Monk, or Barbarian.
Changing environmental rules you will open up a door to some other ideas, like instead of fighting a player party the giant or dragon mentioned above could just sit on them and kill them outright.
If you think this has nothing to do with you as you are the GM and you control these creatures, let me remind you of spells like Enlarge person, or charm/dominate spells which could be used for similar effects, or outright request a dragon (which has a lot of HD and thus would get a damn huge extra damage based on your own house rule) to jump into death.
The more stronger the enemy becomes, the more likely it is the players will also get rid of them this way.
I'm finding it very hard to describe credible attacks of greatswords and arrows not outright killing unarmored people... let alone being on fire or falling off a cliff....
Then you may want to try a less heroic oriented game. D&D/Pathfinder is anything BUT a realistic similation of real world traumatic combat.
Take a look at the Stormbringer/Runequest/Call of Chthulhu rules for some really lethal combat rules.
After you 4th or 5th character dies in it's second combat or gets a limb ripped off you may decide that a little more resilience is good in an RPG. ;-)
Remember, not every succesful ATTACK is actually a direct strike to an opponents body in Pathfinder. Some are close enough that they are a graze or you feal the weapons air as it passes your ear, etc. These too are loss of HP's. It is only really the hit that puts you negative that has seriously actually hit your meaty parts.
The rules are meant to represent heroic and even superhuman characters and the system is built that way. Reread the section on what Hit Points represent.
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Then you may want to try a less heroic oriented game. D&D/Pathfinder is anything BUT a realistic similation of real world traumatic combat.
...
Remember, not every succesful ATTACK is actually a direct strike to an opponents body in Pathfinder. Some are close enough that they are a graze or you feal the weapons air as it passes your ear, etc. These too are loss of HP's. It is only really the hit that puts you negative that has seriously actually hit your meaty parts.
There is a happy medium. Even without houseruling, describing non-crit damage as parrying (and other abstract defense loss) does the trick nicely, and it is technically Rules-As-Written. HP are defined as abstract in the rulebook.
Parrying a giant's club is still superheroic in nature, but a good bit more believable than the direct-hit interpretation of HP that proliferates for some reason.
Yep. And HP being abstract and describing "non-hits" such as parry and near misses as taking their toll in HP damage is all gravy. I have a hard time coming up with things, but I do try to.
For being on fire, falling, or being submerged in acid/lava or ejected into outer space... these are very hard to swallow as anyone surviving them. This isn't "superheroic" to survive... its truly and exceptionally superhuman, even super-biological, to survive.
Do check out the link above then. Even if you don't adopt the houserule whole, it contains a "dictionary" of sorts for every damage type and suggests ways to describe "abstract" results for each — including flame, falling, bleed, disease, &c.
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With falling damage though... there is no way to describe anything but that you indeed hit the ground with a sickening thud and should really be dead from 100 feet for sure...
Isn't there? You can't say,
"You fall off the edge of the hundred-foot cliffs, grabbing a sapling on your way down; unfortunately, that uproots and you start falling again, scrambling with broken and bleeding fingernails to gain a handhold, or at least slow your fall, along the steep face of the cliffs. Finally, you can't hold on anymore, and tumble the remaining 30 ft. or so along the base of the slope, colliding with boulders and scree as you come tumbling to a stop at the foot of the cliffs. You took points of damage from the fall."
I do that kind of stuff all the time.
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Not to mention the very small number of people who survive falls that should certainly have killed them.
That's the toughest part about abstract HP, not explaining how they survived the damage, but how they avoided it at cost of personal defensive energy (leaving them somewhat more vulnerable to a killing blow).
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See the link of Evil Lincoln, and stop saying something is "impossible". Especially in an RPG game with magic and whatnot. Too much realism can easily ruin a D&D game anyway, you kill off players just twice with the ideas you got and they will consider having an other GM or leave.
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In an open space, a creature was picked up by an elemental, which carried it to 100 feet, and dropped it onto pavement.
"The screaming wind elemental drops you to fall to the pavement, but your grasp on life isn't that slender. Snatching at the flying elemental, you are buyed by the violent backsplash of air from its passage, which slows your fall. Ultimately you lose your grip and fall to the ground... but you land on your feet and are jarred, rather than killed." Remember, just because you can't imagine something, doesn't mean that no one can.
