The core question
What is a way for a 16th level character to avoid potentially fatal falling damage – but are not Feather Fall, Levitate, magic items that grant the properties of these spells, or the Monk's and Barbarian's class features (Slow Fall and Rage)?
The context
I am planning a short campaign in D&D 5e that starts out with my players imprisoned upon an airship. The airship gets attacked, and all passengers are hurled towards the ground from a substantial height (more than 3000 feet).
The details
- These are 16th-level characters (because we want to do a high-level adventure). I won't tell my players that they "should" or "might take" magical starting equipment or spells that give them flying speed, etc.
- They are stripped of their equipment (because they were imprisoned, by even stronger characters).
- The fall should be lethal, if they do not intervene. I'm considering moving the damage cap for falling up for this very reason (I plan to use the "a creature falls 500 ft at the start of a round" rule). I want to avoid the "raging barbarian just fell out of the sky and just tanks the impact" scenario, if possible.
- I've modified the fall damage as follows: terminal velocity is about 150 ft/s IRL, about 80 in 5e under the "500ft per round or 6 seconds" rule, so I was thinking maybe 40d6 (a quarter of the max velocity in feet). Enough to potentially kill/make high-level players unconscious.
My current ideas are as follows:
- The cargo from the ship – that contains their equipment, which they can recover later in the campaign – also includes Scrolls of Feather Fall. The scrolls are scattered in the air around them and can be grabbed and used. This has the caveat that Feather Fall is only on the Bard's, Sorcerer's, and Wizard's spell list, so if we don't have one player with this class, RAW they cannot read this scroll.
- A player could grab a sail from the airship and use it as a improvised parachute – this is probably far out of the rules, but I might rule this as a DC 20 Acrobatics or Athletics check?
- The players can attempt to fall into water, a lake or something similar. This will reduce their damage, but might still kill them.
I am looking for a solution that
- works for (almost) all classes or
- lets one player save the whole party or
- somehow negates the fall damage otherwise
Best Answer
In short: Don't do this.
I would suggest that starting your game with a challenge or scenario that has the potential to immediately kill one or more characters is setting a poor tone for the game.
I'm not saying "go easy on your players"; but I am saying that you need to have a non-fatal outcome planned for what happens when the dice just decide they'd rather all roll low single digits today. What're you going to do if everything the PCs try just fails through no fault of their own? Stand up twenty minutes into your game and say, "Well, you're all dead, guess the game is off, let's go play Mario Kart"? And it's arguably even worse if only one player dies in the first scene, because now you have to struggle to get them back into the game or they're left out. Believe me, if you exclude somebody from the game because of a random die roll in the first scene, that person is going to be rightfully upset, and they're likely to never come back to your game. And as for me, if you do that to another player, I may well just walk out of your game, because I can see how you treat people who have set aside time for this activity.
A big epic start with a crashing airship is wonderful, but the die rolls involved should determine things like "How badly are the characters are hurt when they reach the ground alive?" or "How much starting gear are they able to salvage?", not whether they actually survive long enough to get out of the prologue and play the game.
For example, instead of having the ship destroyed in mid-air and throwing everyone clear at thousands of feet, consider having the players running around the ship's deck as it starts to fail and shed pieces on the way down, and when the final breakup happens, they're only a couple hundred feet over a lake. Use your DM fiat to declare that any of the PCs reduced to zero hit points wash up on the beach a few hours later, barely alive, possibly with injuries that will cause some long-term problems until they're dealt with appropriately.
Should the players' actions really even matter?
As an aspect of the above, you could do something like what they do in video game prologues a lot, where the opening has a sort of fake threat -- set it up so it feels like the players' actions are having an impact, but in reality the whole thing is an "interactive cutscene", where their choices change the dialogue and details, but make no particular difference to the overall outcome.
For example, the players might try to stabilize the airship's elemental ring to keep the ship aloft, or try to help steer for a crash-landing in a nearby lake:
If they succeed, great job! You describe how the ship is threatening to come apart at the seams, but thanks to their heroic actions, they manage to just barely hold it together long enough to make it over water before the ship loses its integrity and crumbles, dropping everyone the last hundred feet into the drink.
If they fail, that's too bad. You describe how they work hard to try to keep the ship together long enough to reach the surface, but they just can't manage it, and the ship breaks up completely while they're still a hundred feet above the water.
Or, depending on their actions, you describe how they don't do anything to help and instead rob the ship's vault. That was a poor choice! Because they do absolutely nothing to help, the ship breaks up in mid-air, and they have pockets full of heavy gold as they plummet a hundred feet into the water, where they are forced to dump all their ill-gotten loot to survive.