Falling damage seems rather tame
 

On page 431 of the campaigns book it gives an example of a guy being pushed out a 5th story window and the damage will be 3.8d, rounded to 4d crushing. That's going to be about 14 points of damage on average. If the guy happens to be wearing a suit of hard armor like plate mail (DR 7) he'll get up and walk away with some damage but not really that much. In a week or less he'll be fully healed.
It seems to me that being pushed out a 5th story window is not really a big deal in GURPS. Why does armor help AT ALL for falling damage? I mean hitting your own suit of plate mail has got to hurt just as much as hitting hard packed dirt, right?

Re: Falling damage seems rather tame
 

Closer to two weeks with the armor, actually.

You're probably unconscious.
If you are conscious you have only 1/3 your Move and Dodge.
There's a decent chance you've crippled something.
You'll be in that condition for days.

It's not like you're generally going to get up and walk away. There's also a chance you could end up dead, of course.

Armor is generally padded so it makes sense if you think about the injury done to the torso. The neck is pretty flexible though, feel free to quadruple damage if you think the victim's head would have cracked against the ground.

Re: Falling damage seems rather tame
 

The basic rules seem to assume a perfect landing. If you use the "Hit Location from a Fall" box on B431, things get much nastier - even with the DR 7, any arm, leg, hand, or foot result will easily cripple an average man, and has a 1/3 chance of crippling both right and left, so you may not be able to walk away. Face, neck, and skull hits all come with extra unpleasantness of various kinds.

As for armor, I think it really would help, at least for plate. Besides the aforementioned padding, rigid armor will distribute the impact over a wider area. One way to look at it is that, when you "hit your own suit of plate", it's already conformed to your body, and hits it all over at once, instead of concentrating the impact on whatever parts of you touch the cement first.

Re: Falling damage seems rather tame
 

Don't forget the flexible armor rule:

Falls and Armor: All armor, flexible
or not (but not innate DR), counts as
“flexible” for the purpose of calculating
blunt trauma from falling damage.
Thus, even if the victim has enough
armor DR to stop the falling damage,
he suffers 1 HP of injury per 5 points
of falling damage. See Flexible Armor
and Blunt Trauma (p. 379).

Re: Falling damage seems rather tame
 

The plate ARMOUR will protect, because it has padding underneath. However:
4d of damage means 14, or 8 with plate, but plate is very rarely used on the same age of high buildings.
Let's look at what 14 damage does:
You hit the ground, roll hit location, if you roll legs or arms, goodbye to them, if you roll head, goodbye to you. The best option is rolling torso, then you only go unconscious, in any case, you're at -4HP.
Now, you have HT10, start rolling HT-2 every minute, on a failure, you bleed, -1HP. Once you got 6 failures(less than 10 minutes), first HT check roll to see if you're still alive.
Didn't die? Good, you have around 15 minutes until the next check, hope that the paramedics arrive. If they don't, roll HT again to see if you're alive. This cycle keeps repeating until you die or get to -50HP where death is certain.


If you have plate, you're not so bad, you still have half move and dodge, , with is not a lot with plate on, if you fallen on your legs or arms, they're probably only broken. if they're, you'll be rolling HT-1 to not lose HP, if you get to 0, you fall down. If you fall on your torso, you can stand up and walk with difficulty to the hospital.
So, even with plate your survival chances are around 50% if you're not rescued soon.

Re: Falling damage seems rather tame
 

As a reality check, you really, really want to be landing feet first. I'd be tempted to double the falling damage if your (non-locked) legs are not there to help in absorbing the impact. Falling onto your torso from 50 feet up will send you to the ER and surgery, not something you can just brush and walk off. Of course, the bleeding rules do make this a bit more realistic, that you will most likely bleed to death from internal injuries on a torso hit, if there is no help.

Re: Falling damage seems rather tame
 

Just because you're on positive HP, doesn't mean you're able to walk away. Major Wounds cause an extra HT roll to see if you're knocked out or not (requires a failure by 5, but still), which puts you in the same boat as the negative HP bleeder (except granting you a little extra time).

Equally you'll likely be stunned or suffering shock from a fall like that, which slows down your ability to limp off right away - which further delays you from escaping harm and reduces the time you have to bleed before falling unconscious.

Also, you should note that wounding type can change depending on what you fall on. Flat ground causes crushing damage, but fall onto a spiked fence or protruding scaffolding pole and you can be applying impaling damage! I'd probably rule that narrow walls, horizontal load bearing pipes or the side of a skip should apply more injury than simple crushing does too (although I can't currently find any RAW to support this). The higher wounding multipliers pretty much guarantee death from the fall alone, more so as any impaling damage also has the chance of hitting vitals etc.

In general, armour designed to distribute or cushion the force or a blow should help a little when falling - but its still pretty dangerous falling off of anything even with it under the current rules.

Re: Falling damage seems rather tame
 

I'm also prone to eyeing the Medium load that some adventurers bring with them when falling off of things as an unpleasant source of more potential energy when they have a fall. Having 40 lbs of backpack land on you adds more than just insult to your injuries, even if you halve the damage for it being more-or-less soft.

Re: Falling damage seems rather tame
 

Do you just model this as a standard side-on/falling collision between the pack and the PC then? Or do you just modify the basic damage calculation based off of encumbrance?

Both approaches seem like a vague approach to modelling the physics involved. As packs wont contain all of the load carried, nor are they guaranteed to land after the faller (they might be landed on, or hit the floor adjacent to the PC if they land on their size). It looks like a lot of variability to wrap up neatly and quickly - which I'd be prone to just using to up the basic/min damage - but I'm interested to see how you do it.

Also, this makes me wonder how many people have fallen on their own swords. Literally.
'Self-induced' cutting/impaling damage whilst falling thanks to holding a sharp bit of metal during the fall does make the activity a lot more dangerous.

Re: Falling damage seems rather tame
 

Collision damage is based on a character's HP, which is approximately proportional to the cube root of their mass. If we add the weight of their gear to their mass, then use the same proportion to determine HP, we get (for ST 10-20) +1 HP at Light Encumbrance, +1.5 HP at Medium Encumbrance, +2.5 HP at Heavy Encumbrance, and +4 HP at Extra Heavy Encumbrance. Note these are at the maximum weight for said encumbrance levels. So, while encumbrance will increase falling damage, it doesn't typically do it to an extreme level.


For the math for this, I used the general rule of "HP of living things is equal to twice the cube root of weight in pounds at 1G." Using this, I back-calculated the "working weight" of characters of a given ST (note this is flawed, as it says an ST 10 human should weigh only 125 lb, while an ST 20 one should weigh half a ton). To this working weight, I added the maximum load at each encumbrance level. I then reapplied the "2x cube root" rule to determine HP. ST 10 ended up as HP 10.97 (light), 11.40 (medium), 12.51 (heavy), and 13.75 (extra heavy). The boosts go up slightly from there, with ST 20 being HP 21.01 (light), 21.49 (medium), 22.79 (heavy), 24.33 (extra heavy).

EDIT: For simplicity, it would probably work to just say "For every level of Encumbrance beyond None, add +1 HP for purposes of determining collision damage, knockback, etc." Thus, it would be +1 for Light, +2 for Medium, +3 for Heavy, and +4 for Extra Heavy.