Is it just me, or is it weird that many of the beasts in 5th edition see kind of boring and not a little inaccurate?
Context: A few months ago, I was playing a Circle of the Moon Druid who was infiltrating a wizard's tower. I got found out after breaking a window. My druid jumped out the window and turned into a standard issue cat. My thinking at the time was that it would help me avoid fall damage. (Not high enough level to get flying forms yet.) Nope, the DM ruled that I had to take full 3d6 fall damage because I was jumping out a third-story window. Now I'm aware that the hallowed ability of cats to land on their feet uninjured can be exaggerated sometimes, but shouldn't cats have Some kind of damage mitigation against falling from height? Not only are cats Tiny (and therefore have less mass), but they're also well adapted to climbing trees to get away from larger predators. One assumes that dropping down from trees is something wildcats do a lot. My druid ended up losing both a Wild Shape use and taking 8 hp of damage.
This falling damage issue affects also other cat-type creatures as well, esp. panthers, displacer beasts, etc., by the way.
Speaking of which, some animals that should have a Swim or Climb speed or an advantage to Passive Perception in the PHB and MM do not. I'm thinking of the Elephant, for instance. Good swimmers considering their weight and ridiculously good sense of smell. Boars lack advantage to PP for smell also, which also doesn't make sense. Constrictor snakes - no climb speed. It feels like the people who wrote up these animals either never go to the zoo or watch a wildlife special.
Anyway, this post is to ask how other tables handle Beast attributes that maybe should have been printed in the PHB or the MM, but got left out for whatever reason. I almost got into a heated debate with my DM the other day over this issue, so I feel like RAW should be updated on several beast forms to make playing a Druid more... intuitive and less memorization of what every beast option is good or terrible at.
Sorry if this is a little long winded. Your thoughts would be appreciated.
They’re intentionally not perfectly like they are in the real world for game balance purposes. Giving beasts extra abilities would make them higher challenge ratings too.
Im sorry, but I’m on your DM’s side on this one. It’s a game that has magic in it, it’s as far from real as it’s possible to get. Go with the rules as they’re written and have fun. I’m playing a Moon Druid right now and I’m having a blast! Sure, there are things that aren’t close to realistic, but who cares? It’s a game and I’m having fun.
I don't understand how having a snake with a Climb speed breaks the game. Or how an elephant with a moderate (not full walking) Swim speed would break the game. Or a cat taking less falling damage than, say, a human. None of this stuff breaks the action economy, and many of them are just situational, albeit useful abilities. I'm Not asking for my ape form to be able to cast Somatic-only spells at level 3 for goodness sake. (Though that would probably be possible with a very lenient DM.)
Largely it's up to the DM to make a judgement call. Personally, I would have called the shifting into a standard cat good thinking - I believe in rewarding players for using abilities in an inventive manner. Everyone's game is different though.
Similarly, whilst the climbing rules would also apply to an elephant, I wouldn't allow an elephant to climb a rope or a tree.
The stat blocks of creatures aren't designed to model every physiological difference of each creature - they're kept reasonably simple to allow the DM flexibility to make decisions, without having to disregard written rules, or wade through paragraphs of rules for each creature.
I can see an argument for allowing a cat to drop one die of falling damage, but then if you are giving it one ability it should have, then the next question is can it have darkvision (which is a common complaint) and pretty soon it grows beyond it's challenge rating. I would be fine with replacing the swim speed of constrictors with a climb speed, since which they are better at is going to depend on species, but you wouldn't be able to change that choice later.
Elephants are not good enough swimmers to merit a swim speed. Since they have a high strength score (and thus Athletics check) they are already good swimmers at half speed.
No, I don't think cats should have darkvision. That's a fantasy ability that doesn't even exist in the real world. Darkvision is superior to infrared vision in some cases (more fine details being visible with the former) and inferior in others (detecting location of invisible creatures). Anyway, no darkvision.
