Falling, Momentum and Dimension Door

[Arvin Natsuko]

If you're falling off a cliff, say, 500 feet, and close to the bottom you cast Dimension Door, do you keep the Momentum from your fall and potentially die, or you appear safely at the bottom?

[SkylarkR6]

One would hope that since it's a 4th level spell and decently powerful it would have such contingencies in place. If not.... 3 castings of this to reach the requisite height fallen to reach terminal velocity, have feather fall available, carry large rock/anvil/big ass spear. Profit?

[Lord8Ball]

Now your thinking with portals. :smallbiggrin:

[Tiadoppler]

Hmm. I would say that you keep your momentum, but are allowed to redirect it.

If you are falling, you take damage at the end of a fall.


The max speed of a fall is 500' per round. If you fall from 501' up, you end your first round of falling 1' off the ground.

That doesn't mean that you're on the ground and safe. Even though you're occupying a space that is 'on the ground', your fall has not ended, and gravity has not forgotten that you've got 20d6 nonmagical bludgeoning damage with your name on it.

If you teleport while falling, you move yourself to a different space, but you do not lose the 'Falling' condition. Even though you're now occupying a space 'on the ground', your fall has not ended.


Personal houserules:
You can teleport yourself upside-down to invert your 'falling speed'. On the next round you 'fall' 500' feet up, and your falling distance resets to 0' (as you reach the peak of your trajectory). This lets you negate damage by 'jumping back up' to the clifftop or airship, but doesn't fully replace Feather Fall.
If you teleport onto an object moving faster than 60'/round, you take 'Falling' damage based on the relative speed and land Prone.

[dickerson76]

Personal houserules:
You can teleport yourself upside-down to invert your 'falling speed'. On the next round you 'fall' 500' feet up, and your falling distance resets to 0' (as you reach the peak of your trajectory). This lets you negate damage by 'jumping back up' to the clifftop or airship, but doesn't fully replace Feather Fall.
If you teleport onto an object moving faster than 60'/round, you take 'Falling' damage based on the relative speed and land Prone.

Any air resistance would prevent you from reaching the original "falling off" point.

[Tiadoppler]

Any air resistance would prevent you from reaching the original "falling off" point.

A wizard did it.
Or... yeah, I realize, and I used to make people roll INT to figure out exactly how high they need to teleport themselves to get back up to the start, but *shrug* it's a cool maneuver that doesn't come into play often and I'd rather not sit around doing calculus during a campaign.


Re: spell safeguards
I am very reluctant to say that a spell has some underlying logic to protect you from consequences. If Dimension Door has a Feather Fall effect, that should be written in the spell. If Fireball has a minimum arming distance before it can explode, that should be written in the spell. If a player comes up to me and says "well, Wish is a ninth level spell, so obviously it would have a safeguard to prevent it from doing things I don't want" I will laugh in their face. For an hour. Stopping only to breathe.

[DaveOfTheDead]

Now your thinking with portals. :smallbiggrin:

Beat me to it!

[SilverStud]

There is the fact that Dimension Door it takes a full action. There's a reason Feather Fall is a reaction spell: you have to be able to cast it VERY VERY quickly.

Then consider this quote from Xanathar (p77):

"When you fall from a great height you instantly descend up to 500 feet. If you're still falling on your next turn you descent up to 500 feet at the end of that turn. This process continues until the fall ends."

So there we have it. Definitively, you fall 500 immediately at first, then a further 500 at the end of each turn thereafter. Which means that if an enemy clubs you off the edge of a cliff, your fall happens immediately. Since it is their turn, you cannot cast Dimension Door. Even if you could, the fall happens instantly, RAW, and you have no time for spells that aren't Feather Fall.

The only remaining way this could work is if a player Held their Cast a Spell action for the trigger "I begin to fall." At that point, they could use Dimension Door to get to safety. But since the trigger is at the beginning of the fall, they have no momentum to worry about.

If a player was trying to pull a stunt with the trigger "when I'm halfway down," well...

The text of the spell says "You teleport yourself from your current location to any other spot within range. You arrive [blah blah]..." Sure, the name of the spell mentions a door, but you aren't actually creating a portal. Consider the text in the spell Gate: "You conjure a portal linking an unoccupied space..." That one specifically says that you make a portal. So we have precedent strongly showing that if a portal is made, it says so in the text.

With all of this in mind, I tell my players that momentum is preserved. Since no mention, or even implication, of orientation of either self or portal exists in the text, I take it to be a straight location-shift. Thus, if you are travelling downward 500 feet, then teleport to the ground, you are still considered to have fallen 500 feet, and will take the 20d6 damage that carries with it.