I'm asking this question in expectation of an upcoming scenario in the next adventure of the campaign I'm running. There is likely to be a high speed horse chase, and I expect one of the PCs to leverage her Hold Person spell, which would effectively paralyze the opposing rider.
It's a given that any successfully paralyzed rider would fall from their horse; they have effectively 0 Dexterity and are incapable of making ride checks. The question is how much damage would they take? This is relevant because the person fleeing on horseback is likely to already be highly wounded.
A horse with the Run feat moving at a run is travelling about 30 miles per hour. A rider dismounted from their horse takes falling damage of at least 1d6 normally, but the environmental rules don't seem to cover higher speed falls from low height. Is there a resource somewhere or a houserule anyone can share?
Eh, I'd just wing it in my game and give the rider 1d6 for every 10 miles an hour the horse is running. He's not going to just hit the ground and stay there immediately. He'll bounce and roll at least once.
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By the rules they will take 1d6 damage. There is no extra damage for falling at speed.
That said an extra 1, maybe 2d6 doesn't seem unreasonable as an ad hoc judgement call.
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30 mph is equivalent to a fall of 30' (it's quadratic, actually v^2/30') so arguably that's 3d6, though it's obviously a matter of what one hits. Going splat into a tree is going to hurt more than mowing down a stand of wheat. So a total of 3d6 or less sounds reasonable.
Wow. I just made my answer up on the fly. And then Mudfoot brings math into it! I feel smugly justified. :p
Horses have a speed of 50 ft. Which means a normal move action has them moving at about 6 mph. Moving twice is about 12 mph. Running would be about 23 mph.
So I would do it as no damage unless the horse is running, but fall prone. At a full run, I would probably do 2d6. For a horse with the run feat, which is about 30 mph, 3d6 sounds reasonable.
None of that is the rules though. I wouldn't get to crazy because it will feel punitive if you do.
This is assuming that the creature falling hits a vertical object. The horizontal momentum doesn't really translate to "falling damage" unless they fall off the horse straight into a solid object (a wall, for example.)
The person who falls off a moving horse will take 1d6 and gain the prone condition. If you want to make it more realistic, they could take some "roll damage". Do you want the players to kill him? If he is supposed to die, I would just plan for the hold person to cause him to hit a tree (use other suggested damage) or have him meet some other type of deadly peril. Can he fall into a river or something?
If you wanted him to roll, there are a lot of information that could change the damage. What is the surface he is falling on? What's the angle of the ground? etc.
Assuming he is travelling on "regular" ground. just like... a little bit of grass and flat... I would say he would roll about 1/10th the distance the horse travelled on the previous round (this is arbitrary. don't have time to do math now) and take some nonlethal damage. Adjust accordingly for terrain. Corn field? Not a lot of rolling or damage. Rocky decline? More rolling and lethal damage, etc
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10 % chance to get a hoof in the face? (Regular Hoof damage plus the fall of 1d6, prone) For every 10 feet of movement the horse made before the fall (current round or last round, GM call), additional 1d6 falling damage? Or perhaps every 20 feet? Soft ground have first 1d6 be Non-Lethal?
These are on the fly rule 0 solutions.
