Poison: Acceptable Rules?

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virgil
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Poison: Acceptable Rules?

Post by virgil »

What, if any, do you feel are flaws with the rules for poison in D&D 3.X? Does Pathfinder's frequency add or detract from the standard rules? Is the ruling that multiple doses increases the DC/frequency better than just having it be an independent effect; and should there be additional constraints for that rule? Is 4E on the right track switching to predominantly doing HP damage over time with occasional status effects rather than ability damage/drain? Are there superior ways to handle poisons and toxins in d20 rules?
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Post by spongeknight »

When you can conjure a bucket of poison and force someone to make a hundred saves in one round by dumping it over their head, your poison rules kind of suck. Plus, the random "one stat damaged" concept of poisons is pretty retarded by itself- what poison in the real world has ever reduced someone's dexterity but not strength?

If you're looking for good poison rules, I've never seen any in d20.
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erik
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Post by erik »

Ability damage/drain is shitty so anything that moves off that is an improvement.

Inducing states is good (paralysis, sleep, nausea, sickened, slowed, confusion, etc.). Dealing damage is fine if called for.

Having increased potency increase DC isn't bad. Just need to standardize it. A poison may come with a standard and a heavy dose.

Getting an extra +2 DC for being hit a second time by a poison weapon is just annoying in my opinion. If hit with a poison once I wouldn't worry about additional identical poisonings from the same source. Too much hassle.

I'm not offended by Pathfinder's frequency, when dealing damage it makes a good simulation of ongoing damage via poison.

Breaking up poisons by modes of delivery seems reasonable and I wouldn't change that.
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Post by CapnTthePirateG »

Eh, I'm probably gonna get crapped all over for this, but here goes.

There shouldn't be ability damage, period. There are very few implementations of ability damage where you do enough damage to own a guy, and most of them require a save. So instead of fucking around draining strength you could have forced them to not act again ever. If you really want some debuff effect you could just apply a penalty to the end result (you are weakened, -4 attack and half damage) without forcing you to recalculate everything because that slows down the game.

As it stands, barring "I dump 30000 doses on your head with minor creation", poison sucks because it doesn't scale and cost money. I'd like to see some sort of scaling effect where poison made by a master assassin or poisoner has a higher DC as they are better chemists/know how to deliver it to the best parts of the body/whatever. That would go a long way toward making PC poisoner a viable lifestyle choice.

As far as 3.X goes, you probably want something like a worsening condition track that ticks up by the round, which IMO would feel more like movie poison and less like running away for a minute to get that one guy's 3 last constitution to zero.
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Lago PARANOIA
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

As far as scaling issues go, you might be better off just acknowledging different poison doses. For example, you have light poisoning (1d2 strength, DC 11, fine-sized injested, tiny sized contact exposure; re-exposure 12 hours), medium poisoning (1d6 strength + 1d4 dex, DC 14, tiny-sized ingested, small sized contact; re-exposure 5 minutes), and heavy poisoning (1d12 strength + 1d10 dex, DC 18, small sized ingested, medium-sized contact; re-exposure 1 round). If people make poison cocktails, save against the strongest DC first with an escalating bonus to the save for the next-strongest down the line poison. So while combining anthrax and nightshade is a bit more effective than using either, putting cyanide into the mix will hardly be noticeable unless it already outweighs one or both poisons.
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Post by CCarter »

Its weird that poison bypass the HP system when swords don't, and causes problems when multiple doses start being stacked.
Maybe a system where a character saves vs. damage when they're exposed, with accumulated poison 'damage' compared vs. hit points to get different effects at 25% HP, 50% HP, 75% HP, etc. You could also then apply healing or subdual damage healing rules for how long it takes characters to recover from poison effects, rather than having ad hoc durations (if a poison does sickened at 25% HP, the target would recover from that when the damage heals to less than 25%).
A larger dose would be more damage and so more likely to cause an effect against a bigger (more HPs) target.

So you might have a poison like:
Black Nightroot (Fort DC 13, ingested, d8 damage per dose)
25% HP: loses darkvision starting in d6 rounds
50% HP: fuzzy vision, -4 to Spot checks, lose darkvision immediately
75% HP: blinded
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Post by erik »

I am opposed to things that require you to figure out percentages (especially of HP!) during a combat round. Not unless those amounts are hard-coded onto every monster and character sheet. In D&D that's extra fucked since you can have temporary HD, change of total HP due to level drain, constitution drain, constitution buff, etc.

No No No to percentages.

[edit]
With poison I'd still prefer to do a condition track from the repeat saves.

Fail 1 save and you are at tier 1 (sickened or the like), fail a second and you are at tier 2 (nauseated for combat and sickened after combat), tier 3 (poisoned, removed from combat until healed/combat ended, nauseated until cured).

Different poisons having different effects possibly including ongoing damage, but generally follow that progression.
Last edited by erik on Tue Aug 19, 2014 11:33 am, edited 1 time in total.
Lago PARANOIA
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Post by Lago PARANOIA »

Regardless of the route you take, you're going to have to take care of at least three issues with poison. Using 3E D&D for our straw model:

1.) Cocktails. As written, it's more efficient to have three different low-strength poisons than one powerful potion. Dicepool and bell-curve systems have a reasonably effective answer for that, but linear RNGs struggle with this. And all three models can't really do anything about dipping your sword in five different kinds of equal-strength poisons other than just declaring you can't do that.

2.) Repeat injuries. It's a bit silly and pretty unbalanced that lightly nicking someone with poison six times in a round is more effective than jabbing them through the gut and injecting them with five times the poison. Your poison system needs to put a cap on how many times you save against a poison in a round.

3.) Dosage. As written, lightly flicking a few droplets of poison into someone's goblet is just as effective as holding them down and forcing an entire vial in their mouth. If space is a concern, you can fold this issue into 'Repeat injuries' and just declare that 600mL of spider venom is the threshold and maximum dose and then just declare that giant spiders force you to save against spider venom for the next five rounds. Or five times in a row. But you should probably do something about it.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.

In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
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Post by virgil »

So long as effects like minor creation exist, and frequently even then, you will get the question of overdose. Realistically, what happens if someone does the ice bucket challenge with pure dimethylmercury? What happens if someone takes a shot of botulism toxin, or perhaps FeBreezed in the face with polonium vapour? How far past the RNG must someone be to survive extreme acute toxicity before it becomes more efficient to just start handing out poison immunity?
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Post by OgreBattle »

How about something like After Sundown's poison rules?
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Post by fectin »

I mostly find 3e poisons acceptable. They're clearly and obviously flawed, but are also good enough to apply quickly and move on with the game. Unfortunately, that also covers my biggest complaint: STR or DEX damage takes way too long to apply, or requires you to keep track of way too many things.

FantasyCraft has a hojillion different progressive condition tracks, all roughly equivalent to gaining different flavors of negative level (which, IIRC, their poisons do not use). That approach might be exportable.
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