@Stormknight Yes, rules approximations make the game smoother. I get that part. That doesn't mean that we need to take fun out of wildshapes by making it so that a lot of beasts cannot do some fairly simple things that they Could do in real life. If people use pigs to find truffles, doesn't that stand that Boars would have a better than average sense of Perception (smell)? This kind of stuff doesn't even add up to more lines in the manual since all beasts already have a passive perception score. My main point is that omission of useful and game-level-appropriate details make it more difficult for people who want to play Druid to feel comfortable using Wildshapes if they feel they need to either keep copious notes or memorize a bunch of stuff when they're playing with a conservatively-ruling DM, or just as likely, a DM that they know nothing about.
One of the things that balances the game is limiting Druids to beasts that they’ve already seen. There are a few beasts with fun abilities that I’d love to use as my Moon Druid that I can’t yet because he hasn’t seen them. Sharks are on that list by the way.
If I’d been in your shoes in that situation I would have shifted into the form of a spider and climbed up instead of jumping. Or I’d have shifted into something with a larger pool of HP that a normal cat so that none of the falling damage would have gotten through the beast’s pool of HP to hurt my real form, but only if I was desperate.
You’re asking to change the rules as they’re written. Like it or not, that means your DM has to agree to changing them. Otherwise you have to either accept the rules as written or find another game. If I was the DM I’d have ruled exactly the way he did on the spot and I’d have stuck with the ruling after thinking it over too. I’m not a fan of house rules, especially ones that change a PC’s abilities, and that’s what you’re asking your Dm to do.
Ummm, I never said anything about trying to take a beast form that I had no reason to be familiar with. What does that have to do with anything?
And the situation was that I was sliding down a hanging rope with TWO wizards with Misty Step right behind me. I had to succeed on an multiple Acrobatics checks just to A) slide down the rope and B) swing out the window from the rope ASAP before they started frying me. I used my bonus action to shift. Anyway, that's not the main point.
One of my points is that more careful editing and a tiny bit of research going forward with new material and/or when they re-print the MManual would help avoid situations of players needing to argue with DMs about stuff like this in the first place. Preventing conflict between players and DMs makes everybody a little happier. It's not like I'm trying to break the game or hog the spotlight by creating an uber-build min/max character.
Since Wizards of the Coast has the money to do so, they could hire a few more expert consultants or editors is what I'm saying. (And playtesters. But that's a separate discussion.)
I'm with your DM too. Shifting to a cat has no impact on resisting the effects of gravity. It has no effect on reaching terminal velocity. Landing on your feet doesn't mitigate impact.
I do, however, agree that shifting to a cat was a smart idea! For one thing, that falling damage you took would have been mitigated by being in wild shape (wild shape HP is basically a free buffer), so--unless the falling damage was greater than the HP of your cat form--you didn't really take any damage at all.
I would have also rewarded your creative thinking, but not with fall damage reduction. Cats do have an amazing sense of balance/orientation, and--rather than landing Proneas is standard--I would have allowed your character to land on their feet.
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You don't know what fear is until you've witnessed a drunk bird divebombing you while carrying a screaming Kobold throwing fire anywhere and everywhere.
@Sigred It sounds like what you're saying is then, that in the scenario I described, my character should have Wildshaped into the biggest cat family beast that she had ever seen for maximum damage mitigation. That makes sense via in-game logic. However, it doesn't make as much sense from most people's intuition or from real world examples since lions and tigers are Not generally tree climbing predators b/c it's A) harder for them to go against gravity to get up the tree in the first place and B) falling down Hurts them more Because they have more weight. THIS is why it matters that cats are Tiny size creatures. If size and weight have no bearing, then optimally, I should have just turned into a lion, or even a brown bear b/c RAW that would have created maximum damage mitigation. Screw logic, screw observational experience from real life, just give me that bag of hit points already!
Let's use a less loaded example: A schoolteacher drops a pea-sized pebble from the top of Sears Tower. Ten feet away, a student drops a fist-sized rock from the top of Sears Tower. Which dropped object is more likely to impact the ground with sufficient force to kill someone? Obviously, it's going to be the fist-sized rock. Greater weight means that the rock will be less impacted in its downward descent by wind blowing sideways than the pebble and, perhaps more crucially, its terminal velocity will higher Because it is heavier.
