D&D 5E Poison and projectiles

[Saeviomagy]

Mythbusters proved that won't work. On the other hand if its a fantasy poison, who's to say that it wouldn't? (The story in question was from the American Civil War, where it was claimed that a bullet (mini-ball to be exact) hit a soldier in the leg, bounced up off the bone and through his junk, then proceeded on for a hundred yards or so and lodged in the abdomen of a woman watching the battle from her porch and impregnating her.) Watch it on YouTube if you're interested.

In that test they were only looking for live sperm, which are significantly less durable than your average poison compound, let alone if you were specifically looking for something to coat a bullet with that would make it to the target.

My thoughts on this are that it's possible, and that in the real world people don't do it because it's unnecessary: if you hit someone with a typical bullet well enough that you would transfer poison, they're already more incapacitated than the poison is likely to make them in any reasonable period of time.

That said, there are accounts of using poisoned bullets: but they typically take the form of the victims of said bullets complaining that their foes are fighting dirty by poisoning bullets with things like feces or arsenic, and it makes their wounded harder to treat, rather than having any immediate effect.

 

[Dausuul]

Hmm. If you're just dipping the bullets in the poison... I see a few problems with that. First, the bullet has less surface area than an arrowhead, so can't carry as much poison. Second, the poison is presumably rather sticky (or it wouldn't stick to the arrowhead); and the last thing you want in your gun barrel is a lot of sticky goo. I'd impose disadvantage on the attack roll, and if both dice come up a miss, your gun fouls and becomes unusable until you disassemble and clean it. Furthermore, the victim gets advantage to save against the poison.

Of course, you could make custom bullets designed to hold poison and release it on impact, as EzekielRaiden suggests. Such bullets would work like poisoned arrows, delivering a full dose of poison with no damage to the gun. But that would require a higher level of technology, and you would have to make the bullets from scratch--you couldn't just take an existing bullet and inject poison into it.

 

[CyanideSprite]

Mythbusters proved that won't work. On the other hand if its a fantasy poison, who's to say that it wouldn't? (The story in question was from the American Civil War, where it was claimed that a bullet (mini-ball to be exact) hit a soldier in the leg, bounced up off the bone and through his junk, then proceeded on for a hundred yards or so and lodged in the abdomen of a woman watching the battle from her porch and impregnating her.) Watch it on YouTube if you're interested.

That sounds a lot more convoluted than shooting a bullet through a vial of poison.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Mythbusters proved that won't work. On the other hand if its a fantasy poison, who's to say that it wouldn't? (The story in question was from the American Civil War, where it was claimed that a bullet (mini-ball to be exact) hit a soldier in the leg, bounced up off the bone and through his junk, then proceeded on for a hundred yards or so and lodged in the abdomen of a woman watching the battle from her porch and impregnating her.) Watch it on YouTube if you're interested.

Yeah I have to agree with the other posters--the much bigger issues here are "living cell surviving on a fired bullet." A chemical compound like a poison doesn't need to "live" through the trip, it just needs to have a high enough concentration to remain dangerous. If the 'glass vial' can survive the impulse that flings it from the gun in the first place, or can distribute the poison onto the bullet in a reasonable way, I don't see why it wouldn't be just as dangerous on the bullet as it would on the blade. Noting, of course, that D&D poisons are highly unrealistic for taking effect in seconds, but rarely (if ever) being strong enough to kill in seconds. (Most poisons that cause full-system damage in a few seconds are going to kill you in short order, IRL.)