So a few questions came up while designing a "Lancer" inspired character for leaping in and out of battle. At first it was very simple "Would I take falling damage for leaping 20' towards an opponent, seeing i was airborn for 20'" Then it became 30', and here is where the questions started.
No jump can exceed your maximum movement in a round. Assuming that takes into account running that's 4x your base speed, if not 2x your base speed. We'll work with the idea 2x is your max for the current situation, and if it is 4x your speed we'll address that later.
Every 10' over base 30' movement you get a +4 Acrobatics. Heres where the tricky stuff started.
Assuming a Ninja with a 2 lvl dip into Kineticist. We take Air's Leap. Now we're jumping twice the distance of the resulted roll. Take a point of burn and we're multiplying that by 4 instead. Add in a Rod of Balance and your doubling that distance again, and adding +10 to your roll. Acrobatic Master from Ninja grants +20 to your rolls. High Jumper halves the normal DC for jumping high. Assuming level 10, without Dex your looking at +43 without feats as well. Assuming a 10 on the roll 53, so that would give a 25' jump up. With the rod and Aerokineticist your looking at 125 up from 5x distance, unless the wording on those skills is 4x then 2x that distance.
Assuming a jump of 125' up would you take falling damage on the landing?
Branch Pounce lets you deal falling damage to an opponent, would jumping straight up and landing on your opponent result in said damage being dealt to them?
Im sure the response will be "You take this damage as well", sure but if you have the skill unlock in Acrobatics you can lessen fall damage if you can roll high enough. With Boots of the Cat im softening my landing even more if I fail the check.
If I exceed the check and negate my falling damage, would my opponent still take falling damage from Branch Pounce?
TL/DR Jumping high, landing on people. Does jumping extremely high result in falling damage. If I can negate my falling damage, would an opponent hit by Branch Pounce still take that damage?
Boot's of the Cat treats the falling damage (which you both take) as if the GM rolled a 1 for each die. It probably the worst way tho reduce your falling damage.
Abilities that make you take less dice of damage might work; the feat seems to set the precedent that the opponent still takes all the dice, even if you don't.
So would you say jumping that high would result in falling damage?
falling 10ft or more triggers falling damage. If you jump up 10 ft and then fall 10ft you fell 10ft and would have damage when you landed.
@Chess Pwn
So your saying jumping up 125' would result in a "falling distance" of 250, resulting in falling damage of 24d6?
no, jumping up 125 ft would result in a falling distance of 125, which is 12.
Though it's pretty impossible to jump 125 up as the movement cap would hit in, And I'm not aware of anything that increases that cap.
Wouldn't Kineticists Air's Leap, and a Rod of Balance increase your distance by more then your movement cap?
I don't believe you take falling damage from a high jump (assuming a successful jump check).
If you fail by 5 or more, you fail to make the jump and fall (or land prone, in the case of a vertical jump).
Meaning conversely, if you don't fail the check on a high jump, you don't fall prone.
Then we have from the environmental rules
Creatures that take lethal damage from a fall land in a prone position.
If you take lethal damage from a fall, you land prone. How can you fall from a high jump, succeed, and not fall prone, while simultaneously taking lethal damage from said fall from high jump and thus fall prone?
As for the question of falling on opponents, at that point the rules simply do not tell us enough about how these sorts of interactions should play out.
Personally I'd simply switch to the rules on falling objects, and inflict that damage on both characters - and boots of the cat would not play a roll in reducing your damage hear. You don't "land on your feet" on top of someones shoulders or head. From a real world perspective the physics of colliding with a squishy creature with uneven features compared to landing on solid earth are a lot different. But all of this becomes GM ruling in any case so your GM may view it differently.
As to branch pounce, it requires you to start on higher ground then your opponent. If you are level with them, you cannot jump high in the air and gain the benefits of branch pounce on your way back down. Such also breaks the 'charge' rules that branch pounce is. Charge requires straight line movement, jumping up, then coming back down is not straight line movement.
