Has anyone tried the "Penny Arcade" rules for free fall?

[Bard Regard]

I'm running an ambitious first session soon that I plan to end with a brief (2-3 turns) encounter falling from the sky, with the PCs fighting against falling NPC. Looking for guidelines for that, I found Gabe's, from Penny Arcade, reprinted here:

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

Fighting while in free fall is tricky business. 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

Look 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.


/end rules

Has anyone tried this? How'd it work? Any issues I should watch out for? Do you have a better system?

The PCs will be level two, so they can't fly, but they'll land soft.

Thanks!

[Sipex]

While I haven't tried them myself, with PCs at level 2, anyone not trained in Athletics is going to have a frustrating time moving anywhere and anyone trained in the ability without good stat synchronization isn't really going to have that much easier of a time.

With the low levels as well, the PCs won't have much access to re-roll powers for Athletics checks which would be very useful in an encounter like this.

[dariathalon]

I have to agree. For level 2, moving around seems a bit too much of a challenge. I think I would see about adding in another skill or two that could be used to attempt to move. Acrobatics seems like a pretty obvious choice, there might even be others depending on the exact circumstances. Giving characters more choices on skills to use should help them out some.

Another question occurs to me though. What happens if someone is knocked prone? This seems like something you at least need to consider.

[Kurald Galain]

How does this interact with movement powers, such as the rogue utility Tumble?

[ericgrau]

I'd try DC 10 acrobatics (including partial success on a check of 6+) and perhaps a DC 5 wisdom check as well to figure it out the first time. It's a common mistake to set DCs according to what's challenging for the DM's current party level or for an optimized character rather than asking how hard it is for a commoner. I'm not saying DC 10 is perfect, but it's gotta be a lot lower than 20.

Other than that the rules are simple and while that might not be the most accurate, simple is very nice. It seems like you should get stands for vertical spacing to limit confusion.

[SowZ]

I have to agree. For level 2, moving around seems a bit too much of a challenge. I think I would see about adding in another skill or two that could be used to attempt to move. Acrobatics seems like a pretty obvious choice, there might even be others depending on the exact circumstances. Giving characters more choices on skills to use should help them out some.

Another question occurs to me though. What happens if someone is knocked prone? This seems like something you at least need to consider.

I would think you can't actually be knocked prone, but maybe you are knocked wonky and flail around a bit doing frontflips which takes a move action to stabilize and grants combat advantage to anyone attacking you.

[Bard Regard]

So the session went well! A brief report on the encounter in question:

The DC Athletics I decided on was 14, which I thought struck a nice balance between "attainable" and "this is actually difficult." Whenever someone rolled just below that, for half movement, this just made them consider their movement a little more carefully. Also, even if movement was completely cancelled, it wasn't too bad, since there were only three fairly fragile enemies for the five PCs. The encounter lasted 5 turns. Nobody was knocked prone, but I like the idea of "falling uncontrollably" as a functionally identical substitute. No rogue in the party, so that wasn't an issue either. The one edit I made was that I granted combat advantage to any unit in a space directly above another. That led to some clever positioning strategy.

All in all, it worked well for a short encounter, and I give it my approval. For longer encounters, the lack of environmental features could make it a little boring, so keep it fairly short. Also keep in mind that the difficult movement will naturally tend to lengthen the encounter a bit.

Hope this has been helpful, or at least interesting.