Windlings, knockdown and falling damage.

[Spader]

Just a survey to know how you deal with those situations.

- When a windling misses a knockdown roll (for being wounded), should he be entitled to falling damage (since he is flying most of the time in combat)?

- Do you apply the same damage to windling when they hit the ground? Since they weigh a third of a human's weight, falling should be less lethal. How do you deal with that?

[etherial]

[Mataxes]

It would depend on the height involved.

A windling Archer or magician using their flight ability to attack from a higher vantage point? Yes.

A Swordmaster or Warrior engaged in melee combat? Probably not, because I generally don't apply falling damage to other close combat types that are knocked down in combat.

I don't worry about the mass issue when it comes to falling damage -- by that logic, a troll or obsidiman would suffer more damage from falling. The game rules are an abstraction by necessity, and trying to bring too much real world physics can burden the system.

[Kasbak]

What Mataxes said. Game stats are arbitrary numbers made to streamline physical concepts so they are in the same relative frame of reference and quick and easy to figure out. You could do all the equations necessary to figure out real values for everything you encounter, but at that point you're no longer playing a game, just doing math to run a simulation (which I personally would still enjoy, but I'm weird like that).

As for the primary question at hand, if a Windling is falling from normal standing height for other Namegivers, then there's no need to add falling damage; even looking at real world physics, they wouldn't have had enough time to accelerate to the point where they would encounter any more relative damage than another Namegiver tripping and falling.

[Ral76]

Just my thoughts: I would argue that flying to a windling is like walking to another namegiver; a natural ability. Thus even a knocked down windling should still have sufficient body control left to not plummet to the ground like a rock (except he/she is inconcious).

[Mataxes]

That's not a bad thought either -- certainly when dealing with low altitudes (perhaps 2-3 yards) windlings shouldn't have any significant disadvantage there. Perhaps if getting knocked down from a greater height, you could allow the character to make a Dex check or something like that to keep enough control to avoid damage (but still need to take an action to "stand up").

This is starting to get into an area where each GM's ideas about how things work can start conflicting. Some GMs have a bit of a hate-on for windlings, and want options that allow them to "punish" windling flight to one degree or another. I'm not one of them, but I can understand the problem that flying characters can bring to a game, because they can ignore obstacles that would normally stymie land-bound characters. (Kind of like how a Beastamaster can make it difficult to include normal creature/animal encounters.)

[Panda]

There are all kinds of things which are natural fliers and plummet from the sky when struck. Pretty much everything, actually. Anything other than the most glancing of blows sends them to the ground.

If you want to apply physics to the answer, some interesting things come out. First, since they are small, they should take a great deal less damage from falling. Their terminal velocity is likely to be much less than a human (who will cover roughly 180 yards in 6 seconds while falling - they hit terminal velocity just before this). As Josh pointed out, obsidimen and trolls would be in bad shape from falling. The square-cube law is rough. The only thing worse off than a falling obsidiman is whatever is underneath said falling obsidiman. The complexity of correctly applying falling damage based on size isn't really worth it.

From a game perspective, offering a windling the ability to suffer no consequences from flying as high as possible and avoiding the conflict seems sketchy. In addition, giving them a chance to right themselves essentially means they may never have to worry about knockdown at all. On the flipside, this is a situation which should also apply to flying creatures and of which players can take advantage. Keep in mind, this isn't a question of losing your balance and falling - I can naturally walk, but it still happens - but suffering a serious wound and falling. From a cinematic perspective, having someone try to catch their falling friend is cool; it would prevent falling damage (despite having no actual reason to do so), but would maintain knockdown.

[Mataxes]

Yeah, to stress the point, whatever approach you might take to windlings suffering damage from being knocked down while flying, none of them should allow windlings to overcome the need to take their Standard action (or use the Jump Up option) to recover from being Knocked Down.

[Slimcreeper]

In my game, falling windlings always land on a strategically placed cactus.

[etherial]