Heroes Can't Jump

[hcobb]

Originally Posted by Shostak

But doesn't that assume that the same energy is going into a vertical jump as a horizontal jump? It seems to me that standing still and jumping straight up will have a lot less energy than running at 5m/second and jumping.

Or Usain Bolt at 10 m/s. (MA 20, doubled for running in perfect unguarded conditions.)

[Drakenbow]

Oh, my!!!! Math is now in session. Let me pull out my sliderule!

I agree with the basis of HCobb's math even though I don't remember my high school and college physics class formulae. I do remember that 45 degrees with an initial velocity does yield the maximum potential distance. And that rotating the angle to 90 degrees will determine maximum height.

I do wish to point out that examples being used are top notch athletes trained for these feats of long and high jumps. Also, they are unladen by the boots, pants, belt, weapons, and other things carried by a character. But this is a fantasy game - it's magic! The characters don't have perfect running pitches and don't have time to make the perfect steps into the jumps (long or high).

So with that... Using reality and trying to mesh in the rules, what comes out to a workable game rule? The rules did use a progressive number of dice againt (ST+DX) in order to suceed for the distance attempted. Failure means falling short somewhere along the path. Same should be extrapolated for high jump, and a bit extra for the character's height and reach, yes?

[Axly Suregrip]

And let's not forget that jumping vertically will be more affected by how encumbered the character is. Running across you have more momentum with that extra weight then you do going up. Maybe for simplicity just go with MA.

I am going to assume you are trying to figure how far someone has to jump to grab a ledge. There are other reasons to want to know how far up someone can go, but that is the one that seems to make the most sense to me.

A big part of "how high can they reach with a jump" is going to be how tall are they and how long are their arm reach?

Average vertical jump is 12 to 20 inches. This fits nicely with it being MA * 2 in inches. Elves and runners in no armor going beyond the top average is good as there should be some outliers when using averages.

Now you just need a table of height & reach by race are you are all set.

[David Bofinger]

Originally Posted by hcobb

Or Usain Bolt at 10 m/s. (MA 20, doubled for running in perfect unguarded conditions.)

Also he's slower in his first turn and a little faster thereafter.

Usain Bolt also only steps in every second hex. His hundred metres record consisted of 41 steps, most of which were jumps over one intervening hex.