fall damage, he fell a loooong way Options

[Mortax]

Quick question everyone.

We just got done with a run where our shaman lifted a guy to about 25 meters up and dropped him. Does anyone know how much damage one would take?

...a starting phoenix shaman takes down a grade 4 hermetic initiat with bear form. (shakes head) Who says levitate person isn't a combat spell.

[Dog]

I think I read somewhere that all falling damage is base D with the power = to the number of meters fallen. FOF I think, so there might be something newer, but this is what I use.
However I categorize lots of big falls under 'screw it, you're dead'.
If you wanted to get technical, use the accelleration of gravity and compare it to a vehicle/pedestrian collision chart or something.

[Charon]

Well, it's been a while since I've done physics.

What's gravity? 9.8m/s^2 ?

If so, your shaman would be hitting the ground at roughly 15 m/s which is 45 meter per round. What's the rule in Rigger 3 for crashing at that speed (too lazy to check right now)?

[Arethusa]

There are newer rules that bracket falls into damage levels (2D for falling 2 meters? What asshole thought that was a good idea), but I don;t recall where. They've been brought up before, and you can search for them if you don't want to wait for a bookninja to stop by.

[toturi]

P46 SR Comp.

Do I qualify as a bookninja now?

[Arethusa]

Yes, bookninja.

[Capt. Dave]

Falling Damage Table (pg. 46, Companion)

Distance Fallen (in meters)

1-2 = Light
3-6 = Moderate
7-20 = Serious
21+ = Deadly

Power is half meters fallen - half characters impact armor (round down)
Now that's bookninja.

[toturi]

[Sandoval Smith]

How long did that take to do? Levitation's rate of movement is Magic Attribute x Successes (limited by the spell's force) so (assuming a MA of 6) he could've lifted the guy 25 meters in one pass, if he'd scored five successes, and it was a force 5 spell. If the target is unwilling, they get to resist with either willpower, or strength, whichever is higher. It's possible that luck just went against the level four intiate, and the Phoenix was able to lift and drop him before he got a chance to act, but it's not something I'd want to try more than once because if I don't get enough successes to lift and drop him on my turn, he can cast levitate one himself, or toxic wave me, or whatever else he wants.

[tisoz]

The levitated mage didn't know Levitate? I wonder how many Kg the bear form weighed and if they remembered to raise the TN for each excess 100kg?

The levitator could have been using a power focus to help increase distance.

[Crusher Bob]

It also would have taken roughly 2.25 seconds for him to fall 25 meters, plenty of time to do some elemental commanding, creative casting, or whatever.

Distance = (1/2) (Acceleration) (Time^2)

this gives him an impact speed of around 22 meters a second (80 kmh / 50 mph).

Some googleing says that terminal velocity for people with arms and legs extended is around 56 m/s (200 kph) which you would reach (without air resistance) in about 160 meters of fall.

(As an aside, reduced drag positions (ie, arms and legs not extended make your terminal velocity go up by a third or more)...

Sigh, and the rules are crap, as usual, the power of the falling damage should be proportinal to the square root of the distance fallen, not a linear comparison...

[ShadowGhost]

[Tarantula]

SG, do you have any little kids? You ever pick them up when they don't want to be? You notice how they somehow seem to double their weight when doing so? Its using your body to resist being picked up, lowering center of gravity, becoming dead weight, things like that.

[Arethusa]

None of which has any physical effect on your mass. Levitation is a uniform force applied, and no amount of twisting and bitching's going to make any difference if you can't grab onto something not affected.

[Tarantula]

No, not grabbing or twisting, weight felt. They FEEL heavier, its because they go limp. Unconcious people are the same way, sure, I can pick you up while you're standing there, but if you're unconcious, you feel a lot heavier, because you're not supporting your own weight in any which way.

[Austere Emancipa...]

Which, again, makes no difference when there's a uniform force applied.

[Sandoval Smith]

Let's just call it a balancing factor so that when you go outside in Seattle, you don't need the kind of umbrella that will protect you from both acid rain, and plummetting trolls.

[Johnny Silverhan...]

My question is this:
How the HELL did you get that kind of successes on THAT kind of target numbers.

Let's assume that you're not walking around as an astral beacon with 900,000,000 force worth of foci helping you out.
You might have sorcery(casting) at 5/7, hell maybe even in Manip to 4/6/8, and I don't know phoenix shamans, so maybe they get 2 bonus dice.

So, let's give you those 10 dice, plus 6 in the spell.