When charging a target by jumping down from above (such as when jumping out of a tree),
Even in a case where you start on higher ground, you are still simply jumping down on the target from the high ground, not jumping up, then coming back down. As above, if you are jumping up, and making the jump check, you aren't adding/taking damage from coming down. And again also breaks the charge rules regardless.
It depends on if the fall from a jump is part of the jump.
Also, this isn't a Check with a set DC, this is seeing how high you can jump, so it's impossible to "fail". It's saying, I want to jump up 100ft. Okay so you succeed to jump up 100ft, but now you're up 100ft at the end of your turn, so you'd fall. High jumps with DC's are trying to jump on top of something, that's why failing by less than 5 lets you grab onto whatever you were trying to jump onto. If you're doing a jump just for jumping then I don't see why you'd ignore falling.
"How can you fall from a high jump, succeed, and not fall prone, while simultaneously taking lethal damage from said fall from high jump and thus fall prone?"
Easy, the acrobatics check/jump didn't make you prone. The falling damage made you prone.
I see it like casting defensively for a ray spell, if you're successful the spell goes off with no AoO, but the ranged attack of the spell still provokes an AoO. The casting no longer provoked (a successful jump doesn't make you prone) but the ranged attack provokes (taking damage from falling made you prone)
Going back to the normal high jump with a DC, if you succeed you're not prone cause you didn't fall at all since you're standing on top of what you jumped up to. But if you high jump with nothing to end on you start to fall.
Let me quote an additional rule from acrobatics then.
Falling: When you deliberately fall any distance, even as a result of a missed jump, a DC 15 Acrobatics skill check allows you to ignore the first 10 feet fallen, although you still end up prone if you take damage from a fall. See Falling Damage for more details.)
Emphasis mine. Implying that conversely, a successful jump does not result in a fall.
When you are simply jumping to see how high you can get (or how far you can get in a long jump) there is no failure number. You weren't targeting a specific DC, so you succeed at whatever result you got.
e.g, if I'm doing a long jump, and get a 12, I jumped 12' distance. There is no success or fail on that number - it's simply a distance. The same would apply for a high jump. A 12 gets me 3' in the air without any success/fail consideration.
There are also no rules that say making a high jump causes you to take damage when you come back down from a successful jump check. Now you might argue a character can deliberately fail a jump check - or set a target they know they can't reach to make sure they fail, but that is still different than succeeding on a jump check and taking damage on the way back down. And in either case the rules don't clarify how that sort of gaming the system to deliberately fall on someone should play out, though as I noted above, the rules on falling objects should probably cover it well enough.
There is also no specification that during a high jump I must land on something at the height I'm jumping to. Is it not perfectly reasonable for a ninja to jump over a 20' high wall while only moving 5' or 10' foward? The jump DC is based on that 80 DC for the wall height, not the 10 for the distance traversed. Ninja lands on the ground on the other side of the wall.
Since this is a "fantasy" game, treat jumping as jumping and falling as falling. No damage when making an Acrobatics check to jump, baring circumstances like jumping off of a ledge. If the points you jump from and land on are about the same elevation then don't worry about ti.
bbangerter, nothing you're sharing provides any rules saying a successful jump into the air doesn't cause falling afterwards. They jumped up, they are now X ft into the air, and now they begin to fall. That's a setup of the rules and view that jumping handles putting you Xft into the air and it is done at that point. Now that you're Xft into the air we look at the other rules for handling what happens when you're Xft into the air with no flight, which is falling.
To me, looking at real world for a sanity check we see that high jumpers have a nice cushy thing to land on to mitigate the falling they are doing from their high jump. So to me the real world supports the rule view that a successful jump just puts you up and doesn't handle the down.
Now, if the ENTIRE up and down of the jump is less than your movement I can accept the claim that since it's all part of the jump which is less than your movement that there's no falling as all the movement is with voluntary by using up your movement for the round. But if you jump UP the maximum of your movement you have no "voluntary movement" left so falling is the only option.
Now A failed jump for sure falls since you didn't meet the DC to get high enough to be on top of something so you for sure will fall. A high jump to get on top of something means no falling. A high jump up for fun means you're now up in the air and must fall.
bbangerter, nothing you're sharing provides any rules saying a successful jump into the air doesn't cause falling afterwards.
