Question about falling damage

[Tywin Lannister]

Another day, another thing I need clarified...concerning falling damage, that is.
The way I interpret the rules on p. 96, you do not take into account Toughness and Armor Values - at least, nothing is written about it.
It seems to me that it works fine this way - when distributing damage points on various body parts, you have to be pretty unlucky to get near a level 3-5 wound.
A character fell of a cliff today onto a ledge, 6 damage and ended up with a bruised hand and some scratches (not taking into account TO and AV as mentioned above).

Is this correct or am I a lamp?

[Richard_Strey]

I'm currently thinking about factoring armor in. Maybe up to 2 points of *padding* and hard armor (plate etc.) negating the effects of extra-mean surface (like sharp rocks)... but I'll probably decide that when the situation arises and I need to fudge the result to keep the game going. ;) "You hit the ground hard... but you wear a helmet and are not knocked out. Barely."

[Tywin Lannister]

But wearing a helmet could possibly make the fall worse. I don't think it feels good to first crush into the rocks below, then actually having metal wrapped around your head.

[Ashren Va'Hale]

aren't helmets designed to keep you from getting hurt when you hit your head anyways? Like say when riding a bike or horse? Maybe I missed the common sense boat on this one but it seems straight forward to me.

[Lance D. Allen]

Hey Tywin,

This is mostly speculation, as I've never fallen from a cliff with a helmet on, but any force which will actually crush the helmet into your head would probably crush your skull anyway. The metal makes no difference at that level of force.. Now, anything with less than the required force to crush your skull is unlikely to cause the helmet to damage you at all. The ability of the metal to spread the impact across a portion of it's surface, then to have that spread impact transferred to the padding within, which absorbs some before passing it on to the head would be greatly appreciated.

The only negative effect of a helmet, or any armor really, on falling damage would be the weight, and unless you're wearing full-harness plate, I don't expect that would change a great deal of the impact.

Exception: the weight of the helmet, specifically, could result in a greater chance of torque on the spine, leading to a broken neck, which I don't really think TRoS is granular enough to worry about. Cranial damage would be much less likely, though.

My zwei pfennig.

[contracycle]

You are more massive wearing armour so the total energy in the impact is higher the more you are wearing, applying more force to limbs etc.  OTOH, what makes the helmet valuable is not that it has special properties that other armour does not, but only becuase head injuries are fatal or nearly so so frequently.  On the down side, a helmet crushed such that you cannot get it off might be a pain.  I would be inclined to go with the ignore armour rule for simplicity.

[Thagorod Alynsson]

Hello all, i'm new to the forum, but have been playing TROS since easter.

I'm not sure if i agree with you that we should ignore the armour rule. Lets think of a rather well known situation like a tournament. Does the knights only wear armour as protection against the incoming lance? Is the armour only a drag when they are poked off their mount? I believe that for chainmail the effect is around zero, because it will not spread the infliction, and on some cases if not properly padded could worsen the injury. But for plate mail there should be some effect, this also goes for the helmet, the solid metal construction spreads the impact and lessens the potential injury ( *believe that I'm walking in someones steps here* ).
As vital as the head is I suggest that we use the armour modifier with the plusses and minuses this should give us. I believe that wearing a caved in helmet should give some modifiers for pain, but it is certainly more comfortable than a caved in scull.

[Salamander]

It kind of point towards what Thagorod was saying.
http://www.livesteelarmor.com/ase.html

[Mike Holmes]

Lots of faulty physics being bandied about here. Yes, the force of the impact (F=MV) is increased by the weight of the armor, but that only damages what's been impacted. Namely the ground in this case. The person only takes as much force as their own mass. The armor, after it hits the ground effectively becomes the ground. The character then runs into that. So the damage is the same falling with or without armor.

