Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Metallian" data-source="post: 243614" data-attributes="member: 1063">I agree with the others here that, looking at the game mechanics, there's no real justification for all poison use being evil, or even necessarily unlawful (depends on where you are).As far as I know, in real life, most poisons are fatal to most people. Even if they don't kill you, they might cause nasty forms of permanent damage. Plus, I think it is more difficult to posion someone in a fight in real life, so most poisons are used for murder.Also, even some anasthetics or tranquilizers (causing Str or Dex damage or whatever) can cause dangerous, unexpected reactions, or a person might be allergic to them or whatever. This is presumably why the police don't chloroform rowdy suspects when making arrests.In D&D, following the rules, none of these things are true. Most poisons cause nonfatal, nonpermanent damage. There's no table of cross-reactions, side-effects, or allergies to certain poisons/drugs. They are easy to use in combat, and so have legitimate non-murderous uses. They're more like stun guns or pepper spray than guns or knives. Heck, even stun guns or pepper spray could probably kill a person with a weak heart or an allergy!This doesn't mean that D&D societies won't outlaw poison. Stun guns and pepper spray are illegal in some places. But if you outlaw poison in your D&D city, you should probably outlaw weapons, dangerous magic items, and dangerous spell use as well. As someone else pointed out, most of those things are WAY more dangerous than poison!IMC, I've ruled that (in most civilized places) Ingested poison is illegal (hard to use it for any legitimate purpose), Contact poison is illegal (except when obviously used as a security measure, like a trap), Inhaled poison is illegal in large quantities, and Injury poison is mostly legal (just another weapon).However...CON damage poison and any poison that does permanent damage is always illegal...the thinking here is that you may poison the guy one round, then find out he is innocent, mistaken, manipulated, whatever...and then there is a chance that your poison might still kill or cripple him a minute later (secondary damage). It's too easy to make a mistake, or inflict lasting consequences after the person has "reformed."I consider using those types of poisons to be evil under most circumstances. The rest are neither good nor evil...like any form of attack, they are simply tools that can be used for good or evil. I can't really think of a good reason why they would be considered "evil" in a world governed by the D&D rules. If they wanted to make poison evil, they should have designed the game to make it...well, evil in some way. As it stands, most are kind of humane.                            The Metallian</blockquote>

Verification