Of course the 1d6 / 10 foot of falling in the PHB is just simplified math. Well and good that we have simplifications in a game. We could of course, also have used different dice to simulate the differences when a Tiny creature falls versus when a Small/Medium size creatures falls versus when a Large/Huge size creature falls. Like a 1d3 for Tiny creatures instead of a 1d6 / 10 feet of falling and a 1d8 for Large size creatures and a 1d12 for Huge size creatures. Still not complicated. And it Makes Sense because animals like elephants are crippled a lot more when they trip and fall from a 10 foot height than when a rat falls the same distance (though rats have so few hit points, maybe they'll die anyway). Okay, not perfect, but at least now we can use simplified game-ified math in a way that is intuitive for players to grasp.
So returning to my first paragraph and the question of what a hypothetical player SHOULD do when circumstances warrant jumping out of a window, Brown Bear is probably what of the best options for a Druid before level 8, right. Having more hp is clearly more important than actual logic from real world observation. So for people playing Druids then, we're SUPPOSED to think counter-intuitively in order to get decent benefits from one of our core features. Good to know.
@Sigred It sounds like what you're saying is then, that in the scenario I described, my character should have Wildshaped into the biggest cat family beast that she had ever seen for maximum damage mitigation. That makes sense via in-game logic. However, it doesn't make as much sense from most people's intuition or from real world examples since lions and tigers are Not generally tree climbing predators b/c it's A) harder for them to go against gravity to get up the tree in the first place and B) falling down Hurts them more Because they have more weight. THIS is why it matters that cats are Tiny size creatures. If size and weight have no bearing, then optimally, I should have just turned into a lion, or even a brown bear b/c RAW that would have created maximum damage mitigation. Screw logic, screw observational experience from real life, just give me that bag of hit points already!
Let's use a less loaded example: A schoolteacher drops a pea-sized pebble from the top of Sears Tower. Ten feet away, a student drops a fist-sized rock from the top of Sears Tower. Which dropped object is more likely to impact the ground with sufficient force to kill someone? Obviously, it's going to be the fist-sized rock. Greater weight means that the rock will be less impacted in its downward descent by wind blowing sideways than the pebble and, perhaps more crucially, its terminal velocity will higher Because it is heavier.
See this is why you receive no damage mitigation from being a cat (of any size). Mass has no effective bearing on terminal velocity. Mass also has no bearing on the amount of damage you would take upon colliding with the ground. That has more to do with the specific material properties of all creatures/objects involved. 20kg of meat splats the same as 200kg.
Mass does affect the amount of damage you could inflict to another creature, but that's not at all the same as damage inflicted to you.
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You don't know what fear is until you've witnessed a drunk bird divebombing you while carrying a screaming Kobold throwing fire anywhere and everywhere.
Nope. You are either mis-reading my words or misunderstanding terminal velocity. Here, I will link here the NASA website explanation of Terminal Velocity:
And I quote: "Comparing two objects, the higher velocity occurs for greater weight, lower drag coefficient (more streamlined), less gas density (higher altitude) or smaller area. " And just below that: "An object which is falling through the atmosphere is subjected to two external forces. One force is the gravitational force, expressed as the weight of the object. The other force is the air resistance, or drag of the object." Emphasis are mine.
Therefore more Weight means Higher velocity if two objects falling experience the same degree of wind resistance (drag coefficient). Therefore an animal with much less weight takes less impact when it hits the ground by falling 10 feet or 30 feet or 300 feet than when a much heavier animal hits the ground from the same height Unless it is wearing a parachute or something that increases its drag coefficient by a large degree. Thus a Tiny size animal falling 30 feet impacts the ground at a lower velocity than a Medium size animal if both have roughly equivalent drag coefficient.
And I'm also sharing this link from WIRED magazine about cats and falling and physics because it's A) cool and B) demonstrates that cats actually have a way to increase the odds of higher drag coefficiency on themselves, thus enabling seemingly miraculous survival after falling from high-rise apartments:
I've come to 2 conclusions after reading (most of) this thread.
Druid players should read the monster manual of their wild shapes.
In order to be more realistic, tiny creatures should take half damage from fall damage and huge/gargantuan creatures should take extra fall damage. You can make this a house rule.