This strikes people as odd. Why, then, does armor protect from blows? And the answer is that it doesn't. The full force of the blow hits the person in the armor. The question is what happens to that force. Without armor, a blow from a sword gets distributed out over the small area of the edge of the weapon. Which means that in terms of units of force per unit of area impacting, the force is quite high. With armor, the force gets spread out meaning that whatever is being hit has to withstand much less force per unit area. Enough so, and the force can be transfered into heat and kinetic energy before any chemical bonds are broken. Bonds breaking is what we RPG players call "damage".

So, why then do people get hurt by falls which are spread out all over at once? Because, as we used to say in the Army when somebody would drop a 100 lb round on their toe, "Gravity is a Motherfucker." That much accelleration is pretty potent. Actually a man can generate similar forces. But he can only accellerate a weapon a short way. Sure, if you fall only a swordswing length will you get hurt? It's the distance that's really lethal. Which we all know implicitly. That distance that you fall, that release of potential energy, translates into tremendous force over distance.

Further, you might not hit everything all at once. In fact it's rather rare. Typically something hits first (the legs if the faller can help it), and those sustain all the impact. The reason that legs are best to land on is twofold. First, they are designed for such a thing, and when you land, your muscles can ameliorate some of the damage by absorbing some of the force like shock absorbers. Think jumping off of a chair and landing on your feet, and then think about landing on your ass. The legs can stop a lot, actually.

The other reason you want to land on your legs is that it's not often lethal if you break them. Assuming enough force, the legs will break (or shatter if it's a really bad impact) and that takes up a whole lot of force. An amazing amount, really. People survive some pretty long falls with only leg injuries.

The next thing you're going to want to try to absorb shock with is the arms. Sometimes this is all you can get in the way if it's a fall in an unfortunate position, right? Well, again, they work like legs, just not nearly as well.

Still, the key is to protect the noggin. Because the chest is pretty well protected, and, more importantly, large. Impacts to the chest hit the ribs, which, like armor, spread the force around pretty well, breaking if they have to in order to absorb damage. The brain, is actually best protected of all. The skull is very tough. But it has to be, because any blow that affects the brain is potentially dangerous. Talking to a Physician's Assistant I know who worked at an ER, I asked him about unconsciousness. Basically, getting "knocked out" as it happens on TV and Film is very unrealistic. As he put it, "Any trauma to the head that renders you unconscious, is a life-threatening situation."

So, a lot comes down to what hits first. Because that's going to take the brunt of the damage. Then, lessened, the damage will proceed to other parts of the body until the whole has come to a rest. A really realistic TROS falling system would calculate all damage first, find the hit location, or locations plural, apply up to 5 levels of damage to each of these, and then figure out what's next, etc, until all the damage levels have been used up. A terminal volocity fall onto something hard should do enough to crush through the entire axis of damage (and probably have some to spare).

Now, each area that hits should actually have some armor effects potentially, despite what I said above. That is, a helmet properly designed, might transfer some of the force around the skull to the shoulders. That sort of thing. So, a helmet is potentially useful. The armor on the legs would, like the bones in the legs, probably absorb some shock in collapse, sending the force upward somewhere (hopefully outward or to other armor, and not the groin). So, it can help in an odd way. This is even more pronounced if the surface of impact is irregular (think spikes), as that would act to localize the force more (making it much nastier) and effect which armor can combat.

This all deals with most armors, but leaves out padding. Which is actually the best armor for a fall. Because padding is designed to absorb blunt force trauma from blows, which is what a fall is. I'd give full value for padding.

Modeling this all would be difficult, however. A simple way of doing it would be to roll a d10, and allow the armor to absorb that many hits as long as it was less than or equal to the AV of the armor. For irregular ground, change the damage type, and add some points to it, which can be reduced by the armor. Anyhow, given that combat armor isn't meant to absorb this sort of impact, it's no surprise that it would be less effective.

There's really no way to ensure that you're acurately modeling such a thing. But that's no different from combat, so we instead make gross approximations. As long as your consistent, and the results produced are believable, that's really all you can ask for.

Mike

[Lance D. Allen]

Damnit Mike, why you gotta come along and ruin a good argument with facts and research?

::grins:: Actually, that about sums up my view on it, with a lot that I just sorta intuitively assumed.