Disclaimer: I only own the books in my native language, so my wording might be a bit off when mentioning exact skill names. It should still be clear what I'm asking.
Just recently, my character was hit by a fear effect while on a roof. To escape, I decided my character would jump off the roof. That was a choice, he could have just run along the roof or stood still. We looked up the rules and they said that you only take falling damage if the height is more than 3m. As it would be boring to take a auto-success action in response to an enemy success, we decided the roof would be 4m from the ground.
So my character decided to jump down 4m. And then… we failed to find any rules on this.
There is falling damage. The rules are clear. However, my character was in full control. He was not pushed or otherwise impaired. He looked down, said "I can do that" and jumped down. He was not "falling".
Looking up all the athletics skills, we found out there is one that explicitly covers "jumping down from any height". Free-falling. But there is no single rule for it. It just says "This covers jumping down from any height." That's it. No difficulties given, no mentioning of what a success does.
Can anybody clarify the rules or point me to the paragraph I missed that covers jumping down?
Best Answer
Your confusion is understandable. The section on active physical skills (page 133 of the Core Rulebook) does not go in-depth into discussing how fall damage works in combination with the Free-Fall skill. The next page (134), however, under the section on Climbing Failures and Glitches refers you to page 172 for Falling Damage.
Falling Damage
Again, no guidance is given in using the Free-Fall skill. So the GM needs to apply their own discretion. Here's how I do it assuming that the character doesn't have any gear designed to help them overcome falls such as grappling hooks, parachutes, etcetera.
The "Break-Fall" Free-Fall specialization is applicable to this test, granting a +2 dice pool bonus to characters attempting to break a fall.
The reason that I increase the threshold quadratically is to represent the fact that the greater the fall distance (and thus more time spent falling), the more speed gets built up and the harder it is to successfully break the fall.