Look, most of this thread has become about gravity, creature size and falling damage. However, nobody has addressed my concerns about beasts being printed in the MManual lacking what would in in real life, being intuitive passive perception abilities. I realize that some things inevitably slip through the cracks in editing. That said, it's still frustrating being a person who likes to play Druids and not having access to stuff that should come with beast forms. Same thing for Rangers with the Beast Master subclass and certain familiars for other spellcasting classes. Having a few more options to gather information or avoid being surprised is part of why people have kept dogs, cats, and pigs around for thousands of years And why it's useful to have familiars at all. Yes, I could homebrew whatever I want, but I would either need DM approval (mileage may vary) or be the DM myself, in which case I wouldn't be playing as a PC anymore.
Look, most of this thread has become about gravity, creature size and falling damage. However, nobody has addressed my concerns about beasts being printed in the MManual lacking what would in in real life, be intuitive passive perception abilties. I realize that some things inevitably slip through the cracks in editing. That said, it's still frustrating being a person who likes to play Druids and not having access to stuff that should come with beast forms. Same thing for Rangers with the Beast Master subclass and certain familiars for other spellcasting classes. Having a few more options to gather information or avoid being surprised is part of why people have kept dogs, cats, and pigs around for thousands of years And why it's useful to have familars at all. Yes, I could homebrew whatever I want, but I would either need DM approval (mileage may vary) or be the DM myself, in which case I wouldn't be playing as a PC anymore.
It seems from reading this thread that you just told your DM while falling, "I wildshape into a cat" and expected everything to go to plan. If I'm reading the situation wrong, I'm sorry.
I find that I'm always much happier when I tell the DM what I'm trying to accomplish with my actions. A better standard operating procedure as a player is to say something like, "I wildshape into a cat so that I can land safely." Then your DM should tell you, "your character doesn't think that would work," so that you could then change course. If your DM is unwilling to engage in this way, you can even get more direct, e.g. "Does my character think wildshaping into a cat would let me land safely?"
You also are free to choose animals you have seen that aren't in the monster manual. That way your DM has to confront physical intuition about what should happen. A cockroach would easily survive such a fall.
As for editing the monster manual, it doesn't seem exceptionally necessary. What was the situation in previous editions?
Cats don't actually have a special ability to reduce fall damage IRL, they have lower terminal velocity and less kinetic energy than larger creatures. That is about it.
Not knowing that 5e's simplified game mechanics made fall damage impartial to mass or surface area is on you.
Since I have already said what I was going to say re: falling, size, and role-playing as preferably an intuintive thing rather than merely a mechanical one, I have nothing more to say on that. Since I like horses, I have no intention to keep beating on dead ones, as some people intend.
However, there are other things I have pointed out that could easily be added to the monster listings for beasts in the MManual or the PHB that do not take up space which the editors have clearly neglected and which just make sense to the beast types themselves. It could appear in official errata, or whatever. The point is, they can easily do these things, but WotC chooses not to.
Official errata tends to not add or remove whole abilities, only reword or fix rule interactions of existing ones, so they will likely not add keen senses to creatures that dont already have them. They also will very likely not add a swim or climb speed to creatures that can't do it at close to walking speed.
Cats do have ways to mitigate some fall damage, though. It's not a huge amount, by any means, but they are better able to know which way is up and can turn themselves the right way very quickly - this is tied to their incredible sense of balance. Their paws and legs are designed to channel the shock and redirect it which protects the bones largely due to the types of muscle and extra cartilege. So, they are tiny with decent surface area, good instincts and a physical anatomy that is specifically designed to mitigate some fall damage. So, I do fully agree with the OP that in this instance cats should have some aspect of minor fall mitigation, perhaps a damage die (actually 2, my own cats have often jumped from 15 ft and higher ledges and walked away with no injury, effort or even a break in stride, including my cat who was very overweight!). Also, by RAW a cat can jump across 4 ft but in reality I've seen my obese cat jump 6 ft without effort, and his brother has jumped distance of 10 ft! It would be more reasonable for the cat to have a feature that allowed it to use Dex instead of Str for calculating jump distances.
Cats also have superior nightvision compared to any diurnal beast and even many nocturnal ones. It's not unreasonable to expect darkvision. "But that's a magic ability" I've heard some cry, yeah, but an Owl has darkvision, quite a few "beast" non-magical creatures have darkvision and many have lesser night vision than a cat in the real world (Owl is one of the few that has better) so, no it really makes no sense at all whatsoever for other creatures which inferior sight at night to get darkvision while a cat with superior sight at night doesn't.
