The rules are quite clear on how to manage jumping up, or jumping laterally. What seems less clear to me is how one is supposed to manage a scenario in which one is trying to do both.
For example, jumping to grab the higher railing of a ship as it departs from the dock, or trying to grab the ledge of a wall across a moat, or to jump over a pit to a higher ledge on the other side.
What if one is trying to jump down? Such as over a pit to a LOWER ledge on the other side? What then? Would or should you take falling damage?
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I ran into this when doing a conversion of a section a PF1 adventure for a one-off game early this year and didn't find any easy or RAW answers myself.
That said I just settled on scaling the DC by +5 for every 5 feet of additional distance added to the either vertical or lateral movement (capped at their normal land Speed). The exact example of what they were dealing with was a 20-foot wide chasm that was 10 feet higher on the opposite side and I settled on the DC 20 for the Long Jump + 10 for the vertical component for a total of DC 30 because it made the most sense to me at the time but of course, that was me having to color outside of the lines to make it work.
At the table, it played out well enough with the (level 8) Monk just barely making the check and then throwing a rope across for each other PC, one at a time, to swing down across the distance and then climb and/or be pulled up the rest of the distance. At the end of things, it all ended up saving them a few hours of travel time walking alongside the obstacle to a bridge while they were being pursued by enemies and everyone seemed satisfied.
That's an interesting way to handle it. Might an easier method be to just use the higher of the two DCs?
I have houseruled you combine the traits of the leap and the high/long version.
So if you do a long jump you can jump as high as uou would normally get on a standard leap in addition to the length.
If you do a high jump you can move as far as a standard leap horizontally.
Is it realistic, not even slightly... but a player built their character around jumping feats so it came up, a lot.
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High Jump states that on a Crit Success, you can jump 5 feet vertically and 10 feet horizontally, and Leap lets you jump 3 feet vertically and 5 horizontally with no check. Use that as the base line and adjust from there if they have Powerful Leap or something.
As for jumping onto a lower edge, if it's at least 10 feet down then yes, they would take fall damage. I guess you could allow an acrobatics to not (tumbling when they hit the ground to disperse the force), but that's not anywhere in the rules. Cat fall would work just fine though.