A Falling Mechanic

In Tuesday's game, one of the characters was snatched by a flying dragon, dragged off the airship, and then dropped (actually due to the dragon taking damage, but that just played into my hands, since the dragons was going to drop the character anyway...). The airship was at the time flying an unknown (but very large) distance above the ground - and of course the ground was itself not exactly level.

So, how to handle this?

I think the mechanism I used was about the right one - rather than calculate an exact distance to the ground, I used an ever-increasing chance that the character would hit bottom this round. When the character hit bottom, she would have suffered 20d6 damage (and probably died).

Had the fall been less than 200 feet, the character would have hit bottom in 1 round, and taken damage based on the exact distance fallen. That wasn't the case here.

In the second round of the fall, just before the character took her actions, I rolled 1d12. Had this come up a '1', she would have hit the ground and taken 20d6 damage. That didn't happen.

In the third round of the fall, I rolled 1d10, then 1d8... I would have kept rolling a constantly reducing die type until either I rolled a '1' or I reached 1d3, at which point I would have stuck there until a '1' came up. As it happened, Jag used a dimension door after a couple of rounds, and so took herself out of trouble.

As I said, I think that was about the right mechanic - neither Jag nor I really knew how high she actually was when she started the fall, nor could this easily be judged due to the weather conditions. So, either I picked a fixed number of rounds, or I went with a random mechanic. And the mechanic used was quick, simple, and would have given ballpark-right results. So I'm reasonably happy with that.

The only thing I maybe should have changed - start with a smaller die type!

(I've run the numbers in Excel. It appears that starting with d12, there's an 8% chance of hitting in round 2, 18% by round 3, then 28%, 40%, 55%, 70%, 80%, 87%, 91%, 94%, 96%, 97%, 98%, 99%... That is, you cross the 50% threshold at round 6.

Starting with d10, the percentages become 10%, 21%, 34%, 51%, 67%, 78%, 85%, 90%, 94%, 96%, 97%, 98%, 99%... The 50% threshold is crossed at round 5.

Starting with d8: 13%, 27%, 45%, 64%, 76%, 84%, 89%, 93%, 95%, 97%, 98%, 99%... The 50% threshold occurs at round 5.

Starting with d6: 17%, 38%, 58%, 72%, 81%, 88%, 92%, 95%, 96%, 98%, 98%, 99%... The 50% threshold is at round 4.

Starting with d4: 25%, 50%, 67%, 78%, 85%, 90%, 93%, 96%, 97%, 98%, 99%. As can be seen, the thresold is reached at round 3 exactly.

And starting with the dread d3: 33% 56%, 70%, 80%, 87%, 91%, 94%, 96%, 97%, 98%, 99%... Meaning that the threshold is reached and exceeded at round 3.)

Oh, and of course, this is just a variant on 4e's recharge mechanic for monster powers. The difference is that they use both a fixed d6 and a fixed recharge value. The probabilities are therefore a bit more predictable in 4e. I'm not sure that's a bad thing.