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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TanithT" data-source="post: 5769906" data-attributes="member: 87695">The way I phrased it when educating folks about biotoxins was that poison is bad if you bite into it, and venom is bad if it bites into you.  A bit of a crude approximation, but what is generally accepted in the biotox community is that venom is delivered via active mechanism (bite, sting or aerosolization) and poison is a passive mechanism that requires touch or inhestion, or inhalation minus the active aerosolization by the organism.Medically, all drugs are poisons.  Sometimes it's just a question of which organisms they poison - to a bacteria or a parasite, the antibiotic or antihelminthic is definitely a poison.  Quantity tends to be the dividing line; there are almost no efficacious drugs that will not kill the patient when overdosed.   Sometimes the safety margin between life saving drug and fatal overdose is very, very tiny.  Sometimes the drug is always harmful or fatal in the absence of a specific condition it is intended to treat.So the mechanism of how you would magically distinguish a harmful poison from a helpful drug when the dividing line is quantity rather than quality is really something of a complicated grey area.  I think we're pretty much stuck with the "it's MAAAAGIC" deus ex machina, because medically there just isn't that distinction.The bio stuff is geeky and complicated enough that I definitely don't blame any GMs for throwing up their hands and just using the easiest interpretation of the rule book, even if it makes zero medical or scientific sense.  It's D&D, not a National Geographic documentary.</blockquote>

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