This is true. But I am providing rules that imply those things to at least some extent. You have so far provided no rules to back up your position implied or otherwise.
To me, looking at real world for a sanity check we see that high jumpers have a nice cushy thing to land on to mitigate the falling they are doing from their high jump.
I don't feel this is an apt real world example. The nature of the jump itself results in a prone position regardless of meeting the target DC or not. If there wasn't a soft landing on the other side none of those athletes would be jumping in a fashion that would all but guarantee breaking their neck or collar bones. So this isn't the type of high jump being talked about in the rules.
I think a more apt example would be a basketball player making a dunk shot. Their is a target DC to beat: they either make the shot, miss the shot by 4 or less (and remain standing) or miss by 5 or more and go tumbling across the floor when the land (prone).
And of course the high jumped analogy breaks down as a real world example when talking about the ninja jumping over the 20' wall. No real world human can jump that high without pole vaulting from a very long pole (which also has the same landing problem in the real world as the non-pole-vault high jumper). So if we then look to the inspiration for the incredible ninja feats of acrobatics from stories/mythologies from the real world, jumping over that 20' wall and landing on their feet, unharmed, is common place. With that as our inspiration then for the ninja type characters, clearly jumping up only (though also common) is not the only option for the high jump. They both jump up to obstacles high in the air, and jump over tall obstacles - landing at their starting elevation. Of course it is not a perfect match, because the only pathfinder rules for jumping down from great heights is to decrease the fall damage by 10'. But again you have not shown ANY rules support for the idea that a high jump necessitates a falling state and falling damage. Which doesn't mean your wrong on the rules in this regard, I'm just looking for something to back up that view point while providing an alternate possibility that, so far as I can see, is implied and is well within the scope of the rules.
I provided rules backing up my view.
If a character is 120ft above a solid surface with no flight what happens to them?
Rules say they fall the 120ft to the ground.
If I jump up 120ft in the air using all of my movement I have no movement left with which to move, per the rules.
Since I am now at 120ft above ground with no flight and no movement the rules for what happens when a character is not on ground take over, aka falling.
The jump covers reaching a place, and then the rules for what happens when you're at that place take over.
I believe the rules allow me to move action jump up Xft and then standard action attack the guy up there, but now my turn is done. Assuming this is true, that means that coming down ISN'T part of the jump, as the jump needs to be completed before the standard action. If it's not true and jumping includes the coming down then the only way to jump attack is via spring attack and the like.
Now if you're trying to jump up something and fail the DC by 5 then you're not high enough to be on anything and fall cause you jumped up X feat and now the rules for what happens when you're X ft up take over.
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Sounds like someone needs to play a mythic campaign:
6th-Tier Champion Path Ability
Seven League Leap: Your leap is so mighty that you defy gravity. Add your tier to Acrobatics checks made to jump. The distance you can jump in a round is not limited by your movement speed. If you are carrying no more than a light load, you can expend one use of mythic power to make a powerful jump that lets you sail through the air. In order to use this ability, you must be able to run in a straight line for 1 minute. Any obstacles or impediments that prevent you from completing this sprint uninterrupted prevent you from being able to use this ability, though the expenditure of mythic power is not wasted. At the end of your 1-minute sprint, you attempt an Acrobatics check and leap a distance up to half the check’s result in miles, rounded down to the nearest mile (for example, an Acrobatics check result of 29 would allow you to jump 14 miles). This trip takes 1 round per mile, and you reach a maximum height at the apex of your arc equal to half the distance traveled. You do not take falling damage from using this ability. You must have a clear arc of travel to complete this jump; if you strike an obstacle mid-jump, you and the obstacle each take a number of points of damage equal to 1d8 × the number of miles you have left to travel. If this damage destroys the obstacle, you continue your jump; otherwise, your jump comes to an end and you fall, taking falling damage as appropriate. You cannot aim this leap accurately, and always land 50 to 5,000 feet (5d% x 10) from your intended destination.