Falling Rules and Others

Kirowan

Mongoose
I just received my copy of Conan and started reading through it.

I can't find any rules for falling, traps, or environmental hazards. Are they in the book somewhere?

Thanks,

Nick
 
Hmmm... despite the fact the climb skill talks about taking "the appropriate falling damage", I can't find that anywhere in the book. I'm using a 1st printing though... do you have the new Atlantean Edition?

Similarly, the Disable Device skill talks about traps but the trap rules aren't present anywhere.

You can always use the SRD ones if you dont have a D20 rulebook handy, but I know that isn't the point of buying a complete game :)
 
D20 standard is 1d6 per 10' of falling distanace up to a max of 10d6 (if I recall correctly). Knowing the deadliness of Conan though, they could have intended for falling to be a little nastier and it got squeezed out in favor of some other rules.

I'll dig a little .... I could swear I saw it somewhere.
 
There are several places in the original book where the unedited copy-and-paste from the SRD is evident. The Concentration skill refers to some spells from the SRD, I believe. Challenge Ratings for monsters, etc.
 
Sutek said:
D20 standard is 1d6 per 10' of falling distanace up to a max of 10d6 (if I recall correctly). Knowing the deadliness of Conan though, they could have intended for falling to be a little nastier and it got squeezed out in favor of some other rules.

I'll dig a little .... I could swear I saw it somewhere.

If you want to make falling damage nastier you could go the route of 1st edition AD&D which was 1d6 per 10' cumulative IIRC.
  • 10' - 1d6
    20' - 3d6
    30' - 6d6
    etc.
 
Sutek said:
D20 standard is 1d6 per 10' of falling distanace up to a max of 10d6 (if I recall correctly). Knowing the deadliness of Conan though, they could have intended for falling to be a little nastier and it got squeezed out in favor of some other rules.

I'll dig a little .... I could swear I saw it somewhere.

The d20 standard is actually capped at 20d6 ... which is quite silly when one considers the non-flying adventurer falling from a thousand foot high cliff and living to tell the tale.
 
Well, it would be a 200 foot cliff rather than 1000 feet but yeah, it is a bit much, if not THAT much.
 
I see that rule more as an abstract thing than physics. The adventurer suffers 20d6 damage, and it's up to the GM to describe the miraculous way they survived. After all, a hero who has survived long enough to accumulate that many hit points doesn't deserve to die from a climbing accident.

Alternatively, if I thought the character was doing something stupid when they fell I'd forget all about rolling dice and tell them that they're now a pancake. If they were a rules lawyer I'd tell them "fine, you're a pancake with your bones turned to jelly but still hanging onto life with that last 50hp... happy now???"
 
Tristan said:
Well, it would be a 200 foot cliff rather than 1000 feet but yeah, it is a bit much, if not THAT much.

Nono, you missed my point. Since the cap is 20d6, purely going by the rules, one could fall off a 1,000 foot cliff and be no worse than if you fell off of a 200 foot cliff. Hell, you could fall off of a 25,000 foot mountain and strictly going by the rules, only suffer the same amount of damage as falling off of a 200 foot cliff.

Since this seems rather silly, you can always go with one of the alternate rules posited by the previous posters. I tend to favor the no cap version myself. You fall off the 1,000 foot high cliff ... let's see that's 100d6. :twisted:
 
iltharanos said:
Since this seems rather silly, you can always go with one of the alternate rules posited by the previous posters. I tend to favor the no cap version myself. You fall off the 1,000 foot high cliff ... let's see that's 100d6. :twisted:

Thats easy enough to do without even changing the rules :twisted: :

"Okay, you fall 200 feet down the 1,000 foot cliff. Oh, damn, you hit a tiny outcrop and take 20d6 damage, then bounce off and keep falling. And .. oh dear.. it seems this cliff has an outcrop every 200 feet or so...

So thats 20d6 plus 20d6 plus 20d6 plus 20d6 plus 20d6...."
 
mthomason said:
iltharanos said:
Since this seems rather silly, you can always go with one of the alternate rules posited by the previous posters. I tend to favor the no cap version myself. You fall off the 1,000 foot high cliff ... let's see that's 100d6. :twisted:

Thats easy enough to do without even changing the rules :twisted: :

"Okay, you fall 200 feet down the 1,000 foot cliff. Oh, damn, you hit a tiny outcrop and take 20d6 damage, then bounce off and keep falling. And .. oh dear.. it seems this cliff has an outcrop every 200 feet or so...

So thats 20d6 plus 20d6 plus 20d6 plus 20d6 plus 20d6...."

LOL. That's pure evil. I like it. Hehehe.

