Integrating poison making rules from BoVD

[azhrei_fje]

I'm always leery of allowing material desired by players for the betterment of their characters (who isn't?) so I'd like to get the opinion of the hive on the poison-making rules from the BoVD. I don't own the book myself, but the player has sent me the rules for Craft(poisonmaking) (including Table 3-6).

I'd like to hear from anyone who is currently using these rules in their 3.0, 3.5, or Pathfinder campaign. Is there anything I should be aware of?

I noticed the table notes say that a couple of poisons do "vile damage", but what is that? Does it matter to my campaign? If I ignore that note are the rest of the statistics for those poisons still appropriate? I'm more inclined to remove those poisons than to modify the stats without knowing what "vile damage" is.

The description in the PHB says that the Craft skill allows a character to create objects after "one week of dedicated work". What is "dedicated"? Does it mean the same as for wizard spell research and such, requiring that no other strenuous activity take place? If the PC is interrupted in the middle of the week to do some adventuring, can they come back and pick up where they left off with the poison-making? (I'm inclined to say "no", since much of the craft is likely timing based.)

I plan to require the PC to hunt any creature(s) they want to use to make poisons and the craft check itself will likely consume quite a bit of game time, taking the character out of action for a couple weeks on average. (That's fine, since the Paizo AP we're running has built-in downtime for this kind of thing.)

I'd appreciate any insight you might have on this. Thanks!

 

[frankthedm]

Just say no to poison in the player's hands. Running a game is enough grief, having to recalculate monster stats after every successful poisoning is not worth the effort. Also, watch out for dex poisons. Game designers gave most big monsters mediocre DEX to reperesent they wern't that agile agility, NOT to give the monster a glass jaw against dex damage poisons and spells.

Vile damage does not heal at all except under certain conditions.

Cautiously compare the 3.5 values for poison to the bovd values.

IIRC complete scoundrel or complete adventurer may have 3.5 poison rules.

 

[javcs]

Just say no to poison in the player's hands. Running a game is enough grief, having to recalculate monster stats after every successful poisoning is not worth the effort. Also, watch out for dex poisons. Game designers gave most big monsters mediocre DEX to reperesent they wern't that agile agility, NOT to give the monster a glass jaw against dex damage poisons and spells.

Vile damage does not heal at all except under certain conditions.

Cautiously compare the 3.5 values for poison to the bovd values.

IIRC complete scoundrel or complete adventurer may have 3.5 poison rules.

It's Complete Scoundrel.
If the players want anything out of BoVD ... well, I would say that they have to (a) find out that what they want exists, (b) find someone (or something) willing to teach them/provide them with the necessary resources/raw materials, and (c) survive the 'side effects' that come hand-in-hand with using such vile methods (alignment going to evil or even to vile evil, damning their souls, demonic/diabolical pacts, a kill order being placed on their heads by an order of paladins, etc).

The glass jaw is somewhat mitigated by big creatures tending to have high fortitude saves. But, I agree, the mediocre Dex isn't supposed to be a glass jaw, and that poisons tend to be annoying to deal with mid-combat.

 

[irdeggman]

I agree BoVD leads to the dark side.

Just like Book of Exalted Deeds is based on characters being exceptionally good, BoVD is based on them being exceptionally evil (actually it more oriented towards NPCs but. . .)

Anything that does vile damage, IIRC, leads to becoming evil - very evil.

Both books are premised on strong role-playing restrictions and this should always be kept in mind when using material from either source.

Use the poison rules from Complete Scoundrel instead much more "neutral" source.

 

[azhrei_fje]

Wow, good information. Thank you!

So vile poisons are definitely out. And I will check out Complete Scoundrel (I don't have that one either, but one player in particular has a pretty large selection so I'll ask him).

It's an interesting point about finding someone who can teach the skill, too. The PC now knows that the local thieves guild doesn't sell poison. They have a limited charter from the gov't and the gov't doesn't mess with them (as long as they pay their vice taxes on time and in full) and they don't want to jeopardize that relationship, so when the gov't put the kibosh on poisons, they agreed (if somewhat reluctantly).

I'm not too worried about the stat changes being a pain during a game session. We're using MapTool (and I sometimes use DM Genie) so I have automated tools that can apply ability score modifiers on-the-fly to 99% of the creature's rolls. But it sounds like some of you treat poison damage as though it stacks. That's curious, since I would consider the "type" of damage to be "poison", and like damages of the same type from the same source typically overlap.

Do you play that poison effects stack or overlap? What is your reasoning?

Thanks again!

 

[frankthedm]

Do you play that poison effects stack or overlap? What is your reasoning?

Thanks again!

Because poisons damage ability scores like weapons damage HP. Penalties may not stack, damage and drain does

 

[azhrei_fje]

Okay, that makes sense. You're thinking that the more poison added to the creature's metabolism, the more damage that accrues? But what about spells like poison then (link to the SRD)? Would multiple castings of the spell stack? In looking at the spell description, it would certainly seem to: duration is instantaneous and the description says, "you infect the subject with a horrible poison"...

I'm leaning towards using the Craft (poisonmaking) rules in the BoVD regarding the time required with the costs set to 50% of market price, but only allowing the poisons in the SRD. And the raw materials will not be available, so the character will have to forage/hunt for them himself. That should significantly reduce any "brokenness" of allowing PCs to create poisons. Oh, and I'll be rolling the 5% check of hurting yourself when handling poison and requiring the Reflex save on attack rolls of natural 1's. If the player decides to go this route, I'll be modifying the MapTool attack macro to check for the Nat 1 and roll the Reflex save as well.

 

[irdeggman]

Okay, that makes sense. You're thinking that the more poison added to the creature's metabolism, the more damage that accrues? But what about spells like poison then (link to the SRD)? Would multiple castings of the spell stack? In looking at the spell description, it would certainly seem to: duration is instantaneous and the description says, "you infect the subject with a horrible poison"...

Frank is talking about "damage" and not "penalties".

Check the text on the Spell Neutralize Poison and it should help clear this up some.

You detoxify any sort of venom in the creature or object touched. A poisoned creature suffers no additional effects from the poison, and any temporary effects are ended, but the spell does not reverse instantaneous effects, such as hit point damage, temporary ability damage, or effects that don’t go away on their own.

And yes the spell Poison would stack sonce it is an instanteous spell. The damage done can't be neutralized, although any future damage could be - that is if you neutralized the poison before the secondary effect took place then that damage would not happen, but the initial damage is done and can't be "neutralized".


Don't think in terms of poison flooding a system - in D&D it is much more of a "shock" effect and then the poison is totally gone after the secondary effect is resolved.

 

[azhrei_fje]

Okay, thanks again.

I've pretty much decided to let the PC use the Craft (poisonmaking) rules from BoVD, but the only allowed poisons will be those in the SRD/PF Beta. So now I'm off to evaluate the list of poisons...

Thanks to everyone for your input!