D&D 5: Starter Set, Falling Damage

Okay Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set, where is the falling damage?

After about an hour of reading, I see what you did, you hid those rules from me inside the adventure in one of the encounters. I had to fall back to the PDF to find the official rule, but I was determined to find it somewhere in the Starter Set, refusing to believe they left rules for falling damage out. Sure enough, there was a 20' fall referenced in one of the encounters, and the corresponding 2d6 damage to let you figure things out from.

Arrgh! This set has been one headache after another for me running it. I am not sure about other groups, but our group hasn't been having the best of times with this set. I am going to try a reboot of our D&D 5 experience and run this again, knowing what I know now. We were severely hindered by not knowing the rules, having to constantly reference the Basic Rules PDF on a laptop (which slowed play), some issues with the very-tightly designed rules, and some of the background/trait rules led to a couple very-stiff feeling roleplay encounters.

As an aside, we also ran into a severe player motivation issue. With little or no magic items or other upgrades to collect, the driving force in my game became levels. With magic items also limited (due to the numbers being tightened up and also their lack of availability in the Starter Set/Basic Rules), my players felt really limited in the "sideways upgrades" they could gain. 

It's like this, in Pathfinder or D&D 3.x, if you were stuck at level 4, there are plenty of ways to still improve your character by going out and collecting gear. Even finding a 'utility items' such as an 8-charge wand of darkness could be a cool upgrade, and there's always another set of +1 chain to get, or perhaps you quest to find your party's rogue a +2 dagger. In D&D 5, a set of +1 armor or a +1 weapon is a game-changer since the numbers in the system are so tight, and I'm a lot less likely to hand those out early. 

So experience became our group's motivator, and then the inevitable "which monsters give us the most XP?' thing started...I know, story should be the motivator, but there always is this player-centric desire for upgrades and improvements at my table.

I want a reset, and another try at this to see if we can get the D&D 5 feeling going again. We will have another shot at this again soon, so I'm looking forward to running a group through this that experiences the new-game feel I read in the books, but haven't experienced yet on the tabletop. This system is turning out to a bit fiddly and requiring more prep-time on my part than D&D 4, which is also interesting. More on that later.