So, can anyone with the Atlantean edition tell us whether there are falling rules incorporated into that edition?
 
Keep in mind the 20 point cap for Massive Damage. There is that. In that regard, it need only be a 40ft fall that kills ya...
 
$50 for a game that doesn't even have all the rules in it? I'm working from the Atlantean edition too.

Nick
 
It's called "Be a GM and wing it!"

There weren't falling rules when I started playing D&D...we had to come up with it on our own. Think about it: Falling 50ft into a snow drift or sand dune is totally different to falling 50ft into a dry, rocky river bed. Plus, with massive damage, at a certain point it won't matter how many dice you roll and you can invoke th einevitable death rules on pg 339.
 
I'd have to argue that rules for falling are alluded to in the Climb skill, and despite them being available in the SRD I think they ought to be added to the next Conan errata. This may well be someone's first ever RPG and they may not have a clue what to do.
 
I'm an experienced gamer and I also know I can find the rules in the SRD. I just shouldn't have to.

Nick
 
The 20d6 falling rules cap comes from the fact that humans reach terminal velocity after 200 feet.

It's just plain Physics. You won't hit the ground any faster or harder if you fell from 200 feet, 400 feet, 1000 feet, or 20,000 feet. Wind resistance keeps you from accelerating any faster after 200 feet.

http://hypertextbook.com/facts/JianHuang.shtml
http://ask.yahoo.com/ask/20011205.html


Keep in mind, however, that terminal velocity is 120mph. Imagine your car crashing into a wall at 120 mph. Now imagine the car is you and the wall is the ground.
 
Kirowan at Work said:
$50 for a game that doesn't even have all the rules in it? I'm working from the Atlantean edition too.

Nick

This is a point where people can have a legitimate difference of opinion. The PHB and DMG are both over 300 pages of which a large part is devoted to spells and magic items. Conan is about 350 pages and also includes a REH essay, a gazatter and a small monster section. Sooner or later something has to go.

Some people feel that Conan, as a stand alone product, sholuld include everything a DM needs (believe it or not a duplicate of this thread ran a couple of months ago) but me, I think that the entire point of the OGL is that game designers don't have to re-print everything to have a complete and workable game.

You just can't please everybody I guess.

Later.
 
argo said:
Some people feel that Conan, as a stand alone product, sholuld include everything a DM needs (believe it or not a duplicate of this thread ran a couple of months ago) but me, I think that the entire point of the OGL is that game designers don't have to re-print everything to have a complete and workable game.

You are correct on the OGL allowing for products which are not standalone RPGs in and of themselves, and the majority of products produced under it state that clearly on the cover, along with the name of the other product(s) required to use it. Conan does not do this, and gives no claim of being anything other than a complete RPG.

The "generic" OGL rulebooks (Cybernet, Horror, etc) keep themselves to standalone rules sets without any claim to contain setting-specific information.

The Judge Dredd and B5 games clearly state that they're not standalone games, and that other books are required in order to run them. The Conan and Lone Wolf games do not state this (and cannot, as they're not d20-licenced), and present themselves as complete combined Player/GM guides with no attachments to the d20 system. I actually prefer the latter approach, and support the OGL system fully.

Any roleplaying newbie picking up wouldn't have a clue they were meant to have any other rulebook in order to have those "missing" rules, therefore I don't believe Mongoose intended players to need any other rulebook, but that these rules simply got overlooked. Other rules, such as the environmental ones, were probably excluded as being inappropriate to the Conan setting during everyday play. The problem lies in that traps and falling are referred to within the rulebook while not existing in it, or with any indication of where to find them (or even a short statement saying "make up your own rules for these").

A simple fix, therefore, would simply be to add these rules into the Conan errata available online. They are referred to elsewhere in the book, without any indication that you need to look elsewhere for them, and therefore really ought to be in the Conan rulebook somewhere. Otherwise the references in the book (in the Climb and Disable Trap skill descriptions) should at least tell you where you need to go to get them. Not everyone owns (or should have to) a copy of the D&D rulebooks or knows of the existence of the SRD, and saying "well, they're in the SRD" is not really an acceptable response to a customer who has bought this product (unless the book itself specifically states that so they buy it knowing that fact)

If they were indeed omitted because it was assumed players already had them (and it would surprise me if this is the case), perhaps the statement "the use of the Pocket DM's Handbook is suggested in order to run this game" should have been added to the back of the book? Or even a reference to the online SRD.

I should add that I don't feel Mongoose are to "blame" for anything here at all. Mistakes happen, errata gets released. Some games (by any company) have confusing text in them that needs explaining.
 
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