Craft (poison) or "It takes HOW long???"

[DWARF]

Alright, I may be getting a bit soft in the head from all of my classes, but doesn't it seem to take just a wee-bit too long to make poisons?

According to the rules for Craft, Greenblood oil has a DC of 13 and a cost of 100 Gp, or 1000 Sp for crafting purposes.

Now let's make a poisonmaker. Assume an Int of 14 (+2), level 5 expert (8), with skill focus (+2). That's a total of +12. So except for 1 being an automatic failure, it will always be a success. Average roll is 22 x DC 13 = 286 Sp of work for one week. So that makes it an average of 3.5 weeks for the poisonmaker to come up with one dose of a very weak poison.

Is this logical, or am I missing something? Perhaps it DOES take that long to work poison, but should it be completely labor intensive? Maybe the fact that you spend a lot of the time letting it sit mixing or evaporating off, etc. could let him make 3 or 5 different poisons at the same time. What abouta multiple dose amount all at once, split up into 5 or 10 vials once it's completed?

 

[Vhane]

Skills dont auto fail on a one.

What rolled DC do your numbers take into account? Is it average 10? Its Rolled number x DC sps per week

Also the ELH has a rushing work you can voluntarily up the DC to increase the speed to create... and it doesn't say thats an Epic use of a skill (and if I'm wrong it shouldn't).

 

[Balgus]

Hmmmmmm-
you got me there. I never ran into that problem, cause poison has always been cheap enough for my group just to buy.

Other than RPing purposes, I don't see why someone would take the craft skills. It takes too long and give too little for me to see anyone taking craft bow- or craft trap or whatever...

I once had a PC take craft- trapmaking. At level 2, I wanted to make sure we would not be interrupted in our sleep while resting in a room we just cleared out. I wanted to rig a shortsword to a rope that was tied to the door. If the door wa opened, the sword would swing down at the person. Now tell me an idiot can't do that in three and half seconds... He said it would take me three days to complete- and I had to roll like 15 to get the DC right....so i set put two cans in front of the door.

 

[DWARF]

I was working on a character concept, a voodoo witch doctor. mainly a cleric type with some druid and wizard spells and ability's. Now, one of the things I wanted to bring in was the poisoned blow-gun idea. In real life, brazilian tribes use blow guns to hunt birds, and all they do is rub their darts along the back of tree frogs with a neuralytic poison. So I figred that it should be fairly easy to make poison if you have the animal's poison glands, right?

I've taken some chemistry, and it seems like it should be:

• Squeeze glands into jar
• Mix poison with solvent
• decant off unwanted part of poison
• maybe mix into better solvent (for injury versus contact poison, for example)
• distill down into pure form
• split into single doses

And that should take a day at most. I mean, it'll only take my character a day to brew a potion of cure moderate wounds. But it'll take weeks to craft even a really weak poison? Usually, it's a lot easier to kill things than it is to make them better.

And I'm not looking for tons of hurting poisons either. I'm mostly looking for the "unconscious" type ones. As well, does anyone know of a supplement with some other less harmful poisons, ie they make someone staggered for a while instead of Str damage?

 

[Creamsteak]

That is WAY too long... yep

 

[Mistwell]

Hmmmmmm-
you got me there. I never ran into that problem, cause poison has always been cheap enough for my group just to buy.

Other than RPing purposes, I don't see why someone would take the craft skills. It takes too long and give too little for me to see anyone taking craft bow- or craft trap or whatever...

I once had a PC take craft- trapmaking. At level 2, I wanted to make sure we would not be interrupted in our sleep while resting in a room we just cleared out. I wanted to rig a shortsword to a rope that was tied to the door. If the door wa opened, the sword would swing down at the person. Now tell me an idiot can't do that in three and half seconds... He said it would take me three days to complete- and I had to roll like 15 to get the DC right....so i set put two cans in front of the door.

The Leadership feat gets you many followers, in addition to the cohort. Everyone always seems to focus on the cohort, but for me it is the followers that are the attraction. A poisonmaker expert follower can be very useful, as can other craft-focused, profession-focused (herbalist is my favorite), and alchemy-focused expert followers. So that's why people might be interested in these skills - to give those useful Expert followers something to be working on while the party is out adventuring.

