The next step of the argument is then if a character throws the creature up in the air does the creature take damage as it is still the fall that causes the damage?
Yes.
If so what really is the difference to throwing the creature against a wall?
Generally, this does 0 damage. If you have a damaging wall, we would need to know its rules to say more.
Or if I drop a rock on it should it take damage as it is the same force of gravity responsible for the collision as a fall and both have been equally instigated by me?
We have no rules for this per se, but if you drop a horse instead of a rock, and the lycanthrope or whatever fails its save, it will indeed take damage - this isn't an attack.
You can also murder a lycanthrope with caltrops or a hunting trap.
If you push a creature off a cliff it is a non-magical attack. So if the creature is immune to damage from non-magical attacks do they take damage from the fall?
Falling (landing) isn't an attack, so they still take the bludgeoning damage. But if they are immune to non-magical bludgeoning damage, then they don't take any.
Being devil's advocate but surely this is a case of " the law is an ass". If a creature falls 1000ft down a cliff with no means of reducing the force of impact at the end it is nonsense to think it would just land lightly on its feet and walk off.
It's a pretty short list of creatures who are immune to non-magical bludgeoning damage, as opposed to being immune to damage from non-magical bludgeoning attacks and all the ones I can think of are pretty amazingly powerful, so it isn't too terribly outrageous.
It's a pretty short list of creatures who are immune to non-magical bludgeoning damage, as opposed to being immune to damage from non-magical bludgeoning attacks and all the ones I can think of are pretty amazingly powerful, so it isn't too terribly outrageous.
Yes I appreciate that it just rankles me that it seems so ludicrous I guess. Same as you could theoretically drop a planet on such a creature and they won't be squashed!
The next step of the argument is then if a character throws the creature up in the air does the creature take damage as it is still the fall that causes the damage?
Yes.
If so what really is the difference to throwing the creature against a wall?
Generally, this does 0 damage. If you have a damaging wall, we would need to know its rules to say more.
Or if I drop a rock on it should it take damage as it is the same force of gravity responsible for the collision as a fall and both have been equally instigated by me?
We have no rules for this per se, but if you drop a horse instead of a rock, and the lycanthrope or whatever fails its save, it will indeed take damage - this isn't an attack.
You can also murder a lycanthrope with caltrops or a hunting trap.
Surely throwing an ordinary creature against a wall does damage. I don't recommend trying it but throwing yourself against a wall hurts! In the game throwing a piece of masonry at someone does damage. Throwing them at the masonry should do as well.
The next step of the argument is then if a character throws the creature up in the air does the creature take damage as it is still the fall that causes the damage?
Yes.
If so what really is the difference to throwing the creature against a wall?
Generally, this does 0 damage. If you have a damaging wall, we would need to know its rules to say more.
Or if I drop a rock on it should it take damage as it is the same force of gravity responsible for the collision as a fall and both have been equally instigated by me?
We have no rules for this per se, but if you drop a horse instead of a rock, and the lycanthrope or whatever fails its save, it will indeed take damage - this isn't an attack.
You can also murder a lycanthrope with caltrops or a hunting trap.
Surely throwing an ordinary creature against a wall does damage. I don't recommend trying it but throwing yourself against a wall hurts! In the game throwing a piece of masonry at someone does damage. Throwing them at the masonry should do as well.
RAW no, but I houserule that if a creature impacts against a wall (either pushed or other effect) it takes 1d6 bludgening damage per 5-foot it would have traveled if there was no wall.
It's a pretty short list of creatures who are immune to non-magical bludgeoning damage, as opposed to being immune to damage from non-magical bludgeoning attacks and all the ones I can think of are pretty amazingly powerful, so it isn't too terribly outrageous.
Yes I appreciate that it just rankles me that it seems so ludicrous I guess. Same as you could theoretically drop a planet on such a creature and they won't be squashed!
It's also a pretty short list of ways to drop a planet on someone without using magic.
This link only showed spells about falling. Where's do I find the information in the books?
