Walking Death

[AbdulAlhazred]

Treating it like an affliction more or less translates into:

heal xx ends!

The important part here however is, that a hard check is needed to succed, and endurance does not help here, as you already failed your fort check...

If it is a minion, 20 damage dave ends is too much, if it is not, it makes no sense.

If you need a heal check, you have not so much ime to call for help, but it is still possible, if a healer happens to hang around, and suddenly your HP make a difference between dying and surviving.

I think if you are in a combat situation then HS loss and maybe 'you can't heal' or whatnot are pretty useful effects. I mean a poison can certainly just do damage, but the typical thing with poison is that when you are poisoned you need to be cured, that's what really makes it distinct from just damage. It is also going back a bit towards the old style of poison kills. Well, now it doesn't necessarily kill, or at least not right away, but it may eventually kill you or leave you in bad shape.

So treating it like a disease and giving it an onset time and a check frequency seems cool to me. A quick poison might hit you right away and progress every round. A slow one might take hours or days but it also might have nastier effects. Sure, heal checks can be made, but they don't automatically cure you, they CAN make you worse or just not help at all. Heal by itself might not do the trick in all cases either, maybe some poisons require specific antidotes to even allow a check, or the check is very hard to achieve except with the right antidote.

Poison as it is now in 4e (if you can say much general about it at all) just seems rather uninteresting. It is just another kind of damage. Maybe it's ongoing, maybe there's a save ends effect involved, but it is so abstract it lost all its flavor.

 

[Saeviomagy]

If it's called walking death, wouldn't the disease track go:

Onset: no effect
1st fail: no effect
2nd fail: no effect
3rd fail: death

 

[Destil]

First, use the inherent bonuses system.

At the very least everyone should be doing something like this for Bull Rush, Grab and these sort of Item attacks.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Well, not every poisonable NPC needs to have hundreds of hit points. If you want to take down an (non-combatant) enemy king that hides behind thousands of soldiers without getting killed in the process, you slip Walking Death into his food and go away. A few hours later, he's dead.

This poison serves more of a storytelling device than an actual weapon for the PCs.

I think part of the problem is that it's hard to tell that this is what you use it for.

It becomes an exercise on the DM's part of suddenly figuring out, on the fly, the saves and HP's for a character he never expected to stat out (because he never expected a combat with that character).

That's easier in 3e where a Level X Noble has XX HP's and +XYZ for saves, and you can sort of wing it pretty effectively.

In 4e, it becomes a question from the PC: "Well....do I kill him? Or not?" It's too binary to be satisfying either way (the DM can say yes, but only if the enemy is 'supposed to be' killed, otherwise the DM can say no, and there's not much the player can do except work within the tight reigns the DM places on them).

I firmly believe that we need a good way to allow PC's to covertly poison an enemy that they have reason/motive to kill.

I don't think this is the way to do it.

(I'd perhaps use something more like a Skill Challenge?)

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think part of the problem is that it's hard to tell that this is what you use it for.

It becomes an exercise on the DM's part of suddenly figuring out, on the fly, the saves and HP's for a character he never expected to stat out (because he never expected a combat with that character).

That's easier in 3e where a Level X Noble has XX HP's and +XYZ for saves, and you can sort of wing it pretty effectively.

In 4e, it becomes a question from the PC: "Well....do I kill him? Or not?" It's too binary to be satisfying either way (the DM can say yes, but only if the enemy is 'supposed to be' killed, otherwise the DM can say no, and there's not much the player can do except work within the tight reigns the DM places on them).

I firmly believe that we need a good way to allow PC's to covertly poison an enemy that they have reason/motive to kill.

I don't think this is the way to do it.

(I'd perhaps use something more like a Skill Challenge?)

I always despised the conceit that "Kings are Level 12" (or whatever it was specifically). Humbug, sometimes they're toddlers. Sometimes their hard bitten old war heroes, or deadly warlocks. Mostly they're people that may or may not have some degree of combat training. Beyond that hit points and such never really worked as a mechanism outside of combat. History is replete with Kings falling off horses and being killed, etc. Life is a richer tapestry than any rules system, so you really do have to color outside the lines if you want to have a fully realized world.

So yeah, a Skill Challenge is great. I wouldn't personally really worry about the mechanics of a poison that was going to be used on an NPC any more than I would worry about creating stats for an NPC that won't be faced in combat. Let the PCs pay what they will for a poison if that's their choice of ways to do the deed. The more they want to pay, the more likely it is to be effective and reasonably quick.

Now, is 125,000 gp 'too expensive'? It really depends on the situation. If you're wanting to assassinate the King of Mundania which is a thoroughly ordinary land where a 10th level PC stands out like a sore thumb and is the hottest thing anyone's seen this side of Rome, then yeah, it is probably ridiculous. OTOH if you're trying to poison some Efreet Lord of the City of Brass, then not so much. In any case you can see that my thinking is far away from whatever thought process was used in the writing of the article. Seems to be a position I find myself in fairly often though, and nothing new.

 

[Doc Eldritch]

My own little house rule, that I've started using, is that poisons do not always have a "save ends" effect. Some of them require a Heal check as a standard action (to provide aid and antitoxins), with a DC of 10+ the poison's level.
The idea of doing some nastier or plot type poisons using the disease track is a really good one, and might work well for the particularly virulent kind!