User blog:GolgothaKinslayer/This is the crap my brain goes through

…With game design. Lots of it—as you can see—is a great deal of back-and-forth that often ends up right back where I started. Then, a few weeks or years from now, something will cause me to revisit this again.

Maybe I could make falling damage cumulative, and lower the die size a bit? Maybe? That is, 1D6 for the first 10', 2D6 for the next 10', 3D6 for the next, etc. Thus a 30' fall does 6D6 damage. This is actually Gygax's original rule (derived from an indirect example with thief-acrobats) but was messed up in editing in the 1st ed. rules, and carried forth ever since. This is: Or, I can Fibonacci that shit. It may be easier to remember everything, rather than having to stop and add it all in a pyramid progression. I can keep things as D8s that way, as well: As the saving throw scales upwards into 'crit only' territory pretty quickly, this change may not be worth the added complexity. I'm liking the numbers on this though, especially the maximum potentials. This makes the 60+ falls pretty much guaranteed to do more damage than the height in feet. The lethality:distance is pretty on par with anecdotal evidence. Falls are still pretty severe--moreso than the linear progression--but still allowable for some cool/heroic stunts.

Just by way of comparison, here's the current--linear--damage: Now that I'm looking at it, I think that I like the linear progression more. Linear and Fibonacci match up at the 40-50 point. Lower distances are actually more painful, in addition to being far more likely to occur in game. The very large distances wouldn't seem quite as cheap of a tactic for damage/distance. Not only does this not leave the GM looking as much like a prick if the pc falls off of a cliff (while still killng said character) it also doesn't reward the telekinetic drop... anymore than the rules already do...