The Monster Manual really was a rushed thing and so many things are overlooked. It wouldn't be imbalanced to give the cat 60 ft darkvision and mitigate 1 die of fall damage or state a cat can fall 15-20 ft before taking any fall damage. And the dex/str jump thing and it's still less powerful than an Owl with advantage on all perception (not just scent), 120 ft darkvision, 60 ft fly speed and Flyby! They're the same CR yet the Owl has some serious advantages here. So no, a few tweaks for a more realistic cat is not unbalanced in any way whatsoever.
The beasts of the MM do need a serious overhaul. I agree with the OP entirely on that. I'm all for high-fantasy and it's just a game, but some of the "design choices" for some beasts is brain-drillingly pathetic in too many cases.
Is it just me, or is it weird that many of the beasts in 5th edition see kind of boring and not a little inaccurate?
Context: A few months ago, I was playing a Circle of the Moon Druid who was infiltrating a wizard's tower. I got found out after breaking a window. My druid jumped out the window and turned into a standard issue cat. My thinking at the time was that it would help me avoid fall damage. (Not high enough level to get flying forms yet.) Nope, the DM ruled that I had to take full 3d6 fall damage because I was jumping out a third-story window. Now I'm aware that the hallowed ability of cats to land on their feet uninjured can be exaggerated sometimes, but shouldn't cats have Some kind of damage mitigation against falling from height? Not only are cats Tiny (and therefore have less mass), but they're also well adapted to climbing trees to get away from larger predators. One assumes that dropping down from trees is something wildcats do a lot. My druid ended up losing both a Wild Shape use and taking 8 hp of damage.
This falling damage issue affects also other cat-type creatures as well, esp. panthers, displacer beasts, etc., by the way.
Speaking of which, some animals that should have a Swim or Climb speed or an advantage to Passive Perception in the PHB and MM do not. I'm thinking of the Elephant, for instance. Good swimmers considering their weight and ridiculously good sense of smell. Boars lack advantage to PP for smell also, which also doesn't make sense. Constrictor snakes - no climb speed. It feels like the people who wrote up these animals either never go to the zoo or watch a wildlife special.
Anyway, this post is to ask how other tables handle Beast attributes that maybe should have been printed in the PHB or the MM, but got left out for whatever reason. I almost got into a heated debate with my DM the other day over this issue, so I feel like RAW should be updated on several beast forms to make playing a Druid more... intuitive and less memorization of what every beast option is good or terrible at.
Sorry if this is a little long winded. Your thoughts would be appreciated.
They’re intentionally not perfectly like they are in the real world for game balance purposes. Giving beasts extra abilities would make them higher challenge ratings too.
Im sorry, but I’m on your DM’s side on this one. It’s a game that has magic in it, it’s as far from real as it’s possible to get. Go with the rules as they’re written and have fun. I’m playing a Moon Druid right now and I’m having a blast! Sure, there are things that aren’t close to realistic, but who cares? It’s a game and I’m having fun.
Professional computer geek
I don't understand how having a snake with a Climb speed breaks the game. Or how an elephant with a moderate (not full walking) Swim speed would break the game. Or a cat taking less falling damage than, say, a human. None of this stuff breaks the action economy, and many of them are just situational, albeit useful abilities. I'm Not asking for my ape form to be able to cast Somatic-only spells at level 3 for goodness sake. (Though that would probably be possible with a very lenient DM.)
A snake, or any other creature doesn't need a climbing speed listed to be able to climb.
https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/phb/adventuring#SpecialTypesofMovement
Largely it's up to the DM to make a judgement call. Personally, I would have called the shifting into a standard cat good thinking - I believe in rewarding players for using abilities in an inventive manner. Everyone's game is different though.
Similarly, whilst the climbing rules would also apply to an elephant, I wouldn't allow an elephant to climb a rope or a tree.
The stat blocks of creatures aren't designed to model every physiological difference of each creature - they're kept reasonably simple to allow the DM flexibility to make decisions, without having to disregard written rules, or wade through paragraphs of rules for each creature.