Of course, if you still want this sort of thing to be impossible, there's a simple solution: confine your games to low levels. Check out "E6," for example.
there are professional jumpers, they know how to slow down a fall
When dealing with a magical power your ability to fluff survival should likewise be magical- or at least there is always that possibility.
I am against your possible rules change however because you now take a particular critter and make it a party killer. Sure, any creature can be- but the dev's designed that creature with a certain amount of damage in mind and if you say "that makes no sense, the PC's should just die!" then what you've REALLY done is put them up against something many CR points higher than you originally intended.
Maybe the sand softened the landing, maybe the winds buffeted the guy in a manner that allowed him to survive somehow, maybe he rolled with a lateral impact rather than being dropped from on high straight down like a rock (we are talking about winds here afterall).
But if you just decide "Nope, its a killer" then bump its CR up and also write it into the description of things for them to find on a knowledge check against said critter. Its very much a major revision for anything with that power.
-S
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Your problem isn't that damage is too low, it's that HP are too high. If you're going to have scaling damage so that the same thing kills a fighter regardless of level, why not just simplify and remove the need for extra damage by stopping the HP growth? Also, you should play E6 or a game that uses wound penalties.
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Then play freaking E3. If you want your PCs to be killed by mundane stuff, and you refuse to stretch your imagination past the limits of what seems "realistic" to you, then you should be playing a game in which the heroes are more or less mortal men, not demigods.
Characters of median level and above put Herakles and Chuhullain to shame, so if you don't want to deal with that level of exploit, you shouldn't be playing that level of D&D/Pathfinder.
This, by the way, the elemental picking up creatures to drop them, occurred at level 4
4th level fighter, hp 10 + (5.5 * 3) + 12 (Con and/or favored class) = 38 hp. The 100-ft. fall I referenced above would have reduced him instantly to 5 hp, leaving him one sword thrust away from bleeding out his life. The wizard or sorcerer would likely have died outright, which should suit your sense of "realism."
Evil Lincoln's Strain-Injury rules are cool, but in the end, I only see it as a way to better describe non-lethal damage and can't see myself finding the need to further complicate and already complicated game with tracking different kinds of damage. The healing people receive could just as much be healing their morale/luck and just track the HP all as one still.
Thanks for checking them out! I guess the take-home message is that Pathfinder RAW damage is a lot like it is described in my house-rule; a mix of wounds and abstract defense loss (which can be as simple as distraction).
You can make the falling rules work by placing curtains to rip down from, or some similar more creative answer. It does not work without GM descriptive intervention. It never will. You'd need to rewrite the falling damage rules, and I'm not sure that would make the game better.
It's best to just accept that some portion of HP are not actual physical injury, as it says in the RAW. You don't need to track it separately like I do, but let it inform your description as a GM and you won't regret it.
I have to run a game next week with gargantuan giants attacking PCs with swords the size of telephone poles. They will hit on most, if not all of their attack rolls. The PCs will, in many cases, survive that first hit. I am very, very happy to have an abstract methodology for HP that lets me describe the PCs hurling recklessly out of the way of those attacks, leaving them overwhelmed and unable to deal with the next attack that actually puts them out of the fight.
Falling damage is the same. The only alternative is killing every player who falls 80 feet during the course of the campaign... and then there's no one left.
You missed in the above...
Cross-posted; I replied to your first post claiming level 4, hit reply before the level 6 correction appeared, and then hit submit soon after you did.
Important: There are other, better games in which a fall from a great height is pretty much always fatal. Victory Games James Bond 007 rules simply reference the height of the fall; you compare to a table and see if you're lightly wounded, heavily wounded, incapacitated, or killed outright, and your skill at combat has nothing to do with the outcome. Overall, 007 was an excellent, excellent rule set for the types of games you're describing -- my friends and I played fantasy games using a tweak of those rules for years, and honestly, I preferred that to Pathfinder by a very large margin.
I switched to 3.5/PF for one reason and one reason only -- to play Paizo APs as written. To do so, I've had to be willing to accept the rules for what they are, which is not a model of human protagonists, but of demigod-like heroes. When I want to play games in which fire, large-caliber handguns, and falling from cliffs are lethal, I play different games, because PF ain't it, and isn't meant to be.
