Stupid Deaths, Those Wacky Players Options

[Grinder]

He killed the character not the player.

[mmu1]

[Ed Simons]

[mmu1]

[northern lights]

elf + 4 story fall = death.

easy enough for me to understand.

i'm thinking that either way, without freefall, he's going to die.

i'm also thinking that you have had a character die and felt it was the GM's fault. just what i'm thinking from your tone, but i could be way off target.

4 story falls don't come out well, and any GM that lets them is doing his players a serious favor. if someone goes out the window of a 4 story building in my world they get 2 chances. straight body roll, then hand of god. success in the first represents a miracle and use of the second is considered a miracle as well.

[Shadow]

I think the troll would have landed first just by the nature of his size and bulk and how you carry people. If he held onto the elf the whole way down did he push the elf out in front of him or something?

This sounds like a GM who just wanted to kill a character because he could.

[nezumi]

[mmu1]

[nezumi]

[mmu1]

[Velocity]

And there you have it: could a full-grown man in relatively good shape jump out of a four-story window while carrying an eight-year-old child and land in such a way as to not kill the child? Clearly, the answer is 'yes' if he jumped and the ensuing fall was relatively controlled. If he panicked and ran out, well... anything can happen.

[imperialus]

[frostPDP]

Alright, this run is called Panther's Shame, cuz it sucked for my poor char.

The characters: Panther, Mage verged to Initiate (Me), Zeke (Troll Adept), and Johnny (Face-Type guy played by someone I can't remember)

The mission: Kidnap a princess from Tir Tangiere and take her to the Plane of Night. (for some reason my GM thought Panther had already initiated.)

The effect - Well, Johnny had enough contacts (Lofwyr as a rating 3? Well the guy DID play since he was like 14 and he was 22-ish.) that he had a fake SIN as a CAS celebrety and he looked the part. So he pretended to be an under-the-table diplomat trying to feel out the Tir for trade agreements. He managed to persuade them.

The long story short, we get a private meeting in her top-floor suite in the Hilton. He can't bring his Thors (Dunno what they were aside from ultra-powerful pistols. He had ambidex, by the way) in while loaded (But can with them empty) where my character posed as a bodyguard and Zeke rode with an NPC rigger who we rented for his helicopter.

Meeting starts. Helicoper throws the ladder down and Zeke hops in, pops one of the Princess' two bodyguards with a nice burst from an Ingram.

Johnny shock-gloves the girl. She goes down bigtime and is out cold.

I manabolt the other guard. He falls out of a window.

We notice two UCAS military helicopters. Johnny burns Karma to buy successes and takes one out with each single-shot. AV rounds are cute.

My character is last onto the helicopter. Before we know it, a UCAS soldier with an RPG fires and nails the chopper. 3 failed saving throws (Though I could have used Hooper-Nelson, I was a n00b and my GM didn't remind me...)

Six story falls hurt, but with Armor 6 on they aren't so bad. At least, considering I also had regular armor on so my roll wasn't that bad. I take deadly stun and serious physical and am out. Wake up in a prison getting tortured.

The good news? Panther managed to get revenge on that very same hotel room....

[Panzergeist]

Actually, the troll should fall last. Heavier objects don't fall faster, but larger objects fall slower due to air resistance. Also, the troll should have suffered a higher damage code, since being heavier, he hit with more force. His size should have made it harder on him, not easier.

[Slump]

Granted, the troll is bigger, and thus has more air resistance. But is the troll denser than the elf? If the troll is denser, it might still fall faster than the elf because of inertia -- with wind resistance needs to work harder to slow the fall.

[Herald of Verjig...]

Inertia is a vector. This means that the troll running horizontally will have momentum in that direction, and that energy will not increase his rate of fall (if he was jumping up, it might delay his fall slightly).

The troll was also holding onto the elf for at least some of the fall which changes the tumble properties from "less air resistance falls a teeny bit faster" to "drek, I hate complex object rotations and surface approximations of changing shapes."

Now, unless someone wants to actually calculate the air resistance and relevant vectors for every moment of the troll and elf freefall (with conditionals based on if/when the troll releases his grip), I think this nit has been picked beyond any potentially productive extent.

[Angelone]

Was the elf out cold right after being used as a battering ram? I'm suprised they didn't cast levitate or shapechange into something that can fly(or a small white cube, cause they fell no pain).

Personally, I don't know much about physics, but I'm smart enough when I'm falling to shout "Wonderrunner powers activate. Form of hawk!"

[nezumi]

I suspect levitate won't do much for 600 lbs (unless it's viciously high level), and most mages I've seen don't have much that would help (invisibility? Nah... Fireball? Maybe...)

[John Campbell]

All else being equal, the troll will fall a little bit faster than the elf. Thanks to square-cube law, the troll has a higher ratio of mass to surface area than the elf, and force of gravity is proportional to mass, while air resistance is proportional to surface area. The relative builds of elves and trolls probably add to that effect slightly, too.

But it's a very small effect, and, in a relatively short fall, is going to be overwhelmed by other factors, like the initial positions of the characters and how they tumbled as they fell.

Also, while the elf has very little chance of surviving a four-story fall, the troll's chances are even lower, basically zero. Mass cancels out of the equation when determining how fast you fall (ignoring air resistance)... it doesn't cancel out when determining how hard you fall. The elf is likely to break every bone in his body when he hits... but the troll will splash.

[Shadow]

It still sounds like to me the GM made up his mind to kill the elf and did it. Lame GM.

[Trax]

The elf was already dead before they hit the ground.

[fistandantilus4....]

why ? was the troll hugging him for a security blanket?

[Wounded Ronin]

Dammit, people. If I were GMing the elf and the troll falling out of the window, I'd just spend 10 minutes looking up the falling damage codes from the Companion and then tell both players to resist the damage without armor or combat pool, and then leave it at that.

[fistandantilus4....]

yeah, but I'd give maybe a 1-12 chance (foro easy numbers) that one land on the other, just to make it interesting. But not just declare it out of hand.

Falling damage is fun to look up. I had to look it up for 25 stories the other day (see earlier thread). Characters body was in the low 20's, w/ armor, and a quickened armor spell, so there was actually a chance.

[blakkie]