Here is a question, when does the falling happen? Here is the scenario:
Players are fighting at the top of the cliff, and one gets shoved off the ledge. Do they fall during the turn that the creature shoved them, or on their turn?
Here is why it matters: if they have misty step then as a bonus action they can teleport back onto the ledge during the first second of their turn, but if they fell on the monster's turn, they would be out of range from the cliff ledge.
Feather fall is a reaction, but misty step is a bonus action. Xanathar's Guide says you instantly fall 500 feet, which makes me feel like you fall during the monster's turn. As an equivalent, if the party is on a bridge and the bridge falls, they all fall at the same time, they wouldn't be floating in midair until their turn.
Halp
As a little add-on to what others have said, as the DM I probably would choose to have the falling start whenever it happens in the turn order; however, falling ends (or continues if a higher fall than 500 ft) at the top of the turn order (or if you prefer at Initiative 20). Depending on turn order then this allows for other characters to have more of a chance to help the falling character in some capacity. That being said, XGE seems to be clear about falling happening right away without an actual chance for anyone else to use actions or bonus actions (of course this excludes Feather Fall) unless the falling height is greater than 500 feet at which point you seem to get to have a chance to do something whether action or bonus or what. Whether or not that actually helps you survive is of course dependent on the place and situation but yeah, just my two cents on the matter! :)
Falling occurs immediately per the rules, up to 500' down. You fall further at the end of your next turn, an additional 500' until you hit the ground or the fall is otherwise stopped. feather fall is a reaction that can be used as soon as you start falling, and activates prior to falling any distance. This is per the Xanathar's rules (PHB rules just have you fall the whole way instantly). Xanathar's also has optional rules for flying creatures that start falling.
Anything else is homebrew (remember this is rules and game mechanics, we mostly discuss RAW here).
Falling occurs immediately per the rules, up to 500' down. You fall further at the end of your next turn, an additional 500' until you hit the ground or the fall is otherwise stopped. feather fall is a reaction that can be used as soon as you start falling, and activates prior to falling any distance. This is per the Xanathar's rules (PHB rules just have you fall the whole way instantly). Xanathar's also has optional rules for flying creatures that start falling.
Anything else is homebrew (remember this is rules and game mechanics, we mostly discuss RAW here).
* Per the optional rules in Xanathar's. The PHB does not provide that you fall instantly, only that you fall, and take damage as a result.
Falling
A fall from a great height is one of the most common hazards facing an adventurer.
At the end of a fall, a creature takes 1d6 bludgeoning damage for every 10 feet it fell, to a maximum of 20d6. The creature lands prone, unless it avoids taking damage from the fall.
When do you fall? What is a fall, versus the descent of a high jump? How far do you fall per turn? Do you continue to fall on other's turns, or only on your own turn per round? Can fall distance over a turn be broken up by actions, or does it happen all in one lump at the start or end of your turn?
These are all questions that the "Core Rules" (PHB, DMG, MM) do not provide RAW answers for. Different DMs will have different reasonable rulings.
Xanathar's provides an optional RAW answer for some of these questions. It describes the PHB as assuming that you "immediately drop the full distance," but that isn't really to say that the PHB rule assumes that you "instantly drop," just that whenever you do drop on your turn, you will drop the entire distance in one round instead of over several rounds. Also, the PHB doesn't assume that you instantly drop the full distance immediately, so I'm not sure why Xanathar's even printed that in the first place. It is in fact Xanathar's that introduced "instantly descend" for the first time in its own optional rule. And again, this cannot be said enough, that's optional.
So no, "anything else" is not "homebrew." If you play with the Core Rules and not with the optional variant falling provided in Xanathar's, then your table is free to provide a ruling on those questions as it sees fit.
Technically, you are correct, Xanathar's are "optional" rules as in they are not part of the "core" ruleset. They are, however, the most comprehensive set of falling rules published, and give insight as to the RAI for the baseline rules.
DMs can always rule differently, but I am not wrong in saying that it is homebrew when they do...since no PHB rules for "how" to fall are given, any solution that deliberately chooses to ignore the Xanathar's rules has to be a homebrewed one.
The only RAW we have on "how" is Xanathar's, optional though it may be.