@ Evil 16th president of USA: so help me understand the strain/injury mechanic just a little more (I'm sure you're so sick of this by now but thanks in advance).
1. Correct me if I have it wrong, but as I understand it 1st level fighter has 16 hp: 10 for hd, 2 for con, 3 for toughness, 1 for favored class. He gets in his first fight and takes a goblin's axe to the face for max damage (6hp). All of this is considered Strain and goes away in 5, granted he breathes easy and takes a smoke break. Then the next fight he gets nailed with a neg. energy channel requiring a save, he fails, and takes 5hp Injury damage. Regardless of another smoke break, without magical healing he only has a total of 11 hp he can heal up to?
2. Please help me understand what role mundane healing plays; does it heal Injury instantly or what?
3. What's a "Final Blow?"
Believe me Mr President when I say I really appreciate the work so far, clarity you can give me on these points, and that whole Evil Gettysburg Address you gave - it gave me the chills hearing it in history class. Also I apologize if you've already answered these like a million times and I'm just dorkishingly missing it.
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The Alexandrian posted a great article on calibrating your expectations in D&D 3E back in 2007. Everything he says applies pretty well to Pathfinder.
Boiled down in a nutshell, level 1 characters are equivalent to real-world above average humans. At level 3 or 4 you're close to, if not at, maximum real-world performance. Once you hit level 5 you are definitely at heroic fantasy levels (you can represent any of the mortal characters in Lord of the Rings using a 5th-level D&D character).
Beyond 5th level you're literally into super-heroic fantasy on a par with the sort of things you see in The Avengers and other recent Marvel movies.
I'd say you need to re-visit what you expect from Pathfinder in terms of realism and, if the assumptions made by the system don't suit your needs, then adopt one of the variants that have been suggested (like E6) or even switch to a game that represents nitty-gritty realism better (like GURPS).
Trying to recreate a combat/damage system which is both "realistic" and playable is at best a Herculean task. Many grey haired GMs have had similar complaints (including myself and Monte Cook who wrote a nice essay on "The Unscalable Wall of Realism" ) and found that the more "realistic" we made our game systems the more the complexity made the game unplayable. But for what it is worth you may find the following statistics interesting and helpful in yur tweaking of the rules:
The LD50 (50 % of people will die) for falls is 4 stories, or 48 ft, and the lethal does for 90% (LD90) of test subjects is 7 stories, or 84 ft (
The LD50 for burns (any cause lava, fire etc) is 80% of skin (in 2000 it was 30% in the pre antibiotic era my best guess would be 10% or even 5%.
The LD50 for trauma/shock (Probably the best real world analog to being hit with an arrow/broad sword or magic missile) has to do with restoring blood flow to the coronary, cerebral and hepatic arteries within 45mins (the so called golden hour in ER medicine) It is worth noting that this has very little to do which what kind of device caused the trauma be it a great sword, a .45 or a baseball bat.
The odd thing with trauma is the the seemingly random nature in which it claims its victims. One man survives 30+ blows of a baseball bat while another is hit by a baseball and dies instantly. I have personally seen people die in as short as 5 mins from a very narrow penetrating wound and other survive a "through and through" gunshot wound to the chest after walking 10 mins to the ED. The point is that real world trauma- what actually causes death in humans - is very complicated and difficult to recreate by even the most dogged game writer.
@ Evil 16th president of USA: so help me understand the strain/injury mechanic just a little more (I'm sure you're so sick of this by now but thanks in advance).
Further substantial discussion should move to this thread, but I'll answer your questions here under the spoiler:
1. Correct me if I have it wrong, but as I understand it 1st level fighter has 16 hp: 10 for hd, 2 for con, 3 for toughness, 1 for favored class. He gets in his first fight and takes a goblin's axe to the face for max damage (6hp). All of this is considered Strain and goes away in 5, granted he breathes easy and takes a smoke break. Then the next fight he gets nailed with a neg. energy channel requiring a save, he fails, and takes 5hp Injury damage. Regardless of another smoke break, without magical healing he only has a total of 11 hp he can heal up to?
