After I posted about my last D&D game, I received a lot of requests for my free fall combat rules.

Here are the rules I put together. I used a combination of underwater combat and flying combat rules, along with some of my own ideas.

Free Fall Combat





The rules of fighting in free fall stress abstraction,fun and simplicity over simulation.





F i g h t i n g w h i l e i n f r e e f a l l i s t r i c k y b u s i n e s s . Characters can steer themselves around while maintaining the same fall speed. Characters can also point themselves down and dive faster than their fall speed or spread their arms (and cloak) to slow their descent.





-Characters must make an athletics check (DC 20) in order to move in any direction while in free fall.





Success: You may move horizontally at your speed, or you may move vertically to any space adjacent to the space directly above or below you.





Fail by 4 or less: You may move horizontally at one-half your speed.





Fail by 5 or more: stay where you are and lose the rest of your move action.





determining range against creatures above or below you





L ook at the distance between the two creatures as if they were on the same elevation, counting squares as normal. Then count the difference between their elevations (each level of the free fall space is separated by 4 square, or 20ft). Use the higher number to determine distance.





As I mentioned before, I used monsters that could fly around and navigate the levels easily. I also had the players fall through a cinder storm once per round. They could avoid this damage by getting themselves on top of one of the pieces of falling rubble.





Also thank you for all the mail about Automata. Honestly I was very nervous about Automata winning the voting. The style was difficult for me and the idea of five more pages of it was a bit scary. I feel like I’ve got the hang of it now though and I can even imagine a world were we have the time to make a proper graphic novel.





I can’t thank you guys enough for letting me do this as my job. Tycho mentioned it before, but the fact that you will stick by us while we go off on these tangents and explore stuff like Automata is really incredible.