I think this is one of those moments where you as a player are angry because you made a poor decision based off of your meta game knowledge of the handbooks and died. In this instance there honestly should not be an automatic success because you cant tell me that some wizard is going to be able to survive the same fall as a barbarian. Everyone is different just like every character is different. Which is why falling gracefully could usually be a check. There is no reason why you could not have someone take 50d6 or even more for falling and if their health allows it have them survive. 20d6 is a stupid cap, just like 1+your Con mod is a stupid rule for how long you can breath underwater. Also these are rules that all still boil down to what your DM officially rules. So just because it "was against the rules in the book" is a ridiculous thing to get disappointed about.
As far as your safety gear scenario yes. There are 1 in a thousand chance encounters of people surviving. They also still have safety gear strapped to them that is designed to slow impact. If you fall out of an airship at 8,000 feet and tank into the ground with 100lbs of gold coins on your body (which you probably wouldn't because no-one even uses encumbrance rules), you would die. Hard.
In situations like these (and in general) I rule that an entire round is 6 second and each turn happens near simultaneously. To this effect I allow allies with adjacent initiatives to act before or after each other freely (with precedence falling to the original initiative should there be a disagreement)
In the case of a sudden fall I would go to each player, ask their intent and gather appropriate rolls, and then narrate the following 6 seconds
I agree but skydivers usually only survive if it was a partial malfunction meaning that they had some cloth slowing them down and were given immediate medical attention.
Gravity is a constant. 32 feet per second squared. When something drops, no matter what mass it has, it falls at the same speed. That's what the whole thing in the leaning tower of Pisa incident was about. A man named Galileo started dropping different objects and noticed that they all hit the ground at about the same time. You reach "terminal velocity" at just over 500 feet when you fall. That's where the number in Xanathar's comes from. As for the Player's Handbook, the rules for falling are in the combat section, and they don't state much of anything clearly.
The amount of damage taken by a fall is something that is intended to make it possible to survive, because that is something that happens in the real world, it's kind of a one in a million thing, but yes, it happens. In a game designed to be fun, instant death of any sort isn't really fun, and you will notice that while pervious versions of the game had instant kill mechanics, the 5th Edition has removed most of them. So they put the cap of 20d6 in place, and just like in the real world, because of terminal velocity, it doesn't increase from there. The rules say 1d6 per 10 feet fallen, and cap out at 200 feet, why not more? Terminal Velocity is hit at 500 isn't it? Well, it was scaled around the number of hit points characters had back when the rules for falling were created, and pretty much all characters have a lot more now. We're kind of stuck with it now, and only Hasbro can change it.
Keep in mind that "hit points" have nothing to do with the physical integrity of the body. They are an abstraction, I like to tell new players to think of them as a sort of magical force field that soaks up the attacks and breaks when you get down to zero. The only time anything more than bruises, cuts and scrapes happens is when you get hit after you go to zero, and the rules for Death Checks handle that. So a fall can kill you instantly all right, if it does more than double however many hit points you have at the time when you land. If you have even one hit point remaining, you've merely been bruised, and that can happen from a 1000 foot fall if you're tough enough. Fantasy game, fantasy setting, rules designed to have fun in them.
Everything added to the game starts out as Homebrew, it gets tested, maybe revised, and eventually will be published in some form or other. The rules in the Players handbook started out the same way, and are now Official. Xanathars expands on them as a kind of strange category. "Official options" just like feats and multi-classing are in the Player's Handbook, and just like in the DMG, they are variants that people can use or not at the DM's discretion. Anything else goes back to being Homebrew.
Gravity is a constant. 32 feet per second squared.
Extremely false. Your acceleration due to gravity depends on the distance between you and the other object, i.e. it varies with altitude (which is why it's easier to win a gold medal at Olympic jumping events at higher altitudes). On Earth, which is spinning, centrifugal force helps keep you aloft, and on top of that, it's an oblate spheroid, all of which means it varies with latitude. Ignoring both of these factors, as well as local anomalies, like mountains, your claim would still only be true in hard vacuum, and creatures generally fall through a fluid - usually air or seawater. When that happens, numerous other factors come into play, including presented surface area, which is why terminal velocity exists - your acceleration isn't constant and goes down the longer you fall, and at terminal velocity, your acceleration is 0.
Gravity is a constant. 32 feet per second squared.
Extremely false. Your acceleration due to gravity depends on the distance between you and the other object, i.e. it varies with altitude (which is why it's easier to win a gold medal at Olympic jumping events at higher altitudes). On Earth, which is spinning, centrifugal force helps keep you aloft, and on top of that, it's an oblate spheroid, all of which means it varies with latitude. Ignoring both of these factors, as well as local anomalies, like mountains, your claim would still only be true in hard vacuum, and creatures generally fall through a fluid - usually air or seawater. When that happens, numerous other factors come into play, including presented surface area, which is why terminal velocity exists - your acceleration isn't constant and goes down the longer you fall, and at terminal velocity, your acceleration is 0.