If the goblin's 6hp was a critical hit then the hit from the goblin drew blood. A hit to the face is a tad dramatic, but entirely possible (non-lethal face wounds exist).
If that 6hp was not a critical hit, then the "damage" reflects one of many possible things: the fighter's armor intercepted the blow but now has a big rent in it limiting the fighter's movement or exposing it to a second attack... or the fighter parried the axe out of the way with his own sword, limiting his remaining energy and ability to cope with attacks from other goblins until the end of the fight.
At the end of the fight, if it was a crit, it stays. It's a sopping gash that will only make it easier to kill the fighter (read: fewer hp!) in a subsequent fight. It's as though his max HP has been lowered, because he is wounded he can only defend himself as well as the wizard now.
If it wasn't a crit, he can quickly patch up the armor, or catch his breath, and get the HP back. If the GM is stingy, this "patching" costs him 3 GP as he uses materials or eats his lunch or whatever.
2. Please help me understand what role mundane healing plays; does it heal Injury instantly or what?
Mundane healing works exactly the same as before: treat deadly wounds takes forever and restores an extremely limited number of HP. However, since injury damage doesn't heal on its own (unless the GM says so), it is now necessary — you can't sleep off injuries.
3. What's a "Final Blow?"
The attack that puts you below 0 hp is always counted as an injury (unless it is a nonlethal attack). This is what makes the whole system work. Any attack that is sufficiently deadly to kill the character is a bleeding, persistent wound... and a small percentage of "hits" before 0HP are also wounds, because it is possible to be wounded and remain conscious. But for most damage, (strain) we're explaining how the character lost defensive potential by not being hit.
Believe me Mr President when I say I really appreciate the work so far, clarity you can give me on these points, and that whole Evil Gettysburg Address you gave - it gave me the chills hearing it in history class. Also I apologize if you've already answered these like a million times and I'm just dorkishingly missing it.
A lot of this stuff is in the thread or the doc, but I'm always keen to try new explanations. I'm open to criticism, too. It's not perfect, but it does make me happy as a GM to have this framework for describing damage in a way that's meaningful and evocative. Hope to see you in the other thread!
I'm not saying that it's likely for people to live, but it has happened in real life, and these people are not heroic PCs - they might be 1-3 level commoners, while a 4th level fighter is an entirely different thing.
Anyway, I'm not disagreeing with you. I think some environmental damage should be percentage based (fire, acid), and others (fall) is probably too low, but if it's too high, it can supersede everything as a form of damage and becomes a danger that low level characters CANNOT face.
Failing your Ride check for a quick dismount is a d6 of damage, and you end up prone. An average 1st level commoner has 6 hit points - that means there's a 1 in 6 chance he will go to 0. There is -no- chance of death, though dying from being thrown from a horse is a very real possibility.
There's a lot of stuff that doesn't make sense, but you will go insane trying to find all of it and fix it.
The more I think about it, the more I don't want to unbalance the game, and do want to just have fun with friends, but at the same time, yes it does drive me nuts.
Perhaps instead of scaling damage like that, I need a different two-part fix.
The first part of my fix I think needs to be to adjust how much damage is done from each given height. In reality, 200ft is waay to high to reach terminal velocity. Even making yourself less aerodynamic isn't going to help all that much. The average height is closer to 125 feet. Though its also not "100% realistic" due to the fact that its 25% higher than this, and that people COULD make themselves less aerodynamic... I think I'm going to double the damage per unit of height. So, a fall of 10 feet is now 2d6, and a fall of 100 feet is now 20d6. The maximums are not increased, and it has nothing to do with scaling for level, but it represents how falling is much more of a real danger.
I won't maximize the damage, because THAT is what would represent things like people making themselves less aerodynamic or rolling when the hit the ground, being lucky to land in hay or soft mud, etc.
The second part is a verisimilitude and story description. Maybe anyone over level 5 is "blessed by the gods" even though not everyone is a cleric. It is a world of gods after all, and people that embody strength that may be in line with what they want to happen maybe DO get more lucky in bad situations than in real life where there aren't gods.
As for massive damage... hmm, still not sure if that's balanced or not, since we are saying that HP includes more than just your physicality, but also your luck etc... anyone have opinions on massive damage?
This is NOT a get out message. This is a friendly public service announcement. Try some other games with more lethal damage systems. They exist and you might like them more.
