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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9223454" data-attributes="member: 8461">That paragraph is, as I read it, Gygax trying to explain what's happening in instances where the attack roll is successful (i.e. the target is successfully hit, which would presumably inject the poison into the target) but the save is successful (i.e. they aren't poisoned).In terms of why he felt that paragraph was necessary, I can only guess, but my presumption is that he's of the opinion that poison isn't really something you fight off, per se. If you're poisoned, then you should suffer the effects as per a failed save, so a successful save must mean something else, i.e. that you were never hit with the poison to begin with...despite the successful attack roll. Which then brings him back around to the idea that hit points lost aren't an injury delivered.Except he undercuts himself in the same paragraph by then saying that hit points lost can be injuries, just not "in proportion" to the hit points lost (i.e. they could be a "mere scratch"), which brings up issues of bridging the gap in terms of connecting injuries to hit points lost. Especially since you can't quantify the deadliness of a particular injury in absolute terms from an in-character standpoint. How long/deep does a laceration have to be before it's not just a "mere scratch" anymore?Which really, to my mind, obviates the entire need for this paragraph. Even if a character is injured by a poisoned attack, it doesn't necessarily have to be a given that the poison gets into their system. The successful saving throw (which is a separate operation, and so isn't tied to the operation of gaining/losing hit points) can be that they sucked the poison out quick enough to succeed, or that the gout of blood that the injury opened up spurted with such force that it carried the poison out of their system, or that they made a tourniquet around the injury and rolled it downward until it pushed the venom out, etc.Now, most of those explanations are ridiculous in terms of how poison operates in the real world, but as has been noted before, D&D doesn't operate as a simulation of the real world. It's a model of pulp stories, myths and legends, and action movies/shows. Whether or not the explanation is contrived is less important than whether or not it keeps consistency with everything else, i.e. verisimilitude.</blockquote>

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