Hi all, we recently had an occurence of this in a game session which got me reading the falling rules. One of the marines in our squad went to jump over a brick wall to jump down 3 metres from a first floor building. When he put his hand on the wall to get over it, the wall gave way (failed his Ag roll) and he fell 3 metres. This almost resulted in reducing him to 0 life.

After reading over the falling rules, is it just me or are they too dangerous? 1d10+1 per metre fallen seems a little extreme. These characters are meant to be far superior to regular humans and could by RAW be killed outright by a 3 metre fall (depending on the GMs rolling).

Hi there,

I suspect this is a misunderstanding of the rules. The sentence in the book is very ambiguous but either in the errata or floating about in a thread somewhere it is cleared up that this means

1d10+(1*meters fallen) not (1d10+1)*meters fallen

so he should have taken 1d10+3 damage -toughness bonus but not armour I think (I haven't got the book on me so im not certain)

so approximately 1d10-5

Hi Narkasis Broon. Thanks for the reply. That actually makes alot more sense, although like you say, it's very poorly written. If that is the case, I'll pass on that info for future games.

No worries

just to confirm it is in the errata, I just checked. I cant remember whether the damage ignores toughness or armour or neither so don't quote me word for word above

Thanks, just found it in the errata as well. I probably should read the entire thing at some point.

personally I run on the belief that as long as you have the errata'd righteous fury you can't go far wrong

Heh, yeah - before the errata there was a joke here on the forum about the most dangerous attack for a space marine was to grab that Hive Tyrant and throw int into the air (still possible due to the non-errata'd lift and carry tables).

Alex

Narkasis Broon said:

It only ignores armour.

I don't think it should ignore armour. Armour should provide ample protectioncushioning for a fall, it still wouldn't protect them from a truly high fall,if you wanted you could say after X amount of meters fallen add Y amount of Penetration to reflect the danger of the sudden stop.

I can understand that for game reasons it was probably designed to ignore armour.

But if I fell off my motorbike, I'd really hope that if I landed on my head that my helmet wasn't completely useless!

Since Power Armour is a stiff exoskeleton, it probably should apply from a logical point of view. Other armour that mainly protects against penetration, but not the blow itself would be less usefull - chainmail, for example, is probably rather useless when it comes to falls.

Not really; because you don't wear chainmail without substantial padding underneath and/or over it. Otherwise it doesn't work very well as armour.

And most of the times you dosn't fall on flat surfaces.
The impact force may not be lessened too much by chainmail. But once there is a stone, boughother roughness on the floor it can very much save you.

It's a game mechanic issue,it's totally streamlined rather than simulationist. If you try to simulate falling creates a whole additional mess of rules that will come into play pretty rarely - it works for what it is.

If you do decide to add armor to the 'save' as a HR, just be aware that you'll likely end up with folks doing slightly ridiculous things, especially if you use a terminal velocity rule in concert with it (like the one from DH)