Anyone else bothered by low poison DC's?

[Talon5]

Viper's listed fort is a DC11- a little low for a rattler, or is it? Consider it takes like a week for a rattle snake to "regenerate" it's poison, so if a commoner makes that DC11 roll then "the snake bite someone just yesterday, so it's venom sack is empty," is a good excuse for why mister commoner isn't dead (10 Con commoner takes 3.5 pts of con/die roll come us with about 10.5 con gone bye-bye = dead commoner).

Mr bad ass fighter (18 Con and first level status = +6) he makes 75% of the time and can only die what 1 in 300 bites (roughly the odds of rolling 3d6 and coming up with 3 sixs), while mr Wiz with his 12 con and 1st lvl status will make only 50% of the time and die if the die rolls are slightly above average.

Course mr commoner gets bit with the DC18 poison then he will more then likely won't beat that DC and thus die 90% of the time, which is not true (I should check the CDC statistics before I make this comment, but I have not the time- sorry).

In short I disargee and think that anyone that complains about the fact that thier 1st lvl fighter beat the rattle snakes DC11 poison needs not to have fighters with 20 Cons in their 1st lvl campaign. Try using lower stats. Course if you are like most of us you prefer campaigns with high stats and thus should not complain about the fact that poisons suck (which they do in high stat campaigns).

The whole of it is that if you want poisons to work then bite the wizards, and rogues, don't bother biting the big bad ass fighter types.

Good luck, and have fun.

 

[jgbrowning]

Poisons usually take at least 10+minutes to effect, excepting a few virolent variaties. I'm not keen on the instant stat damage and then more a minute latter.

If I really need to, I'll kill that damn giant death adder with my bare hands. Then, well, I'll die, but he'll be dead long before me.

joe b.

 

[Herpes Cineplex]

Without disputing the rest of it (hey, feel free to change the poison rules however you like), it seems worth pointing this out:

A brush against a poisonous plant in the jungle going to a temple shouldn't be a matter of an easy to make fort save. It should be a stop-and-heal game event, where the party must tend to their comrade or he may die.

Unless this is some kind of magical plant, dripping with the foulest contact venom ever devised by assassin or wizard, then probably just brushing against it should be a matter of an easy-to-make Fort save.

Because, after all, plants get brushed against all the time. Hell, many plants NEED to be brushed against if they're ever going to reproduce. And more to the point, being brushed against isn't going to kill them, so where's the advantage to secreting a surface poison that kills basically everything that ever touches it? Save that stuff for the animals who actually try to eat you; and yeah, if a party member is dumb enough to start munching on the weird flora, he probably deserves to have to make a ridiculously high Fort save or die. But not for just touching a plant (unless, as above, it's a magical creation specifically intended to murder anyone who touches it); for just touching an ordinary-albeit-toxic plant, I think an itchy rash would be enough.


Anyway, here's a side question for you, because I'm curious how this has worked out in your game: has upping all the poison save DCs and removing things like neutralize poison made the use of poisoned weapons incredibly attractive to the PCs? I'd imagine that the first time someone succumbs to a poisoned arrow, there'd be a rush to get some poisoned weapons of their own. Also, have giant spiders and centipedes and the like suddenly jumped up a CR rating or two to reflect their enhanced lethality?

--
personally, i'm okay with a less poison-centric game
ryan

 

[akchf]

I have to agree that I think poison DC's as they are are too low. I was running City of the Spider Queen, and decided to add the following house rule to my campaigns:

Poison DC's increase at the following rate(per character size) with each exposure :
Large or bigger +1
Medium or Small +2
Tiny or Diminutive +3
Fine +4
These bonuses decrease by the same amount over 20 minutes.

At least to me this helps make a fighter getting hit with 20 poisoned bolts more realistic. While it doesn't increase the lethality of the poison in and of itself, it reflects that with additional doses, there's more poison for the body to try and fight.

 

[Lord Pendragon]

In my campaign, there is no neutralize poison spell. The DC's of all poisons are raised by 5. And being poisoned is a major, life threatening event, not a simple thing to brush off. Any else here agree with me about poisons in D&D?

I disagree. Mainly for two reasons.

1. Poisons are very deadly as they are. Yes, some of the save DCs are low, but the effects are crippling, and using poisoned critters means that eventually you will fail those saves.

2. I treat D&D as an abstract game, where the rules are a vehicle for getting the heroic fantasy role-playing experience I want, not a simulation of reality. Getting poisoned by brushing up against a plant on the way to the Temple of Evil, and being laid up for a week waiting to heal, is not fun, and so I don't want rules that promote it.

2b. And to add to that idea, I find it hard to understand why getting poisoned should be any more of a traumatic event than being hacked on with a large steel weapon. In reality, being stabbed even once means weeks in the hospital recovering, yet in D&D a good night's rest or a cure light wounds is all it takes. I have no problem with poison being similarly treated.

 

[Talon5]

Well said Lord Pendragon- well said.

I disagree. Mainly for two reasons.

1. Poisons are very deadly as they are. Yes, some of the save DCs are low, but the effects are crippling, and using poisoned critters means that eventually you will fail those saves.

2. I treat D&D as an abstract game, where the rules are a vehicle for getting the heroic fantasy role-playing experience I want, not a simulation of reality. Getting poisoned by brushing up against a plant on the way to the Temple of Evil, and being laid up for a week waiting to heal, is not fun, and so I don't want rules that promote it.

2b. And to add to that idea, I find it hard to understand why getting poisoned should be any more of a traumatic event than being hacked on with a large steel weapon. In reality, being stabbed even once means weeks in the hospital recovering, yet in D&D a good night's rest or a cure light wounds is all it takes. I have no problem with poison being similarly treated.

 

[Dogbrain]

How about the venoms with chronic/lifetime effects. Brown recluse venom is so lytic that it can cause irreversable tissue damage. Ulceration and necrotization can become lifetime conditions, even when they don't kill. So much tissue damage is done that the body just can't recover.

There are also neurotoxins that can have lifetime effects. One class of such neurotoxins are the "ordeal drugs". Somehow, in some people, exposure permanently puts everything off-kilter. This is what happened to a proportion of troops who were administered an anti-nerve-agent prophylactic during Desert Storm. (Yes, anti-nerve-agents are neurotoxins in their own right--they just are neurotoxic in opposition to the nerve agents' biochemistry.)

 

[Gothmog]

I acutally have changed the mechanic for poison and disease save DCs in my game. In order to resist a poison or disease, the characters makes a CON check, not a Fort save. Great Fortitude still figures in, and some items that grant resistance bonuses, but otherwise thats it. The DCs themselves are reduced by 1/4 the original value, to reflect that some DCs, due to having to take into account Fort saves, are ridiculously high. There is no good reason a high-level character should be more resistant to poison or disease simply because he has more XP. A person who lives in a slum, and is daily exposed to disease SHOULD be more resistant if he is health, but not simply because he is a 7th level fighter. Poison and disease work by overcoming the victim's body and health, causing sickness, toxicity, or death. This makes poison and disease VERY frightening prospects for characters to run into, and makes mundane poisons useful again for use against kings, priests, etc- as they were in real life. So far the group has enjoyed this change, and Neutralize Poison is often taken, "just in case".