That is going a bit far. Gravity on the surface of the earther varies between 32.05ft/s2 (on an equatorial mountain peak in peru) and 32.26ft/s2 (on the surface of the arctic ocean). This is a difference of about 0.7%. Given very few people spend time ofn top of mountains of near the north pole the variaton in populated areas ia about half that. 32ft/s2 is a reasonable approximation that applies whereever you are on the earth's surface (on the moon gravity is very different but doesn't affect most people)
Latitude has a much larger effect than altitude on gravity, Kuala Lumpa has a similar gravity to Mexico city (32.07) and a lower gravity than Denver (32.15). The reason it is easier to get a world record at olympic jumping events at higher altitudes is much more due to the rarified air havingless resistance. Altitude makes no difference on the difficulty to win a gold medal as all the competitors in an olympic games are competing at the same altitude (at least unless Covid results in every competing in the home stadium!)
it varies with altitude (which is why it's easier to win a gold medal at Olympic jumping events at higher altitudes).
I think you mean it is easier to set a new world record, since all contestants will be competing at the same altitude they have the same chance of winning a gold as they would have at ground level against the same opponents.
Gravity is a Constant in the mathematical sense of the word. In and of itself, it doesn't vary. You apply it in real world calculations, and if you absolutely want the exact correct answer you have to take into account every single feature. There's just tons of things that you have to take into account there, and it's really not worth going into dealing with the laws of physics when you're playing a game that involves something as bizarre as magic and the hit point system. A character can fall from 1000 feet in the air, land with a thud, and walk off a little bruised and battered. That's well within the rules, and it does seem kind of silly, but real life is silly sometimes too.
In D&D Dragons can fly and breathe out fire. Go ahead and try to figure that out using the laws of physics. The "laws" of magic are strange, but as long as they are consistently applied, things are great fun.
A lot f the "sillyness" is tied to the levelling process present in nearly every game like this. A commoner with 4HP has a 50% chance of becoming unconcious from a fall of 10ft and over a 40% chance of being instantly killed from a fall of 20ft (I suspect IRL your survival chances are better than this). By level 5 damage that would kill a commoner is barely a scratch as adventurers have become hardy enough to have a decent chance of surviving a fall reaching terminal velocity (though it might knock them unconcious) and by level 10 as long as they have no pre existing injuries they would be able to just get up and walk away from such a fall.
If adventures remained as fragile as the populace they would never be able to get past fighting kobalds and wolves.
In situations like these (and in general) I rule that an entire round is 6 second and each turn happens near simultaneously. To this effect I allow allies with adjacent initiatives to act before or after each other freely (with precedence falling to the original initiative should there be a disagreement)
In the case of a sudden fall I would go to each player, ask their intent and gather appropriate rolls, and then narrate the following 6 seconds
Gravity is a constant. 32 feet per second squared.
Extremely false. Your acceleration due to gravity depends on the distance between you and the other object, i.e. it varies with altitude (which is why it's easier to win a gold medal at Olympic jumping events at higher altitudes). On Earth, which is spinning, centrifugal force helps keep you aloft, and on top of that, it's an oblate spheroid, all of which means it varies with latitude. Ignoring both of these factors, as well as local anomalies, like mountains, your claim would still only be true in hard vacuum, and creatures generally fall through a fluid - usually air or seawater. When that happens, numerous other factors come into play, including presented surface area, which is why terminal velocity exists - your acceleration isn't constant and goes down the longer you fall, and at terminal velocity, your acceleration is 0.
Extremely false. Everyone competing has the same advantage/disadvantage. It might be easier to jump higher, but it would affect everyone in the competition equally.
If you want a weird example of how real world falling https://www.radiosurvivor.com/2012/03/23/falling-falling-cats-and-radiolab-season-8-episode-3/ cats are actually more likely to survive a falls as high as 32 stories, than from a window of 3 to 4 stories high. (Much shorter falls are fine too). Basically if they have more time to spend in free fall they can get their bodies into an ideal position to hit the ground.
So clearly the secret to falling high distances in DnD is to polymorph into a cat on the way down. Couldn't possibly go wrong.