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I can see an argument for allowing a cat to drop one die of falling damage, but then if you are giving it one ability it should have, then the next question is can it have darkvision (which is a common complaint) and pretty soon it grows beyond it's challenge rating. I would be fine with replacing the swim speed of constrictors with a climb speed, since which they are better at is going to depend on species, but you wouldn't be able to change that choice later.
Elephants are not good enough swimmers to merit a swim speed. Since they have a high strength score (and thus Athletics check) they are already good swimmers at half speed.
No, I don't think cats should have darkvision. That's a fantasy ability that doesn't even exist in the real world. Darkvision is superior to infrared vision in some cases (more fine details being visible with the former) and inferior in others (detecting location of invisible creatures). Anyway, no darkvision.
@Stormknight Yes, rules approximations make the game smoother. I get that part. That doesn't mean that we need to take fun out of wildshapes by making it so that a lot of beasts cannot do some fairly simple things that they Could do in real life. If people use pigs to find truffles, doesn't that stand that Boars would have a better than average sense of Perception (smell)? This kind of stuff doesn't even add up to more lines in the manual since all beasts already have a passive perception score. My main point is that omission of useful and game-level-appropriate details make it more difficult for people who want to play Druid to feel comfortable using Wildshapes if they feel they need to either keep copious notes or memorize a bunch of stuff when they're playing with a conservatively-ruling DM, or just as likely, a DM that they know nothing about.
One of the things that balances the game is limiting Druids to beasts that they’ve already seen. There are a few beasts with fun abilities that I’d love to use as my Moon Druid that I can’t yet because he hasn’t seen them. Sharks are on that list by the way.
If I’d been in your shoes in that situation I would have shifted into the form of a spider and climbed up instead of jumping. Or I’d have shifted into something with a larger pool of HP that a normal cat so that none of the falling damage would have gotten through the beast’s pool of HP to hurt my real form, but only if I was desperate.
You’re asking to change the rules as they’re written. Like it or not, that means your DM has to agree to changing them. Otherwise you have to either accept the rules as written or find another game. If I was the DM I’d have ruled exactly the way he did on the spot and I’d have stuck with the ruling after thinking it over too. I’m not a fan of house rules, especially ones that change a PC’s abilities, and that’s what you’re asking your Dm to do.
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Ummm, I never said anything about trying to take a beast form that I had no reason to be familiar with. What does that have to do with anything?
And the situation was that I was sliding down a hanging rope with TWO wizards with Misty Step right behind me. I had to succeed on an multiple Acrobatics checks just to A) slide down the rope and B) swing out the window from the rope ASAP before they started frying me. I used my bonus action to shift. Anyway, that's not the main point.
One of my points is that more careful editing and a tiny bit of research going forward with new material and/or when they re-print the MManual would help avoid situations of players needing to argue with DMs about stuff like this in the first place. Preventing conflict between players and DMs makes everybody a little happier. It's not like I'm trying to break the game or hog the spotlight by creating an uber-build min/max character.
Since Wizards of the Coast has the money to do so, they could hire a few more expert consultants or editors is what I'm saying. (And playtesters. But that's a separate discussion.)
I'm with your DM too. Shifting to a cat has no impact on resisting the effects of gravity. It has no effect on reaching terminal velocity. Landing on your feet doesn't mitigate impact.
I do, however, agree that shifting to a cat was a smart idea! For one thing, that falling damage you took would have been mitigated by being in wild shape (wild shape HP is basically a free buffer), so--unless the falling damage was greater than the HP of your cat form--you didn't really take any damage at all.
I would have also rewarded your creative thinking, but not with fall damage reduction. Cats do have an amazing sense of balance/orientation, and--rather than landing Prone as is standard--I would have allowed your character to land on their feet.
You don't know what fear is until you've witnessed a drunk bird divebombing you while carrying a screaming Kobold throwing fire anywhere and everywhere.
@Sigred It sounds like what you're saying is then, that in the scenario I described, my character should have Wildshaped into the biggest cat family beast that she had ever seen for maximum damage mitigation. That makes sense via in-game logic. However, it doesn't make as much sense from most people's intuition or from real world examples since lions and tigers are Not generally tree climbing predators b/c it's A) harder for them to go against gravity to get up the tree in the first place and B) falling down Hurts them more Because they have more weight. THIS is why it matters that cats are Tiny size creatures. If size and weight have no bearing, then optimally, I should have just turned into a lion, or even a brown bear b/c RAW that would have created maximum damage mitigation. Screw logic, screw observational experience from real life, just give me that bag of hit points already!