Core rules: PHB p183 (base rules for a falling creature), PHP p191 (non-magical non-hover flight is temporarily disabled by prone and restrained and other similar effects, causing a fall), DMG p249 (several damage values for being hit by a falling object that have no correlation with traps that hurt you via falling objects)
Xanathar's (adds a rule that falls are instantaneous, then provides a rule for them not being instantaneous, and has some additional rules support for resolving things like a falling prone creature with a fly speed standing up during the fall to halt it): Xanathar's p77
NOTE: Xanathar's introduces the only RAW I know of for trying to handle a creature with multiple speeds standing up from prone. It's generally very unclear how to handle this - e.g. if Adam (swim 0 walk 30), Bob (swim 10 walk 30), and Carl (swim 60 walk 30) stand up from prone while swimming, Adam spends 15 feet and we have no RAW I know of for figuring out Bob and Carl.
Tasha's (adds a rule for creatures falling onto other creatures; notably silent for objects falling onto creatures; adds rules for falling into water): Tasha's p170
You can also find numerous examples in multiple books of traps that hurt you by dropping objects onto you, but no-one I know of has succeeded in backsolving an algorithm for determining a consistent way to apply falling object damage based on things like object mass/weight or volume/size or whatever. We also have no rules at all for how much damage a falling object suffers, so a DM has to guess - the only guidance we have is that harder objects generally have a higher AC, which means it's basically impossible to do anything but make up nonsense numbers for taking a normal feather, a glass feather, and an adamantine feather, then dropping all of them from a height of 20 feet onto a marble floor.
It's a pretty short list of creatures who are immune to non-magical bludgeoning damage, as opposed to being immune to damage from non-magical bludgeoning attacks and all the ones I can think of are pretty amazingly powerful, so it isn't too terribly outrageous.
Yes I appreciate that it just rankles me that it seems so ludicrous I guess. Same as you could theoretically drop a planet on such a creature and they won't be squashed!
It's also a pretty short list of ways to drop a planet on someone without using magic.
Also if a planet is dropped on them, they might survive the impact but whatever planet they were standing on almost certainly would not. So now they are drifting around in the debris, likely weightless and essentially helpless and depending on what happens to the atmosphere, quite possible suffocating too.
As they say, it isn't the fall that kills you, it is the utter annihilation of the entirety of the reality you attempt to exist in.
I admit that at this point, we're kind of out of the realm of your typical combat encounter.
It's a pretty short list of creatures who are immune to non-magical bludgeoning damage, as opposed to being immune to damage from non-magical bludgeoning attacks and all the ones I can think of are pretty amazingly powerful, so it isn't too terribly outrageous.
Yes I appreciate that it just rankles me that it seems so ludicrous I guess. Same as you could theoretically drop a planet on such a creature and they won't be squashed!
It's also a pretty short list of ways to drop a planet on someone without using magic.
Also if a planet is dropped on them, they might survive the impact but whatever planet they were standing on almost certainly would not. So now they are drifting around in the debris, likely weightless and essentially helpless and depending on what happens to the atmosphere, quite possible suffocating too.
As they say, it isn't the fall that kills you, it is the utter annihilation of the entirety of the reality you attempt to exist in.
Given that magic can create barriers that are practically invulnerable to mundane damage, a 9th level spellcaster with wall of force could survive the initial impact fully intact. So your method of explaining this is absolutely valid, if the DM is wanting to include cosmic events such as this.
In the real world, skydivers have been known to survive falls from well over 200 feet. At the same time, there have been people who died from falling in the bathroom with a total distance traveled of under 10 feet. Human beings alternate between being remarkably fragile and amazingly durable. Most of the Human body is made of water, and take little enough damage from impact. The speed that things fall goes up fast, but tops out at right around 200 feet, just like D&D has things set, but solid objects break when they hit things at speed, while soft things with the same weight get a nice cushion to absorb much of the damage. They might even bounce.
D&D lacks any rules for mass, and size has nothing to do with much of anything aside from the area covered. Height isn't even considered by the rules. A Large creature should just barely fit in a 10 foot cube, but the rules normally just ignore anything over 5 feet. Even a 6 foot tall Humanoid sticks out of their 5 foot square a bit and some Humanoids are taller than that. I often wonder how a 10 foot tall and 10 feet wide creature gets through a doorway that is 4 feet wide and 8 feet tall.
