2d ago

And I'm free...I'm free fallin'

65 comments

One time in a DND game I had a dungeon with the property "you'll never find what you're looking for". This has a bunch of fun effects. Among them when the players found a spiral stairway around a hole, they tried to find the bottom and, because of the rule, could not reach it. They tried to go back up, and couldn't reach the previous floor either.
So they decided, since they have feather fall, to just jump into the central hole and find the bottom that way.
They fell for an uncomfortable long time. They passed the other party members who had split up (and couldn't find them).
Good times. Players heads were very fucked with.
They did eventually figure it out.
- So how do they get out?
  
  One of the clues they found was from a survivor from the antagonist's party who had gone in ahead of them. He said the boss-man had kept asking them lots of questions about their youth, where they'd grown up, their hobbies. Just a lot of personal questions. The survivor didn't know why, since boss-man had never taken an interest in them before.
- Was the musician "Bono" part of your D&D group, and did he later write a song about the experience?
  
  Mystery solved

Now I'm wondering how long a person would have to be falling at parachute speeds to die and become skeletal.
- 80-120 years
  
  I meant how far, not how long.
- Or how long the living guy would have to be free falling to catch up with the person who's a dessicated corpse?
  
  Far longer than his lifetime, I'm sure.
- Assuming you don’t bring any food, the usual survival times: 3 days without water, 3 weeks without food. So a minimum 3 days… on the other hand, the time to turn into a skeleton would be much, much longer.
  Edit: Since I wanted to do some math, it looks like skydiving is about 120mph in free fall and then 20mph with the parachute open. Let’s say you got scared/bored of free falling after an hour and open your chute, that would be 71 hours before dying. So you would have traveled 1,540 miles (assuming earth gravity, wind resistance, etc). Someone who hasn’t pulled their cord would catch up to you after 12 hours, so very much within the “alive” window.
- You can use the math below and correct the years to be close to 5. But we would end up with a mummy because of the conditions (wind leading to dessication).
- depends on his/her rations
- I think it's literally not possible to fall that long in one direction in an atmosphere. You could do it in space, though.
  
  You could if it's bottomless!

Does 'pushes' mean you get pushed into the pit or does it mean you get to push someone else in the pit?
- its a 2 for 1 in the company world, pay 5$ to push someone who paid 5$ to get pushed. 😸

"Uh... Boss? The pit isn't bottomless anymore."
"You better figure out how to make it bottomless again!"
- It's pretty surprising that AI wrote probably the best greentext ever

What's the updraft situation like in the bottomless pit?
- In a normal deep but endful pit, you'd feel an increase in air pressure as you got deeper as you floated slower and slower. Eventually there will be enough bodies forming a buoyant layer (or, simply bodies lining the bottom of the pit) that you could carve climbing apparatus out of bones and climb back up, feasting on raw flesh as you ascend the wall of the pit. That, or the heat from the biomass of bodies would lift you and your parachute up a decent amount.
  In a bottomless pit, there is no increase in air pressure, the air just falls right through with no resistance because it hasn't reached the end. You'd think that this creates a huge suction at the top of pit, sucking people into it, but no because the air just falls at the same rate that cold air leaves a room in a house, creating perhaps a slight draft into the pit. No bodies at the bottom, no layer of buoyant air, you're just falling. Might as well control your ascent, with some careful parachuting, hook up with some hotties mid-fall, and then embrace the eternity of it
  
  This guy bottomless pits.
  
  If there is an infinite column of air, the air entering or leaving the pit should be more or less constant, all else being equal outside the pit. But if there is a finite column of air falling into a vacuum, then there is an infinite vacuum, and I think the pit starts sucking air at the speed of sound.
  
  What if the pit is subject to shell theorem?
  
  lol no. Air would absolutely flow into the pit at a rate relative to its pressure. It absolutely would not simply drift into a bottomless pit that would never see backpressure... That's... just exceptionally stupid.
- You'd have to ask the inspector

be me
bottomless pit supervisor

...why do you need a parachte in a bottomless pit? It's not like you need it to land?
- Have you ever stuck your head out a moving car window, into the high force wind, and found it very difficult to breathe? That’s what I imagine sky diving is like (not something I particularly want to try), and a ‘chute would slow that enough for comfortable breathing, I imagine.
  
  I went sky duving once, with a free fall. You can breathe just fine ☺️