Let's use a less loaded example: A schoolteacher drops a pea-sized pebble from the top of Sears Tower. Ten feet away, a student drops a fist-sized rock from the top of Sears Tower. Which dropped object is more likely to impact the ground with sufficient force to kill someone? Obviously, it's going to be the fist-sized rock. Greater weight means that the rock will be less impacted in its downward descent by wind blowing sideways than the pebble and, perhaps more crucially, its terminal velocity will higher Because it is heavier.
Of course the 1d6 / 10 foot of falling in the PHB is just simplified math. Well and good that we have simplifications in a game. We could of course, also have used different dice to simulate the differences when a Tiny creature falls versus when a Small/Medium size creatures falls versus when a Large/Huge size creature falls. Like a 1d3 for Tiny creatures instead of a 1d6 / 10 feet of falling and a 1d8 for Large size creatures and a 1d12 for Huge size creatures. Still not complicated. And it Makes Sense because animals like elephants are crippled a lot more when they trip and fall from a 10 foot height than when a rat falls the same distance (though rats have so few hit points, maybe they'll die anyway). Okay, not perfect, but at least now we can use simplified game-ified math in a way that is intuitive for players to grasp.
So returning to my first paragraph and the question of what a hypothetical player SHOULD do when circumstances warrant jumping out of a window, Brown Bear is probably what of the best options for a Druid before level 8, right. Having more hp is clearly more important than actual logic from real world observation. So for people playing Druids then, we're SUPPOSED to think counter-intuitively in order to get decent benefits from one of our core features. Good to know.
See this is why you receive no damage mitigation from being a cat (of any size). Mass has no effective bearing on terminal velocity. Mass also has no bearing on the amount of damage you would take upon colliding with the ground. That has more to do with the specific material properties of all creatures/objects involved. 20kg of meat splats the same as 200kg.
Mass does affect the amount of damage you could inflict to another creature, but that's not at all the same as damage inflicted to you.
You don't know what fear is until you've witnessed a drunk bird divebombing you while carrying a screaming Kobold throwing fire anywhere and everywhere.
Nope. You are either mis-reading my words or misunderstanding terminal velocity. Here, I will link here the NASA website explanation of Terminal Velocity:
< https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/airplane/termv.html >
And I quote: "Comparing two objects, the higher velocity occurs for greater weight, lower drag coefficient (more streamlined), less gas density (higher altitude) or smaller area. " And just below that: "An object which is falling through the atmosphere is subjected to two external forces. One force is the gravitational force, expressed as the weight of the object. The other force is the air resistance, or drag of the object." Emphasis are mine.
Therefore more Weight means Higher velocity if two objects falling experience the same degree of wind resistance (drag coefficient). Therefore an animal with much less weight takes less impact when it hits the ground by falling 10 feet or 30 feet or 300 feet than when a much heavier animal hits the ground from the same height Unless it is wearing a parachute or something that increases its drag coefficient by a large degree. Thus a Tiny size animal falling 30 feet impacts the ground at a lower velocity than a Medium size animal if both have roughly equivalent drag coefficient.
And I'm also sharing this link from WIRED magazine about cats and falling and physics because it's A) cool and B) demonstrates that cats actually have a way to increase the odds of higher drag coefficiency on themselves, thus enabling seemingly miraculous survival after falling from high-rise apartments:
<Cat self-twisting to Increase Drag Coefficient by Instinct>
Also, more physics on small size and falling, not specific to cats.
<On Being the Right Size >
I've come to 2 conclusions after reading (most of) this thread.
Look, most of this thread has become about gravity, creature size and falling damage. However, nobody has addressed my concerns about beasts being printed in the MManual lacking what would in in real life, being intuitive passive perception abilities. I realize that some things inevitably slip through the cracks in editing. That said, it's still frustrating being a person who likes to play Druids and not having access to stuff that should come with beast forms. Same thing for Rangers with the Beast Master subclass and certain familiars for other spellcasting classes. Having a few more options to gather information or avoid being surprised is part of why people have kept dogs, cats, and pigs around for thousands of years And why it's useful to have familiars at all. Yes, I could homebrew whatever I want, but I would either need DM approval (mileage may vary) or be the DM myself, in which case I wouldn't be playing as a PC anymore.