 

[Umbran]

I've taken some chemistry, and it seems like it should be:

• Squeeze glands into jar
• Mix poison with solvent
• decant off unwanted part of poison
• maybe mix into better solvent (for injury versus contact poison, for example)
• distill down into pure form
• split into single doses

And that should take a day at most. I mean, it'll only take my character a day to brew a potion of cure moderate wounds. But it'll take weeks to craft even a really weak poison? Usually, it's a lot easier to kill things than it is to make them better.

The difference is magic. In a normal fantasy world, magic works a lot faster than chemistry. Plus, while you may have taken some chemistry, you've got a couple bad assumptions.

I'll take the simplest one first - distiling seems simple in concept, but it isn't easy in practice. Without good controls on temperature (and remember - in fantasy worlds you've got no thermometers or bunsen burners - you've got simple charcoal fire), it can be a bear. And, if your poison is temperature sensitive (say it breaks down before you reach the boiling point of the solvent) the process can take a while.

Second - we aren't talking pure chemistry, where al the agents start out in nice, pure form. We're talking practical biochemistry. Generally speaking, even in our world, if you want to extract a given substance from a tissue, you cannot just "squeeze it into a jar/decant off unwanted part". You make it sound like the thing you want willingly separates itself out, leaving all other materials behind. That's not how it works. There's a lot more processing to be done. Generally, the tissue must be pureed, ground, and/or chemically treated to break down the very cells. Then you go through a lot of steps to separate out the chemical you want from all the rest. Today, we can do such things quickly and easily in some simple cases, because we can to it automatically, and in bulk. With far more primitive tools, it is not easy.

 

[Drawmack]

Good source for poisons - http://www.bastionpress.com/Downloads/Poison Table.pdf

 

[CTD]

An important point not to miss is that this is a game. The function of time to make poison, and the small dose made, is more about the game than reality.

Reality says I can go to my broom closet, mix up a few chemicals, and have a nice inhalation poison in mere minutes! Why can't I do this in game? I can make potions of cure light in one day, a dose of poison should be about the same right?

Consider that a dose of poison and a potion of cure light are vastly different items. The potion heals relatively minor damage. The poison can kill you, even at high levels.

In the hands of an NPC there is easy control for this: The NPC gets as much poison as the DM determines he needs to challenge the players effectively. So the factor of time is essentially moot.

In the hands of a PC there is great danger in this. Party completes an adventure and the poison maker spends a month making poisons. When he's done he has about 30 doses of a contact poison that peels off CON damage over the space of a minute. This is not an unusual function for poisons in 3E.

The problem lies in that this character can now use this poison (or the rest of his party by proxy) to deliver mortal wounds to enemies. Sure there is a save and a DC, but when it fails, that 15th level wizard with a 10 CON is in for some serious trouble after he looses 2d6 (or more) of it.

The time to make poison is a balance against the great effect it can have on the game. Too much of it in the hands of players can render a great many opponents impotent to challenge the players significantly. Which leads to inflation, suddenly all the enemies are resistant to poison, or all have the knowledge to prep spells for it.

Yes, you can roleplay the negative effects on reputation that poison use gets. You could even have the party chased by the law; but that's a roleplay solution to a mechanical problem, which is bad to introduce into the core rules (roleplay problems and solutions are better found in the individual games IMO).

Lots of pretty words eh? Summation: Poison can really r0xx0r your b0xx0rs! That's why it takes so long to make!

 

[Frostmarrow]

It takes a master weaponsmith (skill+bonuses=14) more than 21 weeks to make one masterworked longsword. However if the smith has a skill+bonuses of 29 he can pull this epic feat off in just 10 weeks.Then it takes a wizard two days to enhance it to magic +1. Seems odd. Correct me if I'm wrong.

It takes a master armorsmith (skill+bonuses=18) about 2 years to make a full plate armor. It is still a 2 day job to enhance it to +1.