REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: Physics and Falling Damage

And so we return to falling damage once again.

Issue #88 (August 1984) presents a lengthy article by Arn Ashleigh Parker that uses physics -- complete with equations! – to argue that neither the as-published AD&D rules nor the purportedly Gygaxian revisions to same from issue #70 adequately reflects "the real world." Here's a scan of some of the equations Mr Parker uses in his article:
I'm sure it says something about my intellectual sloth that my eyes just glaze over when I see stuff like this in a roleplaying game. The very idea of having to understand acceleration, terminal velocity, and the like to arrive at a "realistic" representation of falling damage is bizarre enough. To do so as part of an argument against earlier rules is even more baffling. D&D's hit point system doesn't really stand up to extensive scrutiny if "realism" is your watchword. In my opinion, devoting so much effort to "prove" that terminal velocity is reached not at 200 feet as in the Players Handbook system or at 60 feet as in the revision but at 260 feet is a waste of time better spent on making a new monster or a new magic items – things that actually contribute meaningfully to fun at the game table. But I'm weird that way.

Amusingly, issue #88 also includes a very short rebuttal to the above article by Steve Winter. Entitled "Kinetic Energy is the Key," Mr Winter argues that, if one considers the kinetic energy resulting from a fall, you'll find that its increase is linear, thus making the original system a surprisingly close fit to the "reality." He makes this argument in about half a page, using only a single table (albeit one that draws on the earlier equations). While I agree with Winter that the original system is just fine for my purposes, it's nevertheless interesting that the author also makes his case on the basis of physics, as if the important point is that AD&D's rules map to facts about our world. It's a point of view I briefly held as a teen and then soon abandoned, for all the obvious reasons. Back in 1984, though, this was the height of fashion and many a Dragon article proceeded from the premise that the real world has a lot to teach us about how rules for a fantasy roleplaying game ought to be constructed ...