Falling damage makes perfect sense. What's really odd is that there is any way at all to take less than full damage. Falling from 200 feet ought to do 120 points of damage that cannot be reduced without something that lets you avoid gravity. It's not the fall that kills you, it's the force of gravity. When you strike a surface It breaks apart the molecules the body is made of and spreads the wreckage over an area, and this is assuming a flat surface. If the ground had anything else to fall onto first, there would be damage for that. Keep in mind that part of what Hit Points really are is luck and the favor of the gods. That's how high level player characters can walk away from a hitting the ground from any distance. It's a world with fantastic monsters that break the laws of physics in the real world so often you could spend days just trying to explain how a Dragon the size of a Greyhound Tour Bus with a wingspread only slightly wider than the bus is long can fly.
The math on that says it's impossible for the thing to avoid collapsing into hamburger just from trying to exist.
In the real world, skydivers have been known to survive falls from well over 200 feet. At the same time, there have been people who died from falling in the bathroom with a total distance traveled of under 10 feet. Human beings alternate between being remarkably fragile and amazingly durable. Most of the Human body is made of water, and take little enough damage from impact. The speed that things fall goes up fast, but tops out at right around 200 feet, just like D&D has things set, but solid objects break when they hit things at speed, while soft things with the same weight get a nice cushion to absorb much of the damage. They might even bounce.
D&D lacks any rules for mass, and size has nothing to do with much of anything aside from the area covered. Height isn't even considered by the rules. A Large creature should just barely fit in a 10 foot cube, but the rules normally just ignore anything over 5 feet. Even a 6 foot tall Humanoid sticks out of their 5 foot square a bit and some Humanoids are taller than that. I often wonder how a 10 foot tall and 10 feet wide creature gets through a doorway that is 4 feet wide and 8 feet tall.
Falling damage makes perfect sense. What's really odd is that there is any way at all to take less than full damage. Falling from 200 feet ought to do 120 points of damage that cannot be reduced without something that lets you avoid gravity. It's not the fall that kills you, it's the force of gravity. When you strike a surface It breaks apart the molecules the body is made of and spreads the wreckage over an area, and this is assuming a flat surface. If the ground had anything else to fall onto first, there would be damage for that. Keep in mind that part of what Hit Points really are is luck and the favor of the gods. That's how high level player characters can walk away from a hitting the ground from any distance. It's a world with fantastic monsters that break the laws of physics in the real world so often you could spend days just trying to explain how a Dragon the size of a Greyhound Tour Bus with a wingspread only slightly wider than the bus is long can fly.
The math on that says it's impossible for the thing to avoid collapsing into hamburger just from trying to exist.
Yeah it is a good answer though the only issue is that people very often forget an average human in 5e has like 4 hp or something. It really doesn't matter what you roll on the dice a max damage fall is going to instakill them. That turns any commoner into a Jackson Pollock painting. It is only exceptionally powerful and durable creatures that can survive a larger distance fall. The likes of a high level barbarian that could also survive being chewed on by a freakin dragon could, sure, also survive a 200+ ft fall. High level characters are inherently durable.
Also, as for why roll damage? the same reason we always roll dice. It helps shape the narrative. If you roll near max damage you hit sharp rocks and die. if you roll really low damage you hit a nice soft grassy slope and managed to safely roll.
By default, it only deals normal bludgeoning damage, and doesn't specify it's magical, so resistances and immunities still apply. I had a chuckle with friends at the implications of ODST Dog Soldiers (Since werewolves are immune to nonmagical bludgeoning damage, except silvered weapons. I can't imagine coating the ground in silver to kill a falling werewolf.).
That being said, my group has house ruled that falling damage does it's own separate damage, rather than non-magical bludgeoning. So you could use blanket "reduce damage" effects, but anything to mitigate bludgeoning damage only does nothing.
I had a chuckle with friends at the implications of ODST Dog Soldiers (Since werewolves are immune to nonmagical bludgeoning damage, except silvered weapons. I can't imagine coating the ground in silver to kill a falling werewolf.).
I have an NPC organization in my setting called the War Dogs, all lycanthropes, basically a band of special force shock-troops in the First Empire's warmachine... who are famously good at getting behind enemy lines and no one really understands how or what can to stop them. Glad to see others had the same notion. #superherolandings
By default, it only deals normal bludgeoning damage, and doesn't specify it's magical, so resistances and immunities still apply. I had a chuckle with friends at the implications of ODST Dog Soldiers (Since werewolves are immune to nonmagical bludgeoning damage, except silvered weapons. I can't imagine coating the ground in silver to kill a falling werewolf.).
