Dwarf and poison.

[the Jester]

Here's the thing - I don't want the Dwarven king to die from being stabbed to death - the circumstances of my story dictate that he is poisoned and dies. My example of the king who anticipates an assassination attempt foolishly doubles the guard but does not think to suspect his "loyal" servants. One of his servants laces his dinner with potent poison, and the king dies a painful death.

In this circumstance, stabbing the king to death A. is not reasonable if he is paranoid and keeps guards with him at all times and B. Does not conform to the story I'm trying to tell - it's a story about the Dwarven King trying in vain to avoid his fate by force of arms. Perhaps the assassin has motivations related to past sins of the king.

In my story, the servant is a lowly non-magical commoner. There is no wizard involved, and no magic. It's partially a tale of arrogance - nothing can harm me with my mighty armies, powerful spells, and heavy stone walls protecting me! There's a ridiculously simple solution - offer advantage to dwarves on their poison saves. After playing last night, advantage is a VERY nice thing to have but failure is still possible.

I immediately thought, "Why not slip rot grubs into his drink instead of poison?"

Solved, story more or less intact.

Nonetheless, I understand where you're coming from.

 

[ForeverSlayer]

Leveling racial aspects without a special feat or theme seems weird.

How many people I have to beat up to get poison immunity? Or immunity to pollen?




"wait, aren't dwarves immune to poison?" is the same as "wait, aren't dwarves resistant to poison? Who is dumb enough to try to poison a dwarf."

My thing is the racial features of a fantasy race should be major. Extremely significant. Otherwise it should not be there wasting my memory. Making a defense to an already uncommon offense only slightly more powerful is waste.

Having ~75% success on 5% of traps and attacks is useless. Might as well make it 100% and call it a day.

There is a very easy way to justify it as you level up. During your adventuring career you have been poisoned by various monsters so therefore your resistance increases until it becomes an actual immunity. It's like the dwarf's resistance keeps being put to the test and it continues to grow stronger as it stops poison on a daily basis.

 

[curupira]

What do dwarves do - drink rattlesnake venom for breakfast and wash down dinner with freshly milked spider venom?

That reminds me of the Order of the Stick webcomic, when a female dwarf cleric (Hilga) tried to kill her husband with a poison sandwich. Regretably for her, it didn't work.

 

[Sir Brennen]

DR is a tracking monster. Too high and it is immunity to anything but DM poisons. Too low and it is ignorable.

I don't necessarily agree based on my experience in other editions. Yes high DR can be basically the same as immunity in some cases (not outright a bad thing) but on the low end, I'd take DR 5 Fire against a 20d6 fireball vs no DR. And poison usually doesn't do that much damage outright.

If the extremes of the damage range are known, they can be taken into account when assigning DR, and possibly even allow for scaling.

 

[Campbell]

This sort of thing always happens between editions. In the transition from 2e to 3e Dwarves

• Became able to use magic.
• Learned there was more to life than being Clerics, Fighters, and Thieves.
• No longer had a 20% not to use a magic item.
• Had their ability to defend against magic attacks and poison significantly reduced. A dwarf with 14-17 Con had a +4 bonus to saves in a system where bonuses to saves were rare and incredibly meaningful to a +2 bonus that was irrelevant if the spell/poison targeted a weak save.

Honestly if you have history that conflicts with the new dwarf I'd just house rule that racial feature. Generally, it looks like they want to move away from having a long laundry list of racial features and have fewer more impactful ones.

 

[Daag]

I like the dwarven immunity to poison.

I was going back and forth about it for a while, because many people in this thread had some good arguments for both cases. The reason I like it is it makes race actually mean something other than just a couple of numeric benefits. So now, when you fight dwarfs, elves or humans, you'll have to change your tactics, the same way you would if you were fighting different monsters.

The immunity could also tell me about dwarves in the world, since they are immune to poison, why would they have ever used it or thought to use it until interacting with other races. The average dwarf will know nothing about poisons because they have no effect on him. Or maybe a clan of dwarves specializes in them for fighting other races, but are shunned by proper dwarven society because it is a dishonorable way to fight?

I really don't know how common poisons would be in a given world, that every rogue would use them. To me, poison isn't easy to acquire and as such wouldn't see widespread use.