If you're gonna polymorph anyway, polymorph into something flying instead :P
In situations like these (and in general) I rule that an entire round is 6 second and each turn happens near simultaneously. To this effect I allow allies with adjacent initiatives to act before or after each other freely (with precedence falling to the original initiative should there be a disagreement)
In the case of a sudden fall I would go to each player, ask their intent and gather appropriate rolls, and then narrate the following 6 seconds
Is how I do it.
Yeah, there's a lot of room for discussion here. Xanathat's states that falling takes effect immediately, but compare this to other aspects of combat. For instance, if character A tries to hit character B on A's turn, B is not supposed to just stand there like a training dummy and just take the hit. No, B is supposed to be moving, dodging, defending, deflecting, making it harder for A to hit B. This is supposed to happen even though it's not B's turn. For that reason alone, I personally would rule that any character would be able to react if A would fall of a cliff, with a few guidelines (for instance, characters that have already taken their turn in that round can only use a reaction if they haven't spent it yet, whereas characters who still have an upcoming turn can use either their reaction or a bonus action like Grasping Vine or anything else that would "work" in the narrative) to save the falling character.
Like already mentioned above, cinematic rules apply, IMHO :)
Instant falling guidance in Xanathar's Guide is explicitly optional. The only hard and fast (pun intended) rules for falling are in the PHB and they concern the damage you take when you land. Cinematic falling is much more entertaining and provides opportunities for creativity. And it can be done within the context of the rules as written.
More than a few skydivers have survived much higher falls after their parachutes fail to open, but I also knew a kid in HS who was hanging upside down from a low tree branch, fell 18inches and broke his neck and died. I think the idea behind the dmg cap is terminal velocity, once you reach max fall speed the length of the fall stops mattering after that, the only way to create more force is to increase mass or velocity, otherwise your impact will have the same amt of force.
More than a few skydivers have survived much higher falls after their parachutes fail to open, but I also knew a kid in HS who was hanging upside down from a low tree branch, fell 18inches and broke his neck and died. I think the idea behind the dmg cap is terminal velocity, once you reach max fall speed the length of the fall stops mattering after that, the only way to create more force is to increase mass or velocity, otherwise your impact will have the same amt of force.
i think its more just a pure damage cap and does not have any physics connection to terminal velocity. As with most everything in D&D, it has little/nothing to do with real math.
As a little add-on to what others have said, as the DM I probably would choose to have the falling start whenever it happens in the turn order; however, falling ends (or continues if a higher fall than 500 ft) at the top of the turn order (or if you prefer at Initiative 20). Depending on turn order then this allows for other characters to have more of a chance to help the falling character in some capacity. That being said, XGE seems to be clear about falling happening right away without an actual chance for anyone else to use actions or bonus actions (of course this excludes Feather Fall) unless the falling height is greater than 500 feet at which point you seem to get to have a chance to do something whether action or bonus or what. Whether or not that actually helps you survive is of course dependent on the place and situation but yeah, just my two cents on the matter! :)
Falling occurs immediately per the rules, up to 500' down. You fall further at the end of your next turn, an additional 500' until you hit the ground or the fall is otherwise stopped. feather fall is a reaction that can be used as soon as you start falling, and activates prior to falling any distance. This is per the Xanathar's rules (PHB rules just have you fall the whole way instantly). Xanathar's also has optional rules for flying creatures that start falling.
Anything else is homebrew (remember this is rules and game mechanics, we mostly discuss RAW here).
* Per the optional rules in Xanathar's. The PHB does not provide that you fall instantly, only that you fall, and take damage as a result.
When do you fall? What is a fall, versus the descent of a high jump? How far do you fall per turn? Do you continue to fall on other's turns, or only on your own turn per round? Can fall distance over a turn be broken up by actions, or does it happen all in one lump at the start or end of your turn?
These are all questions that the "Core Rules" (PHB, DMG, MM) do not provide RAW answers for. Different DMs will have different reasonable rulings.
Xanathar's provides an optional RAW answer for some of these questions. It describes the PHB as assuming that you "immediately drop the full distance," but that isn't really to say that the PHB rule assumes that you "instantly drop," just that whenever you do drop on your turn, you will drop the entire distance in one round instead of over several rounds. Also, the PHB doesn't assume that you instantly drop the full distance immediately, so I'm not sure why Xanathar's even printed that in the first place. It is in fact Xanathar's that introduced "instantly descend" for the first time in its own optional rule. And again, this cannot be said enough, that's optional.
