Poison Pondering

[Archade]

So,

One of my players wants to play a druid that dabbles in vermin-poisons.

I think that's fine. He wants to harvest raw materials of poisons. I've made a house rule that he can harvest materials for poisons with a Survival check equal to the Craft (poison) DC as listed in the Complete Adventurer (either by spending a few hours casting about in the wild, for plants, or encoutering creatures or ransacking corpses). He will acquire a number of doses equal to the HD of the creature if he succeeds the Survival check (so a 6 HD Centipede will give him materials for 6 doses).

1) Does this house rule sound reasonable?

2) The poison DC list in the Complete Adventurer doesn't spell out the DCs for all sizes of snakes and vermin -- is there an expanded list somewhere, or how should I scale Huge Centipedes, et al?

Thanks!

 

[Infiniti2000]

The biggest problem with harvesting stuff from creatures that you should consider is the value obtained. 1 dose of small centipede poison is 90gp. 1 dose of huge centipede poison (a 6HD centipede) is not listed, but probably about 150gp (less than giant wasp poison). At 6 doses, that's an additional 900gp of treasure for a CR2 monster. That's way out of whack, so you certainly want to reduce the number of doses obtained and reduce the usefulness of the doses (either in damage, DC, or shelf-life).

It doesn't matter what the DC will be because the PC will certainly max out the skill, easily getting any DC you set up.

Another factor you can throw in there is time spent obtaining the poison. It is certainly time consuming to get a living viper to give you poison, so trying to perform surgery to obtain the poison from the creature's available sac's (if any is even left) has got to take a while.

 

[schporto]

You could probably also mitigate the 'too much treasure' issue, by having the player agree to a no sale idea. For whatever reason the druid feels it is inappropriate to sell the poisons. Heck most poisons are fairly limiting.
-cpd

 

[Archade]

Well, treasure value for monster bits in this case shouldn't be so bad -- it's only for raw materials to be used in the Craft skill, reducing material cost from 1/3 to 1/6 (Complete Adventurer), so materials for a 90gp dose of poison is only really worth 15gp.

(For other monster bits harvesting, I always ask for a Craft (Taxidermy) check, which seems to put an end to that nonsense).

Do you think that milking/harvesting should take, say, an hour?