And as to the dwarven king who was worried about an assassination attempt, he can still be poisoned in a way. How about this king is known for having a tankard of Firebelly Brew at the end of his meal. Firebelly Brew is a delicacy among dwarves and hard to acquire. However, being the king and all, he has one for dessert every day. Now, most other races eschew Firebelly Brew because it is incredibly strong and toxic, but to a dwarf it is just tasty. There is one thing to note however, Firebelly Brew is an active ingredient in Alchemist's Fire. It's one of the reasons most other races avoid drinking it. The assassin knows this however, and has laced the king's food with the other half of ingredient that when combined with Firebelly Brew will cause the effect of Alchemist's Fire. So the king is fine during his meal, but when he asks for his nightly drink, and takes his first swig, a veritable fire erupts in his belly, and he dies, as if from poison.

This whole idea of dwarves being immune to poison also leads me to them being excellent alchemists, with their history of eschewing arcane magic, and not really understanding poisons were harmful, they look heavily into alchemy.

*Shrug* It's how I would probably tell the story.

 

[howandwhy99]

My only issue with this is it promotes poison use.

However poison is now only bonus damage of a particular variety. It isn't save or die, so having a lot of poison used in the game or the ability to ignore it completely means less than it did. The whole affair is easily ignored as the consequence of the absolute here is small.

 

[ForeverSlayer]

I think some people have stated that you can just remove the poison immunity but what exactly do you replace it with?

A person playing a dwarf may feel like they are being picked on if they lose one of their racial abilities while the other people don't lose theirs.

 

[On Puget Sound]

[MENTION=63787]FinalSonicX[/MENTION]: I think you're making too much of an issue of this. DM fiat isn't anything new; and a bit of creativity in mapping a story into plausible rules has always been required.

You've got lots of options. You've a specific need; so there's no problem simply saying that in your world dwarves aren't immune - they just get advantage. Why not? Or...

• You could use a disease
• You could use a magical poison bypassing immunity
• You could use a delay-acting acid everyone thinks is a poison
• You could use splinters of glass in his jug of dwarven ale
• You could use a lucky stab
• You could let him choke
• You could go crazy and say it's radiation; or heavy metals, or magic or anything "not-really-poison-but-kind-of-similar"
• You could leave it a mystery...
• ...e.g. on autopsy no trace of poison is found; he died of a stroke
• You could change the rules surrounding dwarves
• Maybe they only get advantage
• Maybe they only get a bonus to saves and perhaps damage reduction
• Maybe they get something entirely different
• Maybe they're only immune to mundane poisons
• Maybe they're only immune to creature based poisons, not plain rotten food.
  [*]If the king could be poisoned - that means he was not (entirely) a dwarf! Changeling? 1/32 human or gnome blood, carefully kept secret to preserve the legitimacy of the royal line?

Not every story is going to map exactly onto the rules as written. It's nothing new, and it's hardly a showstopper for you is it? I mean, I get that it's not ideal, but you must realize it's a fairly obscure requirement you've got there - a specific occurrence in a specific campaign which you want to map onto the current rules.


I mean there's no way you could map all the in-world experiences in a 2e campaign onto a 3e campaign or a 3e campaign onto a 4e campaign. Some abilities, monsters, rules or magic will have changed and some events just wouldn't have worked out the same way. That's the nature of the beast: dwarven poison immunity is going to be only one of many worries in such an endeavor.

Compared to the anguish of having to somehow cram tiefling and dragonborn nations and history into long-established campaigns, or explain why ancient wizards had Wish and Time Stop but today's wizards are non-quadratic, this ranks pretty low on the aggravation scale in my opinion.

 

[keterys]

It's worth note that dwarves being immune to poisons whose DC is 10 + Con Mod is actually far more reasonable than flat out immunity to everything. That's a clean and simple mechanic, while not "ho hum immune to the god of poison in the poison star" "Nope, he has the godpoison feat that makes it work". It's also something that's easy to apply to other immunity mechanics - elves are immune to charms of 10 + (Int/Wis/Cha? pick something, or just set it to 12 and be done)

Also, taking half damage from poison is good - it doesn't encourage them to start slathering poison around on all their weapons, sandwiches, and salads... but it does mean they're less afraid of folks who use poison.

Basically, immunity is too binary from a world view. From an interesting plot perspective, the elven immunity to charm is actually a more serious transgression.