So no, "anything else" is not "homebrew." If you play with the Core Rules and not with the optional variant falling provided in Xanathar's, then your table is free to provide a ruling on those questions as it sees fit.
dndbeyond.com forum tags
I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
Technically, you are correct, Xanathar's are "optional" rules as in they are not part of the "core" ruleset. They are, however, the most comprehensive set of falling rules published, and give insight as to the RAI for the baseline rules.
DMs can always rule differently, but I am not wrong in saying that it is homebrew when they do...since no PHB rules for "how" to fall are given, any solution that deliberately chooses to ignore the Xanathar's rules has to be a homebrewed one.
The only RAW we have on "how" is Xanathar's, optional though it may be.
I think this is one of those moments where you as a player are angry because you made a poor decision based off of your meta game knowledge of the handbooks and died. In this instance there honestly should not be an automatic success because you cant tell me that some wizard is going to be able to survive the same fall as a barbarian. Everyone is different just like every character is different. Which is why falling gracefully could usually be a check. There is no reason why you could not have someone take 50d6 or even more for falling and if their health allows it have them survive. 20d6 is a stupid cap, just like 1+your Con mod is a stupid rule for how long you can breath underwater. Also these are rules that all still boil down to what your DM officially rules. So just because it "was against the rules in the book" is a ridiculous thing to get disappointed about.
As far as your safety gear scenario yes. There are 1 in a thousand chance encounters of people surviving. They also still have safety gear strapped to them that is designed to slow impact. If you fall out of an airship at 8,000 feet and tank into the ground with 100lbs of gold coins on your body (which you probably wouldn't because no-one even uses encumbrance rules), you would die. Hard.
In situations like these (and in general) I rule that an entire round is 6 second and each turn happens near simultaneously. To this effect I allow allies with adjacent initiatives to act before or after each other freely (with precedence falling to the original initiative should there be a disagreement)
In the case of a sudden fall I would go to each player, ask their intent and gather appropriate rolls, and then narrate the following 6 seconds
I agree but skydivers usually only survive if it was a partial malfunction meaning that they had some cloth slowing them down and were given immediate medical attention.
Gravity is a constant. 32 feet per second squared. When something drops, no matter what mass it has, it falls at the same speed. That's what the whole thing in the leaning tower of Pisa incident was about. A man named Galileo started dropping different objects and noticed that they all hit the ground at about the same time. You reach "terminal velocity" at just over 500 feet when you fall. That's where the number in Xanathar's comes from. As for the Player's Handbook, the rules for falling are in the combat section, and they don't state much of anything clearly.
The amount of damage taken by a fall is something that is intended to make it possible to survive, because that is something that happens in the real world, it's kind of a one in a million thing, but yes, it happens. In a game designed to be fun, instant death of any sort isn't really fun, and you will notice that while pervious versions of the game had instant kill mechanics, the 5th Edition has removed most of them. So they put the cap of 20d6 in place, and just like in the real world, because of terminal velocity, it doesn't increase from there. The rules say 1d6 per 10 feet fallen, and cap out at 200 feet, why not more? Terminal Velocity is hit at 500 isn't it? Well, it was scaled around the number of hit points characters had back when the rules for falling were created, and pretty much all characters have a lot more now. We're kind of stuck with it now, and only Hasbro can change it.
Keep in mind that "hit points" have nothing to do with the physical integrity of the body. They are an abstraction, I like to tell new players to think of them as a sort of magical force field that soaks up the attacks and breaks when you get down to zero. The only time anything more than bruises, cuts and scrapes happens is when you get hit after you go to zero, and the rules for Death Checks handle that. So a fall can kill you instantly all right, if it does more than double however many hit points you have at the time when you land. If you have even one hit point remaining, you've merely been bruised, and that can happen from a 1000 foot fall if you're tough enough. Fantasy game, fantasy setting, rules designed to have fun in them.
Everything added to the game starts out as Homebrew, it gets tested, maybe revised, and eventually will be published in some form or other. The rules in the Players handbook started out the same way, and are now Official. Xanathars expands on them as a kind of strange category. "Official options" just like feats and multi-classing are in the Player's Handbook, and just like in the DMG, they are variants that people can use or not at the DM's discretion. Anything else goes back to being Homebrew.
<Insert clever signature here>
Extremely false. Your acceleration due to gravity depends on the distance between you and the other object, i.e. it varies with altitude (which is why it's easier to win a gold medal at Olympic jumping events at higher altitudes). On Earth, which is spinning, centrifugal force helps keep you aloft, and on top of that, it's an oblate spheroid, all of which means it varies with latitude. Ignoring both of these factors, as well as local anomalies, like mountains, your claim would still only be true in hard vacuum, and creatures generally fall through a fluid - usually air or seawater. When that happens, numerous other factors come into play, including presented surface area, which is why terminal velocity exists - your acceleration isn't constant and goes down the longer you fall, and at terminal velocity, your acceleration is 0.
