poison crafting too expensive

[raleel]

Are the book poison prices artificially inflated to reflect their illegal nature? There is another character in my group who has craft(poison) and was looking at making poisons. I started doing the math and noticed that it takes weeks and weeks to make single doses of poison. Is this wrong? it seems well and truly out of whack

 

[Spatula]

Are the book poison prices artificially inflated to reflect their illegal nature?

Yes. Song & Silence recommends changing Craft progress to be in gp rather than sp when making poisons, but even that is not enough IMO.

 

[MerakSpielman]

I would keep the price for crafting as-is - it reflects pretty well the power of the stuff, balance-wise. Toning down the creation time shouldn't be a problem, though, IMHO.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

In general crafting times are realistic. Too much realism makes the craft skills worthless for PCs.

I recommend tweaking the craft times to fit the needs of your campaign. Craft skills are good background skills, and taking them should be encouraged.

 

[Malin Genie]

Because the prices of poisons have been inflated to 'balance' with other one-shot damaging phenomena (i.e. spell scrools / potions) you could quite justifiably allow crafting of poison to follow the same rate as for magic items - one day per 1,000gp worth.

 

[noeuphoria]

Especially because a large part of the poison's cost is (IMO) meant to reflect the difficulty in getting the ingredients. If you want purple worm venom, someone is going to have to go kill a purple worm for you, and that isn't easy (or cheap). It's like ordering a filet mignon at a restaurant - you aren't paying more b/c the steak is harder to prepare or takes the cook longer to make - you're paying more because the ingredients are rare. Realistically - what does a character do for 2 weeks to make purple worm poison - it already works!!.

 

[MerakSpielman]

Well, most natural venoms degenerate quickly once exposed to air. Part of Craft (poisonmaking) is rendering the poison down to a tiny, powerful dose that can be used to coat a weapon and not lose its effectiveness over time.

Simply finding a poison gland of a purple worm and sticking your sword into it wouldn't - and shouldn't - work nearly as well as treating it with distilled and refined purple worm venom.

 

[CM]

Another thing I like to remind players of when they want to harvest venom from big nasties is that if, for example, that huge scorpion stings you, he's probably injecting at least a few cups of fluid. A Colossal scorpion? Probably close to a gallon. That's got to account for something. It's a much bigger dose than a character could hope to inflict with a poison-coated weapon.