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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 3226484" data-attributes="member: 1465">Exactly. The rules make poisons too much alike, and they turn poisons into just another combat device.It's not terrible, it's just that it could be so much better...Think of what is scary (hence "entertaining") about poisons in movies/novels, or think about them in real life:- you may get poisoned from apparently safe activities (eating/drinking, touching something, breathing...)- the poison kills you gradually and SLOWLY (could be hours, days or even longer)- to stop a poison you have to find the appropriate way (there is no universal cure for all poisons)But poisons in D&D suffer from a seriously boring design choice: all of them give primary damage immediately and secondary damage 1 minute later.This completely takes away a lot of possible fun: think Frodo slowly dying from the Mordor blade wound, and friends have to rush to find someone who can cure him before it's too late. In D&D, you either die from a poison within 1 minute, or you're safe (except that of course it makes you weaker so more likely to be killed in another battle).The crazy thing is that normally poison is a tool for those who don't want to fight, because they're coward or because the know they cannot win a direct fight. This is exactly one of the reasons why the "poison is evil" idea is still mentioned in many D&D books. Because the poisoner (1) escapes a fair fight, (2) escapes punishment (poisons are used by spies exactly because it's much harder to find the killer, especially when the victim dies days later), and (3) the death is slow and painful.No wonder why in D&D lots of people don't see a reason why poison should be evil, because by the rules it's just another type of damaging attack. It actually makes a combat shorter, so someone could even see it as a mercyful device <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />It's unbelievable to me that the designers made ALL poisons in the core books take effect within 1 minute...</blockquote>

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