Partial Saves for Poison...

[Pbartender]

The idea is to make poison just a little more dangerous.

I've never liked the way poison worked in D20. Something about the fact that someone with an exceptional Fortitude save can drink a whole glassful of strychnine and not even feel it always kind of bugged me. In every adventure movie or novel conceived, poison was the one sure-fire way to lay someone low.

As is, for the expense and effort needed to buy it or make it, poison is pretty weak.

Anyway, here's my idea...

How about making poison a "save for partial" effect, rather than a "save negates, twice" effect? To be specific, the Initial Damage always takes effect upon poisoning, but the Secondary Damage is avoided with a successful Fort save.

So, for example, Blue Whinnis would automatically deal 1 point of Constitution damage, but would knock the victim unconscious only if he failed the DC 14 Fort save.

Also, I'd clarify that multiple doses can be administered for increased effect. So, you could feasibly put a triple dose of Arsenic into someone's wine, they'd take 3 points of Con damage and have to make three Fortitude saves each to avoid another 1d6 Con damage. If he fails all three saves, the unfortunate fellow would be suffering from a grand total 3d6+3 Con damage... At worst, he'd be pretty close to death, if not dead, which makes sense if you're drinking all that arsenic. At the least, he'd be awfully sick (3 Con damage, minimum) for a couple of days.

What do you guys think?

 

[el-remmen]

Personally, I think this is a great idea for ingested poisons, but might be way too deadly for monsters that have poisonous stings/bites, etc. . . .

 

[The Edge]

I've been bugged by that too. I wouldn't mind seeing a whole rework of it really, but that idea sounds kinda interesting. I ran a test once to see how a bunch of cats fared with being hit by various poisens (On paper of course! ). They held out far too well considering what they were suposedly being subjected to.

If you take a mid level fighter with an average con score, there are several poisens that they become practicaly imune to, and frankly it doesn't make sense to be completely uneffected like that.

Poisens can have a quite signifigant effect on a game especialy if at the begining of adventures, redeuceing armour class, att bonus or large chunks of hp which can't be straight healed, but still, they just don't seem quite right.


(Edit - I agree with above)

 

[Felnar]

perhaps you'd prefer a fortitude(partial) save, followed by a fortitude(negates) save?
maybe make a feat for fighters that worked like a rogues evasion, only against poison

now i'm trying to remember how it worked in 2nd ed
didnt each poison have an onset time?

 

[Pbartender]

Personally, I think this is a great idea for ingested poisons, but might be way too deadly for monsters that have poisonous stings/bites, etc. . . .

You think so?

But that's kind of my point... In real life, people are AFRAID of poisonous bites, since many of them can kill you, or at least make you very sick for days. I want a poisonous creature to be a truly feasome thing, even for Heroes. Personally, I'd treat it in the same vein as say, a shadow's Str damage attack -- in effect, that works just like many poisons do but without a save.

Hrm... Let me think about it. Now I'm curious to figure out just how many 3.5 MM creatures have a poisonous attack.

EDIT - Here's the list from the SRD:

• Aranea
• Athach
• Couatl
• Demons (Bebiliths, Quasits)
• Derro (Weapon)
• Devils (Bone Devils, Imps)
• Drider
• Drow (Weapon)
• Ettercap
• Formians (Warriors, Taskmasters and Myrmarches)
• Homonculus
• Iron Golem (breath)
• Medusa
• Nagas
• Nightcrawler
• Phase Spider
• Pseudodragon
• Purple Worm
• Spider Eater
• Vargouille
• Violet Fungus
• Wyvern
• Viper Snakes
• Monstrous Centipedes
• Monstrous Scorpions
• Monstrous Spiders
• Giant Bee
• Giant Wasp

perhaps you'd prefer a fortitude(partial) save, followed by a fortitude(negates) save?

Well, that's pretty much what I'm talking about. Think about it this way: If you ingest Arsenic, you take 1d6+1 con damage, but if you make a DC 13 Fort save you only take 1 Con damage.

It's the same thing I was suggesting above, just worded a little differently.

maybe make a feat for fighters that worked like a rogues evasion, only against poison

That's not a half-bad idea.

now i'm trying to remember how it worked in 2nd ed didnt each poison have an onset time?

That's something else I'd reintroduce... Onset times for poisons, so that some are fast-acting, while others take longer.

 

[ValhallaGH]

To deal with the high-level-immunity issue, why not bump all Poison save DCs by +5? Use 15 as the base DC and it's added to based upon virulence and other, more ephemeral, properties.

P.S. Arsenic is 1 plus 1d8.

 

[DreadArchon]

You could just make it do damage.

 

[Celebrim]

D&D has never really handled poison and disease well. When I was younger, this really bothered me, and I spent a lot of time thinking and designing for a rules set that would make poison and disease truly realistic with incubation, symptomology, stages, and so forth.

In pursuing this goal, poisons eventually acquired a description that was about as complex as your average monster entry.

And that wasn't the worst problem. The biggest problem was that in actual play, elaborate symptomology and so forth just wasn't much fun. I had let my simulationist tendancies get the best of me and once again mistaken my 'cool' mental simulation in which all sorts of 'realistic' things could happen for fun.

The problem with a realistic disease and poison simulation is that in practice, elaborate symptomology doesn't open up nearly as much cool roleplay as I wanted to believe that it did.

Sick people don't actually do alot of things. If they have a choice in the matter, they'll do nothing. There is only so much of doing nothing and suffering through the elaborate symptoms of a disease or poison you or your players are going to want to do. Sick or diseased players do one of two things. Either they have the resources to cure the disease or poison, in which case they do so, or they don't do anything until they can cure it. In the former case the complexity you've added is meaningless. The disease or poison goes away before it does any of the 'interesting' stuff you intended for it to do. In the latter case, play is put on hold until the issue can be dealt with, and as I pointed out dealing with the disease generally isn't alot of fun anyway.

One of the things that I had to learn the hard way, because my instincts as a game ref kept driving me the other way was that realism is not a good goal in and of itself. One of the biggest places realism just gets in the way is maiming a PC. Whenever you maim a PC, whether temporarily or permenently, you've taken that player out of the game. Maiming is actually worse than death, because with death the player gets a new character and can get back in the game at the next full stop. When you maim a character temporarily, you take that player out of the game. He can no longer play the game. Parties tend to stop and rest until a character is no longer maimed, not just because it is the smart thing to do or the appropriate in game step, but because since this is a multiplayer game it is also the polite thing to do.

This is why D&D's system of either healthy or dead is - despite all the grumbling that you hear about it - actually a quite good thing. If you had realistic maiming, you'd effectively either killed that character or put the game on pause. If you as a DM have a time line, your time line is probably dead and you'll probably put the time line on hold any way to prevent that, because face it, you as a DM want the PC's to succeed. Maiming is realistic, but it isn't fun.

Realistic disease and poison is just another sort of maiming.

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

Have you seen Sean Reynolds variant?

Web page Here

His continuing damage variant kinda levels out the poison from being an insta-kill while still leaving room for fear and danger from its effects.

 

[Exquisite Dead Guy]

Well, that's pretty much what I'm talking about. Think about it this way: If you ingest Arsenic, you take 1d6+1 con damage, but if you make a DC 13 Fort save you only take 1 Con damage.

It's the same thing I was suggesting above, just worded a little differently.

Not a bad idea. I've toying around with making the initial save DC higher (between +2 and +5) and leaving the secondary save as is.