It seems from reading this thread that you just told your DM while falling, "I wildshape into a cat" and expected everything to go to plan. If I'm reading the situation wrong, I'm sorry.
I find that I'm always much happier when I tell the DM what I'm trying to accomplish with my actions. A better standard operating procedure as a player is to say something like, "I wildshape into a cat so that I can land safely." Then your DM should tell you, "your character doesn't think that would work," so that you could then change course. If your DM is unwilling to engage in this way, you can even get more direct, e.g. "Does my character think wildshaping into a cat would let me land safely?"
You also are free to choose animals you have seen that aren't in the monster manual. That way your DM has to confront physical intuition about what should happen. A cockroach would easily survive such a fall.
As for editing the monster manual, it doesn't seem exceptionally necessary. What was the situation in previous editions?
Cats don't actually have a special ability to reduce fall damage IRL, they have lower terminal velocity and less kinetic energy than larger creatures. That is about it.
Not knowing that 5e's simplified game mechanics made fall damage impartial to mass or surface area is on you.
Since I have already said what I was going to say re: falling, size, and role-playing as preferably an intuintive thing rather than merely a mechanical one, I have nothing more to say on that. Since I like horses, I have no intention to keep beating on dead ones, as some people intend.
However, there are other things I have pointed out that could easily be added to the monster listings for beasts in the MManual or the PHB that do not take up space which the editors have clearly neglected and which just make sense to the beast types themselves. It could appear in official errata, or whatever. The point is, they can easily do these things, but WotC chooses not to.
Official errata tends to not add or remove whole abilities, only reword or fix rule interactions of existing ones, so they will likely not add keen senses to creatures that dont already have them. They also will very likely not add a swim or climb speed to creatures that can't do it at close to walking speed.
Cats do have ways to mitigate some fall damage, though. It's not a huge amount, by any means, but they are better able to know which way is up and can turn themselves the right way very quickly - this is tied to their incredible sense of balance. Their paws and legs are designed to channel the shock and redirect it which protects the bones largely due to the types of muscle and extra cartilege. So, they are tiny with decent surface area, good instincts and a physical anatomy that is specifically designed to mitigate some fall damage. So, I do fully agree with the OP that in this instance cats should have some aspect of minor fall mitigation, perhaps a damage die (actually 2, my own cats have often jumped from 15 ft and higher ledges and walked away with no injury, effort or even a break in stride, including my cat who was very overweight!). Also, by RAW a cat can jump across 4 ft but in reality I've seen my obese cat jump 6 ft without effort, and his brother has jumped distance of 10 ft! It would be more reasonable for the cat to have a feature that allowed it to use Dex instead of Str for calculating jump distances.
Cats also have superior nightvision compared to any diurnal beast and even many nocturnal ones. It's not unreasonable to expect darkvision. "But that's a magic ability" I've heard some cry, yeah, but an Owl has darkvision, quite a few "beast" non-magical creatures have darkvision and many have lesser night vision than a cat in the real world (Owl is one of the few that has better) so, no it really makes no sense at all whatsoever for other creatures which inferior sight at night to get darkvision while a cat with superior sight at night doesn't.
The Monster Manual really was a rushed thing and so many things are overlooked. It wouldn't be imbalanced to give the cat 60 ft darkvision and mitigate 1 die of fall damage or state a cat can fall 15-20 ft before taking any fall damage. And the dex/str jump thing and it's still less powerful than an Owl with advantage on all perception (not just scent), 120 ft darkvision, 60 ft fly speed and Flyby! They're the same CR yet the Owl has some serious advantages here. So no, a few tweaks for a more realistic cat is not unbalanced in any way whatsoever.
The beasts of the MM do need a serious overhaul. I agree with the OP entirely on that. I'm all for high-fantasy and it's just a game, but some of the "design choices" for some beasts is brain-drillingly pathetic in too many cases.
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