So, you're rollin 16 dice (takin the drain like the slitch that you are), and you're trying to nuke bearface up into the air, AND he's got no reaction (air elementals, levitate on himself, having his troll buttlover catch him, athletics to break his fall, etc.), then the situation goes a lil like this:

Phoenix: I"m gonna send his ass up into the air so that he falls and takes loads of damage
GM: how high ((insert jokes about you said jump, etc.)
Phoenix: bout 25 meters
GM: and your magic is 6 right?
P: yeah
GM: cool, so you need 4 successes.
P: cool, and what's my TN: ..... 4 plus his body/2 (what with the mass = bodyx50 and your TN goes up by 1 per 100 body thing)
GM: he's in bear form, so, its body starts at 10.... but he's in bear form, so he rolled.... but his wp IS 6, so that was his own TN, so, he only got 2 successes. so his body is only 11. your TN is 4+5.5. so: 10. ..... oh wait! he's a grade 4 initiate!
P: "Dreck..."
GM: so, he uses shielding. Now, hmm..... he doesn't like your face, he's got a sorcery of hmm..... how about 8... plus his 4 initiate grades, and Hell, let's say no foci. so, he shields himself for 12. your tn is 22, and he's rolling his WP (6) plus 12 additional dice from shielding.
SO! you roll your 16 dice, and I'll roll my 18. I need 6s. you need 22s.
Let's compare successes.
Phoenix: how many successes did you reduce me by?
GM: 4
Phoenix: Frag yes! I got 8 22s on my 16 dice! Eat that dreck Hermatic Bear fragface, one point for the shaman world!!!!
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.......

For some reason I don't see how this question is relevant.
........
Alternately, what they said about SR comp is what canon claims damage to be.
My group and I always figured out velocity, then used Rigger 2 (sorry, second ed player here) to figure out the crash damage to both the faller, and those that they hit.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Thoughts?

[Crusher Bob]

The max TN increase for shielding is now limited by your init grade.

The base TN for levitate is 4. (So the final TN would be 8)

Thankfully, shielding is persistent (can defend against more than one spell) so dumping your pool is not a complete screw job. But the the mage dumps his pool, that leaves him with so ability to actually cast spells, which is still a pretty good result.

The speed at which you can levitate something is magic x successes. So getting even one success lets you get him off the ground...

[Sandoval Smith]

Right, the bone of contention was getting the grade 4 intiate off the ground and 25 meters up without him doing anything about it. As I said in my first post, it would've taken five success, and a force 5 levitate in order to do it in one intiative pass.

[ShadowGhost]

Actually 4 successes on a force 4 (magic 6 x 4 successes = 24 Meters).

Average weight for full grown bear - about 500 lbs, or 228 kilos.

TN for casting = 6 (+1 for each extra 100 Kilos).

Not all that hard to do.

Nothing was said about whether the Pheonix shaman had any spell defense left to use.

Being a shapeshifter shaman - he has to distribute attribute points between 9 attributes - 3 mental, and 6 physical (three physical attributes for human and three physical attributes for Bear).

I've used the same trick as a GM on PCs, dropping a troll from 60 meters - he lived, but only because the party mage cast levitate just in time to slow him down before hitting the ground. The Troll still have to shake off a 10D on half impact armor. Made a nice crater though :D

[Fortune]

[Sandoval Smith]

Oops, you're right, that's over the course of an entire turn, not just one pass. So now I really want to know what that bear did while he was being levitated. It's possible that he had no intiative enhancements, and had already gone when the Phoenix acted, and had not taken Shielding as one of his metamagics, and flubbed his resistance roll to the spell so badly that the Phoenix got the five successes (the OP said 25 meters, so that's at least five) he needed on his force five levitate to lift and drop him in one turn...

Possible, and not that probable. A better evaluation can be made when the OP tells us what hermetic did before he was dropped.

[Johnny Silverhan...]

So Mortax, you have us all interested, do tell?
Explain more, clarify the situation, maybe tell us some of your stats, and if you know them, the stats of the opposed hermetic in bear form.
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Oh, and shadowghost: I'm pretty sure that it says that the HERMETIC guy had cast a spell to become a bear, not, was inherently a bear shifter. .... plus... it was the HERMETIC guy, not the phoenix shaman whos spell defense matters.
...
Just sayin...

[ShadowGhost]

You're right - I had that ass-backwards.... still, it'd be interesting to read the stats on both, and what force/successes the levitate spell had, what sort (if any) spell defense there was, etc, etc.