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You missed in the above... the PCs weren't picked up, an NPC CR6 with 72 hp was picked up. 25 damage rolled on the dice isn't even enough for massive damage. So, basically the local thug in a gang of thieves can't be killed by being dropped 100 feet? I think I am allowed to be incredulous about that.This, by the way, the elemental picking up creatures to drop them, occurred at level 44th level fighter, hp 10 + (5.5 * 3) + 12 (Con and/or favored class) = 38 hp. The 100-ft. fall I referenced above would have reduced him instantly to 5 hp, leaving him one sword thrust away from bleeding out his life. The wizard or sorcerer would likely have died outright, which should suit your sense of "realism."
This part jumped at me. Have to reply.
It's another misconception, one that a lot of people seem to have, but a level 6 anything is not a just a local thug. 90% of the people in a setting are 1st level with NPC classes, usually commoners. Another 9% of the world has PC classes, but only goes to 4th, 5th level tops.People with more than 5 levels are the 1%, movers and shakers. A sixth level rogue is supposed to be the local crime boss or at least an elite liutenant or enforcer.
A rogue around tenth level should be one of the best around, leader of his own powerful and far reaching guild. People with more than 10 levels are stupid powerful, and there should be only a handfull of them in a large kingdom or empire.
People at 14 levels or above are capable of destroyng kingdoms and defeating armies by themselves, there should be less than 50 of them in the whole world, including the PCs if they reach that far.
This part jumped at me. Have to reply.
It's another misconception, one that a lot of people seem to have, but a level 6 anything is not a just a local thug. 90% of the people in a setting are 1st level with NPC classes, usually commoners. Another 9% of the world has PC classes, but only goes to 4th, 5th level tops.
People with more than 5 levels are the 1%, movers and shakers. A sixth level rogue is supposed to be the local crime boss or at least an elite liutenant or enforcer.
A rogue around tenth level should be one of the best around, leader of his own powerful and far reaching guild. People with more than 10 levels are stupid powerful, and there should be only a handfull of them in a large kingdom or empire.
People at 14 levels or above are capable of destroyng kingdoms and defeating armies by themselves, there should be less than 50 of them in the whole world, including the PCs if they reach that far.
And this really jumped out at me. I have to very much disagree with this precept. If you dig way way way back into some of the 3.0 and even earlier editions, you'll find that when it comes to populating towns and cities that the population is not 90% unclassed or 1st level NPC. While the majority is fairly low level it is not even close a near totality that 90% represents. This is also broken by the "rule of cool" that places many higher level NPC classed NPC in the PCs way during adventures. Those "royal knights" that somehow have 15 levels of Warrior or even Fighter.
In keeping with calibrating one's expectations Pathfinder and D&D are epic (as in the story telling form not "levels") stories. This game replicates that, people plucking fire from the gods own hands.
If you want to try and take a "realistic" approach to describing why the world isn't overrun with super high level people it's because they get killed quite frequently. Taking the PCs as the exception, just look a how many "high level" things die to their hands alone. In terms of "humanoids" these are the folks with either ambition to grow beyond a simple sheepherder or are those who have been thrust into that circumstance. They also are put up against in the most life threatening risks and quite often die because of it.
The 4th level bandit that got flung skyward is in that class of heroic villain that seeming lives the most implausible of circumstances. If you treat Pathfinder like it is an exaggerated epic one my being to better appreciate what the system is describing. Of course the "heroes" and "villains" of these tales don't actually fall 100 feet with no significant injury, it was likely more like 10 feet at best. And who knows what that air elemental really was. It's a story after all. :P
Rather than polute this thread I made a separate thread, but the basic idea is "it's magic," and I don't mean Magic-as-seen-by-detect-magic, but it's magic compared to our world. Living creatures are powered by energy from a separate dimension of pure light. Maybe higher level creatures have a stronger connection. No need for strange mental contortions to see how they survived that fall.
It's another misconception, one that a lot of people seem to have, but a level 6 anything is not a just a local thug. 90% of the people in a setting are 1st level with NPC classes, usually commoners. Another 9% of the world has PC classes, but only goes to 4th, 5th level tops.
