Poison (the spell) and warmages

[gnfnrf]

The Warmage has the spell poison on its class spell list.

Poison is an unusual spell, because its save DC is not calculated by normal means.

Calling upon the venomous powers of natural predators, you infect the subject with a horrible poison by making a successful melee touch attack. The poison deals 1d10 points of temporary Constitution damage immediately and another 1d10 points of temporary Constitution damage 1 minute later. Each instance of damage can be negated by a Fortitude save (DC 10 + ½ your caster level + your Wis modifier).

Now, as written in the PHB (SRD) this makes sense, since only clerics and druids can cast poison, and they like Wisdom. For a warmage, on the other hand, it makes little sense, since Wisdom isn't warmage related, nor is it poison related.

First, is there any concrete rules precedent supporting substituting Charisma for Wisdom? Second, is it a good idea?

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gnfnrf

 

[Infiniti2000]

No precedent I can even imagine. As for good idea, I would instead consider houseruling the save. I never liked the half-level thing because it's basically always maximizing the spell DC (e.g. it will be within 1 of the highest level spell of the cleric/druid). It can get worse, actually, when you consider things like beads of karma, etc. Just remove that last sentence and remove the "see text" from the saving throw line of the spell.

Btw, does the Rules Compendium help with this issue?

 

[Shin Okada]

As Poison's DC is a very special one, no, I can't think of any precedent either.

Not just warmage but Spirit Shaman (Complete Divine; uses both CHA and Wis for spellcasting and CHA is used for DC) and Dread Necromancer (Heros of Horror, Cha based arcane caster) uses it, too. There should be a lot of creatures (or maybe some prestige class) which use Poison as spell-like ability and such. I cannot think of any particular example but it is possible that some prestige class with different key ability for their spell may have Poison in their class spell list.

If I were a DM, I will play it as written.
Making generic rule for them could be a little bit complex.

 

[Plane Sailing]

As a DM I could say "Welcome to multiple ability dependency!".

And seriously, even if the warmage doesn't have any Wis bonus it still gets a pretty good DC which scales with his level.