That being said, my group has house ruled that falling damage does it's own separate damage, rather than non-magical bludgeoning. So you could use blanket "reduce damage" effects, but anything to mitigate bludgeoning damage only does nothing.
Werewolves aren't immune to nonmagical nonsilvered P/S/B, and as a result, RAW is that fall damage hurts them normally. They're immune to nonmagical nonsilvered attack P/S/B. Because fall damage doesn't come from an attack, it bypasses their immunity. So do e.g. caltrops.
By default, it only deals normal bludgeoning damage, and doesn't specify it's magical, so resistances and immunities still apply. I had a chuckle with friends at the implications of ODST Dog Soldiers (Since werewolves are immune to nonmagical bludgeoning damage, except silvered weapons. I can't imagine coating the ground in silver to kill a falling werewolf.
Werewolves aren't immune to nonmagical nonsilvered P/S/B, and as a result, RAW is that fall damage hurts them normally. They're immune to nonmagical nonsilvered attack P/S/B. Because fall damage doesn't come from an attack, it bypasses their immunity. So do e.g. caltrops.
Fair enough. Even the outdated pdf I originally looked at specifies weapon (though was replaced with attack) so not sure what I was thinking. Certainly gave some people a chuckle. I should check barbarian rage, since the discussion in my group started with "I want to jump off the cliff." (Thats the discussion that spawned or ruling of "falling deals fall damage, instead of bludgeoning.). Until recently I've been using pdfs of the first printing core rule books, and we don't keep track of errata usually.
I'm playing a druid atm before lvl 8 and was wondering about shapeshifting into an animal that can survive landing when at their terminal velocity. Squirrels or spiders or maybe an ant if the DM allows. They can splay their bodies while falling to reduce terminal velocity and have the leg strength to absorb the landing. It isn't RAW but I think follows real world physics. So fall off a cliff, shapechange into a spider and land like nothing much just happened?
Yes.
Generally, this does 0 damage. If you have a damaging wall, we would need to know its rules to say more.
We have no rules for this per se, but if you drop a horse instead of a rock, and the lycanthrope or whatever fails its save, it will indeed take damage - this isn't an attack.
You can also murder a lycanthrope with caltrops or a hunting trap.
Being devil's advocate but surely this is a case of " the law is an ass". If a creature falls 1000ft down a cliff with no means of reducing the force of impact at the end it is nonsense to think it would just land lightly on its feet and walk off.
It's a pretty short list of creatures who are immune to non-magical bludgeoning damage, as opposed to being immune to damage from non-magical bludgeoning attacks and all the ones I can think of are pretty amazingly powerful, so it isn't too terribly outrageous.
"Not all those who wander are lost"
Yes I appreciate that it just rankles me that it seems so ludicrous I guess. Same as you could theoretically drop a planet on such a creature and they won't be squashed!
Surely throwing an ordinary creature against a wall does damage. I don't recommend trying it but throwing yourself against a wall hurts! In the game throwing a piece of masonry at someone does damage. Throwing them at the masonry should do as well.
RAW no, but I houserule that if a creature impacts against a wall (either pushed or other effect) it takes 1d6 bludgening damage per 5-foot it would have traveled if there was no wall.
This link only showed spells about falling. Where's do I find the information in the books?
https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/basic-rules/adventuring#Falling
Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in awhile.
It's also a pretty short list of ways to drop a planet on someone without using magic.
"Not all those who wander are lost"
You can also find numerous examples in multiple books of traps that hurt you by dropping objects onto you, but no-one I know of has succeeded in backsolving an algorithm for determining a consistent way to apply falling object damage based on things like object mass/weight or volume/size or whatever. We also have no rules at all for how much damage a falling object suffers, so a DM has to guess - the only guidance we have is that harder objects generally have a higher AC, which means it's basically impossible to do anything but make up nonsense numbers for taking a normal feather, a glass feather, and an adamantine feather, then dropping all of them from a height of 20 feet onto a marble floor.
I admit that at this point, we're kind of out of the realm of your typical combat encounter.
"Not all those who wander are lost"
Given that magic can create barriers that are practically invulnerable to mundane damage, a 9th level spellcaster with wall of force could survive the initial impact fully intact. So your method of explaining this is absolutely valid, if the DM is wanting to include cosmic events such as this.