People with more than 5 levels are the 1%, movers and shakers. A sixth level rogue is supposed to be the local crime boss or at least an elite liutenant or enforcer.
A rogue around tenth level should be one of the best around, leader of his own powerful and far reaching guild. People with more than 10 levels are stupid powerful, and there should be only a handfull of them in a large kingdom or empire.
People at 14 levels or above are capable of destroyng kingdoms and defeating armies by themselves, there should be less than 50 of them in the whole world, including the PCs if they reach that far.
The Alexandrian has a great article about this. I highly recommend the reading. It shows how this kind of detail was taken into account when they were still creating D&D 3.0.
EDIT: Just noticed I forgot to add the link... Fixed now -.-'
I'm finding it very hard to describe credible attacks of greatswords and arrows not outright killing unarmored people... let alone being on fire or falling off a cliff....(snip) D&D/Pathfinder is anything BUT a realistic similation of real world traumatic combat.
(snip)
You can cross post this in 100+ reasons Pathfinder is not scientific. :)
In the world I live in, there are rare examples where someone's cute does not open, and they suffer only some sprains and such. The natural laws of science have some gaps and conflicts. Scientists still go to Gravity Hill to try to work that anomoly into their theories. Something is deflecting the waves of gravity possibly. Maybe the skydiver hit a wirlwind that never reached the ground to become a dust devil? In flying encounters, maybe there should be a listing for a massive updraft?
In the world I live in, there are rare examples where someone's cute does not open, and they suffer only some sprains and such. The natural laws of science have some gaps and conflicts. Scientists still go to Gravity Hill to try to work that anomoly into their theories. Something is deflecting the waves of gravity possibly. Maybe the skydiver hit a wirlwind that never reached the ground to become a dust devil? In flying encounters, maybe there should be a listing for a massive updraft?Cases of people falling to terminal velocity and surviving do occur, but that is not the expectation... it is a very rare event. That doesn't help the issue of too high hp in d20 at all. You shouldn't be able to expect a 50/50 chance to survive (roughly speaking) an 80 foot fall unless you ARE a superhero. Yes, you have a very slim chance to if you are a normal person, but you don't expect to.
What explanation is there for a regular person having 28 hp? If 28 hp represents the ability to survive an 80 foot fall half the time, then 28 hp is superhuman. You can call it toughness, luck, morale, or whatever you want. It doesn't matter that it is abstract, the fact is, that 28 hp affords you the ability to survive an 80 foot drop 50% of the time. That's superhuman already, and it doesn't take a level 6 to have 28 hp. You can have 28 hp at level 3.
I think I'm still basically leaning towards just leaving everything else alone, but just doubling all environmental damage... high level characters still can survive long falls, not as easily, but they still can. If fall damage is doubled though, an 80 foot drop does 56 on average damage, which does make you have to be a level that is more appropriately descriptive of a superhero to survive.
The other issue though is being wounded... still working that one out. I never did like that you can only be wounded at exactly 0 hp (wounded and conscious I mean) ... but wounds and vigor has its own issues, a goblin with 24 wound points for example, is ridiculous....
I agree completely regarding falling and environmental damage.
'Changing the Rules' by Michael Hammes is an open content PDF product for d20 games. It essentially replaces many instances of dice of hp damage throughout the d20 rules with temporary Constitution damage. For example, with falling damage, each d6 equals 1 point of Temp Con damage; otherwise all is the same.
I think this is brilliant. It gives realistic danger and consequences while not simply being more of the same (ie MORE hp damage for falls). Recovering Con damage takes greater resources or more likely lots of time. Con damage reduces hit points, which nicely models how major injuries and broken bones would limit your ability to avoid blows in combat. And, of course, if you are reduced to 0 Con (even temp damage) you're dead.
Yes it is harsh. I'm sure the people who attacked your idea of more damage for falling, etc. will be up in arms about this; but it is an elegant solution to what I consider to be a fatal flaw of the game. Hit points can let you dodge, duck, tumble, deflect, and absorb the blows of your enemies like a heavy-weight boxer. They should not let Evander Holyfield survive a straight fall from 80 feet to the ground.
I misspelled chute, sorry.
(opinion)
Green Arrow went from 1st to 10th level as a ranger living on that island. A 10th level character is a superhero.(opinion)