That is going a bit far. Gravity on the surface of the earther varies between 32.05ft/s2 (on an equatorial mountain peak in peru) and 32.26ft/s2 (on the surface of the arctic ocean). This is a difference of about 0.7%. Given very few people spend time ofn top of mountains of near the north pole the variaton in populated areas ia about half that. 32ft/s2 is a reasonable approximation that applies whereever you are on the earth's surface (on the moon gravity is very different but doesn't affect most people)
Latitude has a much larger effect than altitude on gravity, Kuala Lumpa has a similar gravity to Mexico city (32.07) and a lower gravity than Denver (32.15). The reason it is easier to get a world record at olympic jumping events at higher altitudes is much more due to the rarified air havingless resistance. Altitude makes no difference on the difficulty to win a gold medal as all the competitors in an olympic games are competing at the same altitude (at least unless Covid results in every competing in the home stadium!)
I think you mean it is easier to set a new world record, since all contestants will be competing at the same altitude they have the same chance of winning a gold as they would have at ground level against the same opponents.
Gravity is a Constant in the mathematical sense of the word. In and of itself, it doesn't vary. You apply it in real world calculations, and if you absolutely want the exact correct answer you have to take into account every single feature. There's just tons of things that you have to take into account there, and it's really not worth going into dealing with the laws of physics when you're playing a game that involves something as bizarre as magic and the hit point system. A character can fall from 1000 feet in the air, land with a thud, and walk off a little bruised and battered. That's well within the rules, and it does seem kind of silly, but real life is silly sometimes too.
In D&D Dragons can fly and breathe out fire. Go ahead and try to figure that out using the laws of physics. The "laws" of magic are strange, but as long as they are consistently applied, things are great fun.
<Insert clever signature here>
A lot f the "sillyness" is tied to the levelling process present in nearly every game like this. A commoner with 4HP has a 50% chance of becoming unconcious from a fall of 10ft and over a 40% chance of being instantly killed from a fall of 20ft (I suspect IRL your survival chances are better than this). By level 5 damage that would kill a commoner is barely a scratch as adventurers have become hardy enough to have a decent chance of surviving a fall reaching terminal velocity (though it might knock them unconcious) and by level 10 as long as they have no pre existing injuries they would be able to just get up and walk away from such a fall.
If adventures remained as fragile as the populace they would never be able to get past fighting kobalds and wolves.
Is how I do it.
Extremely false. Everyone competing has the same advantage/disadvantage. It might be easier to jump higher, but it would affect everyone in the competition equally.
If you're gonna polymorph anyway, polymorph into something flying instead :P
Yeah, there's a lot of room for discussion here. Xanathat's states that falling takes effect immediately, but compare this to other aspects of combat. For instance, if character A tries to hit character B on A's turn, B is not supposed to just stand there like a training dummy and just take the hit. No, B is supposed to be moving, dodging, defending, deflecting, making it harder for A to hit B. This is supposed to happen even though it's not B's turn. For that reason alone, I personally would rule that any character would be able to react if A would fall of a cliff, with a few guidelines (for instance, characters that have already taken their turn in that round can only use a reaction if they haven't spent it yet, whereas characters who still have an upcoming turn can use either their reaction or a bonus action like Grasping Vine or anything else that would "work" in the narrative) to save the falling character.
Like already mentioned above, cinematic rules apply, IMHO :)
Instant falling guidance in Xanathar's Guide is explicitly optional. The only hard and fast (pun intended) rules for falling are in the PHB and they concern the damage you take when you land. Cinematic falling is much more entertaining and provides opportunities for creativity. And it can be done within the context of the rules as written.
"Not all those who wander are lost"
More than a few skydivers have survived much higher falls after their parachutes fail to open, but I also knew a kid in HS who was hanging upside down from a low tree branch, fell 18inches and broke his neck and died. I think the idea behind the dmg cap is terminal velocity, once you reach max fall speed the length of the fall stops mattering after that, the only way to create more force is to increase mass or velocity, otherwise your impact will have the same amt of force.
i think its more just a pure damage cap and does not have any physics connection to terminal velocity. As with most everything in D&D, it has little/nothing to do with real math.
Guide to the Five Factions (PWYW)
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