In the real world, skydivers have been known to survive falls from well over 200 feet. At the same time, there have been people who died from falling in the bathroom with a total distance traveled of under 10 feet. Human beings alternate between being remarkably fragile and amazingly durable. Most of the Human body is made of water, and take little enough damage from impact. The speed that things fall goes up fast, but tops out at right around 200 feet, just like D&D has things set, but solid objects break when they hit things at speed, while soft things with the same weight get a nice cushion to absorb much of the damage. They might even bounce.
D&D lacks any rules for mass, and size has nothing to do with much of anything aside from the area covered. Height isn't even considered by the rules. A Large creature should just barely fit in a 10 foot cube, but the rules normally just ignore anything over 5 feet. Even a 6 foot tall Humanoid sticks out of their 5 foot square a bit and some Humanoids are taller than that. I often wonder how a 10 foot tall and 10 feet wide creature gets through a doorway that is 4 feet wide and 8 feet tall.
Falling damage makes perfect sense. What's really odd is that there is any way at all to take less than full damage. Falling from 200 feet ought to do 120 points of damage that cannot be reduced without something that lets you avoid gravity. It's not the fall that kills you, it's the force of gravity. When you strike a surface It breaks apart the molecules the body is made of and spreads the wreckage over an area, and this is assuming a flat surface. If the ground had anything else to fall onto first, there would be damage for that. Keep in mind that part of what Hit Points really are is luck and the favor of the gods. That's how high level player characters can walk away from a hitting the ground from any distance. It's a world with fantastic monsters that break the laws of physics in the real world so often you could spend days just trying to explain how a Dragon the size of a Greyhound Tour Bus with a wingspread only slightly wider than the bus is long can fly.
The math on that says it's impossible for the thing to avoid collapsing into hamburger just from trying to exist.
<Insert clever signature here>
Fantastic answer!
Yeah it is a good answer though the only issue is that people very often forget an average human in 5e has like 4 hp or something. It really doesn't matter what you roll on the dice a max damage fall is going to instakill them. That turns any commoner into a Jackson Pollock painting. It is only exceptionally powerful and durable creatures that can survive a larger distance fall. The likes of a high level barbarian that could also survive being chewed on by a freakin dragon could, sure, also survive a 200+ ft fall. High level characters are inherently durable.
Also, as for why roll damage? the same reason we always roll dice. It helps shape the narrative. If you roll near max damage you hit sharp rocks and die. if you roll really low damage you hit a nice soft grassy slope and managed to safely roll.
I got quotes!
By default, it only deals normal bludgeoning damage, and doesn't specify it's magical, so resistances and immunities still apply. I had a chuckle with friends at the implications of ODST Dog Soldiers (Since werewolves are immune to nonmagical bludgeoning damage, except silvered weapons. I can't imagine coating the ground in silver to kill a falling werewolf.).
That being said, my group has house ruled that falling damage does it's own separate damage, rather than non-magical bludgeoning. So you could use blanket "reduce damage" effects, but anything to mitigate bludgeoning damage only does nothing.
I have an NPC organization in my setting called the War Dogs, all lycanthropes, basically a band of special force shock-troops in the First Empire's warmachine... who are famously good at getting behind enemy lines and no one really understands how or what can to stop them. Glad to see others had the same notion. #superherolandings
I got quotes!
Werewolves aren't immune to nonmagical nonsilvered P/S/B, and as a result, RAW is that fall damage hurts them normally. They're immune to nonmagical nonsilvered attack P/S/B. Because fall damage doesn't come from an attack, it bypasses their immunity. So do e.g. caltrops.
Fair enough. Even the outdated pdf I originally looked at specifies weapon (though was replaced with attack) so not sure what I was thinking. Certainly gave some people a chuckle. I should check barbarian rage, since the discussion in my group started with "I want to jump off the cliff." (Thats the discussion that spawned or ruling of "falling deals fall damage, instead of bludgeoning.). Until recently I've been using pdfs of the first printing core rule books, and we don't keep track of errata usually.
I'm playing a druid atm before lvl 8 and was wondering about shapeshifting into an animal that can survive landing when at their terminal velocity. Squirrels or spiders or maybe an ant if the DM allows. They can splay their bodies while falling to reduce terminal velocity and have the leg strength to absorb the landing. It isn't RAW but I think follows real world physics. So fall off a cliff, shapechange into a spider and land like nothing much just happened?
https://www.animalquarters.com/animals-that-cant-die-from-falling/