Jumping down vs. falling damage - can you hurt yourself by jumping too high?

[Segev]

This comes up in discussions of grappling, for a particularly acrobatic maneuver of leaping into the air to hurl your foe into the ground, but it raises a more general question. These discussions have largely assumed that you need something like a monk's slow fall to negate damage from falling back to the ground after you leap some 30+ feet into the air. But if you're leaping that high, in the real world, that means you have the musculature and skeletal fortitude to land and absorb the same force you launched yourself with.

Now, obviously, the RAW don't always reflect the real world all that well. So I thought I'd ask: in the rules on jumping and/or falling, are there any rules for Acrobatics or Athletics checks, or just for jumping in general, which prevent you from taking damage from your own jumping? (Assuming, of course, you're not jumping from a high point and down to a low point. Though, for that matter, if you can jump 10 feet straight up, shouldn't you be able to jump down 10 feet and not be hurt?)

Not asking about reasonability of house rules; I could make those up easily. (e.g. "If you fall no further than you could high jump, you don't take falling damage if you succeed on an Athletics check to catch yourself at DC 15" or something like that.) I'm wondering if there are existing rules that cover this, or if you technically are falling after making a high jump, and take damage accordingly.

[Man_Over_Game]

Nope! There's none!

Although, if it's any help, Crawford said he'd rule in favor of considering "falling" to be the excess of the distance you jumped. However, this would just be a judgement call, as there are no rules to back this up.

[ProsecutorGodot]

By in large falling and taking damage associated with it is something we play by ear at our own table. The rules for vertical movement in this edition seem fairly lacking to begin with, as evident by Horizontal jumping taking no regard to movement. We began this way of playing after the bridge sequence of Nightstone in Storm King's Thunder. When we were shown the diagram of the bridge and told the solution to cross was not "have your Eladrin party member take a rope with his fey step ability" but "just jump lol" we were pretty done with it.

I'd say yes, you can hurt yourself jumping too high. There's no guarantee that because you can reach a certain height means you can land safely... That said, the bar for that would probably change depending on circumstances.

However, the bridge sequence I was talking about earlier does set some decent (imo) guidelines for when you decided between Athletics and Acrobatics for a skill check for landing from a jump. If you're jumping "up" the bridge, it asks for Athletics to maintain your footing without falling prone. When you jump "down" it asks for Acrobatics because you logically have the room and opportunity to tumble out of the jump safely, however failing this check is actually more dangerous than failing the other one because you end up falling further down the slope.

If they're falling from a jump and attempting to land squarely, Athletics, if they have room or aim to roll with momentum, Acrobatics.

[Segev]

Sounds like a deliberate jump down or a fall to the point from whence you jumped should be a DC 10 Athletics or Acrobatics check to negate damage. Assuming the jumped down distance was within your jumping distance.

[da newt]

No rules that I know of but:

I'd argue leaping more than 10' up while grappling another creature in order to toss them to the ground from that height piledriver style would significantly increase the DC of landing clean.

[Segev]

No rules that I know of but:

I'd argue leaping more than 10' up while grappling another creature in order to toss them to the ground from that height piledriver style would significantly increase the DC of landing clean.

Certainly fair. We almost certainly are in DM rulings territory.

[Monster Manuel]

The way I've justified it in my head is that jumping and falling are separate modes of movement. If you jump up 30' and land, all of that was your regular movement. If something changes to your status mid-move, and you end your movement there (some kind of Sentinel feat shenanigans, or you hit a wall, or whatever), then you fall the remaining distance and take normal falling damage.

Since there's technically no discussion of directionality in the movement description for jumping, I do allow characters to "jump" down (the book says they jump "into the air"; it does not say that the air in question can't be below them. Yes, I know this is the most egregious of rules-lawyerly, deliberate mis-reading of the RAW, but I only use it to justify how I would have ruled anyway, if challenged, so I can live with myself, here). You take no damage from jumping down a distance equal to what you could for a normal high jump. If you want to make it into a long jump, sure, but you have to make an athletics check or go prone.

If you jump down a distance further than your jump distance, your "movement" stops at the end of your jump. If you're in mid-air at that point, you start to fall, and take the appropriate amount of damage thereby.

It works for me, and doesn't appear to contradict any existing rules.

[MaxWilson]

The way I've justified it in my head is that jumping and falling are separate modes of movement. If you jump up 30' and land, all of that was your regular movement. If something changes to your status mid-move, and you end your movement there (some kind of Sentinel feat shenanigans, or you hit a wall, or whatever), then you fall the remaining distance and take normal falling damage.

Since there's technically no discussion of directionality in the movement description for jumping, I do allow characters to "jump" down (the book says they jump "into the air"; it does not say that the air in question can't be below them. Yes, I know this is the most egregious of rules-lawyerly, deliberate mis-reading of the RAW, but I only use it to justify how I would have ruled anyway, if challenged, so I can live with myself, here). You take no damage from jumping down a distance equal to what you could for a normal high jump. If you want to make it into a long jump, sure, but you have to make an athletics check or go prone.

If you jump down a distance further than your jump distance, your "movement" stops at the end of your jump. If you're in mid-air at that point, you start to fall, and take the appropriate amount of damage thereby.

It works for me, and doesn't appear to contradict any existing rules.

I like both your reasoning and the outcomes which result from applying this rule. I would allow this.

[Segev]

On jump distance exceeding remaining movement: Because of what rounds and turns are abstracting, I tend to assume that you mechanically "hang in the air" when you make a jump you can't finish with your remaining movement. You're not REALLY frozen there, but the movement you're taking is happening across the whole of the round. Others just happen to be doing their actions while you're in the air.

If you're knocked prone while in the air, or forced to move by actual physical force (Rather than mental compulsion), you'll fall to the ground below where you are (or where you're pushed to). Mental compulsions to move take over when you actually land and can move; you don't magically gain the ability to change your mid-air direction when mind-whammied into being have to.

In light of this, if you jump down and the rules say that you can do so a distance equal to your high jump, I'd say you "finish" your jump down with next round's movement if you lack enough to finish it here. You only start to fall if knocked prone, forcibly moved, or you tried to jump down further than you safely could.

[Greywander]

This thread is giving me Morrowind flashbacks. Though in that case, the problem was that the scroll runs out before you hit the ground. You can actually survive the jump if you use a second scroll before hitting the ground, as the fall damage calculation does seem to take your maximum jump height into account. Also, 1 point of Slowfall would completely negate fall damage without having a noticeable effect on fall speed.

In D&D 5e, there seems to be no crossover between jumping rules and fall damage rules, so yes, you could jump high enough to damage yourself on the landing. Monster Manuel's solution seems to be the best way of handling it, and is still technically within the rules. So in the end, whether or not you can jump high enough to damage yourself depends on how you interpret the rules. Monster Manuel's interpretation does mean that some character with max STR and bonuses to their jump height can jump down quite a distance without hurting themselves, which is actually kind of neat (since jumping seems to be underutilized in a world where flight is readily available).