PDA

View Full Version : Build-a-Poison Workshop [PEACH]



Viletta Vadim
2010-02-03, 05:39 PM
I'm quite fond of poisons. However, rather limited selections get rather annoying, so I decided to slap together some makeshift custom poison rules.

Now, then. Objectives. I want a sturdy set of custom poison rules. Also, poisons tend to be overpriced and scaled poorly, so these rules should make poisons less expensive, more worthwhile, and hopefully better over the long haul. Powerful poisons should be powerful and dangerous without having an utterly ludicrous price tag. I have no problems with an archer who has a weak poison on very nearly every arrow.

Also, I want these rules to be able to scale downward; I want it to be possible to get a dose of really crappy ingested poison for a couple coppers, so that you can afford tens of thousands of doses to poison a well or a river or a lake to slowly wipe out a city or something.

Now then, everything goes off of a baseline, so here's mine. The generic design poison:

Poison- Generic Venom
Type- Injury DC10
Initial Damage- 1 Str
Secondary Damage- 1 Str
Onset- Initial damage immediate, secondary damage after one minute
Price- 3g

This is where I see the most basic, generic poison as sitting.

The way I'm building this formula, I calculate the value of the primary effect, then I calculate the value of the secondary effect, add those up, and then multiply in a couple global modifiers.

Damage Costs:

The base cost is on a quadratic scale, based on average ability damage, whether it's 1, 2d6, 1d8, 3d2+1, whatever. The cost for initial damage is twice the average total ability damage squared in copper pieces. The cost for initial secondary damage is just the average total ability damage squared in copper pieces. Generally, it's assumed that all damage goes to the same stat.

If the primary or secondary damage applies to constitution, then its price is doubled. If the primary or secondary damage applies to a random stat, chosen at the time the victim is affected by the poison, then its price is halved.

One point of permanent ability drain counts as five points of damage.

Global Modifiers:

In case you haven't noticed, the base damage cost comes out to be pretty cheap. 200g for a poison that deals a hundred points of ability damage right off the bat? Yeah, no.

Global modifiers are what really ramps prices up. Or, alternately, brings prices down to 'poison the lake' levels. The three main global modifiers are for DC, type, and onset, plus special modifiers.

DC: This is the main modifier.Multiply the poison's cost by the save DC squared. A poison's save DC cannot be less than ten plus the poison's average primary damage plus the poison's average secondary damage. This minimum is reduced by eight for ingested poisons. One point of permanent ability drain still counts as five points of ability damage when determining minumum DC.

Type:
Of course, poison type is a big deal. An inhaled poison is a lot better than an ingested poison. So, just pull the type modifier from the following table.


Type Modifier
Ingested /8
Injury x1
Contact x2
Inhaled x8

Onset
By default, all poisons have their primary effect kick in immediately and their secondary effect kick in a minute later. I don't like that. So, I'm adding in options for slower-onset poisons. Just pull the modifier from the table.


Initial/Secondary Modifier
Immediate/1 Round x2
Immediate/1 Minute x1
1 Minute/1 Hour /4
1 Hour/1 Day /8
1 Day/1 Week /16

Special
Then, there are poisons that only affect one creature type, or poisons that can affect creatures normally immune. These modifiers are in the following table.



Condition Modifier
Affects one type /4 (e.g. giants-only; cannot be humanoids or a type naturally immune to poison)
Affects only humanoids /2
Affects one humanoid type /4 (e.g. elves-only)
Affects one creature /16 (e.g. Elminster-only, does not stack with other one-type restriction)
Affects one immune type x4 (e.g. affects undead; a poison with this modifiers only affects that one type and only bypasses natural immunity, not immunity gained through any other source, mindless creatures cannot be affected by poisons that inflict damage to mental stats)


Crafting

I don't really have a Craft DC formula I'm really married to, yet. I'm going with 10+Save DC/2 for the Craft DC for now.

Putting it All Together
The summarized version comes down to this.

GP Cost=(.02 x Ability Mod x AID^2 + .01 x Ability Mod ASD^2) x DC^2 x Type Mod x Onset Mod x Special Mod

Craft DC=10 + Save DC / 2

Legend:
AID: Average Initial Damage. One point of permanent ability damage counts as five points of ability damage.
ASD: Average secondary damage. One point of permanent ability damage counts as five points of ability damage.
Ability Mod: If the relevant ability damage affects Constitution, this modifier is 2. If it affects a random ability score, this modifier is 1/2. Otherwise, it's 1.

DC: Minimum 10+AID+ASD for injury, contact, and inhaled poisons. Minimum 2+AID+ASD for ingested poisons.

Type Mod:
Type Modifier
Ingested /8
Injury x1
Contact x2
Inhaled x8

Onset Mod:
[b]Initial/Secondary Modifier
Immediate/1 Round x4
Immediate/1 Minute x1
1 Minute/1 Hour /4
1 Hour/1 Day /16
1 Day/1 Week /64

Special Mod:
[b]
Condition Modifier
Affects one type /4 (e.g. giants-only; cannot be humanoids or a type naturally immune to poison)
Affects only humanoids /2
Affects one humanoid type /4 (e.g. elves-only)
Affects one creature /16 (e.g. Elminster-only, does not stack with other one-type restriction)
Affects one immune type x4 (e.g. affects undead; a poison with this modifiers only affects that one type and only bypasses natural immunity, not immunity gained through any other source, mindless creatures cannot be affected by poisons that inflict damage to mental stats)



Thoughts? Too much math? Broken as all get-out?

imp_fireball
2010-02-03, 05:48 PM
Good concept but I'm not as mechanically inclined as others, so I'll leave it up to them.

Formula is a little confusing, but it's the GM's job to work out a DC and price for the player when they say they wanna craft a poison; and if they wanna buy one, the GM should prepare ahead of time.

I'll reiterate that I like the concept though.

NMBLNG
2010-02-03, 06:20 PM
Personally, I'd go for a more 'guesstimation' approach. Anything with exponents starts to get too complicated for me.

Could you give us a few examples of poisons created by your system?

DracoDei
2010-02-03, 06:34 PM
The basic suggestions for magic item creation involves exponents, so can see how they would be necessary for this too.

Milskidasith
2010-02-03, 07:16 PM
Your generic poison doesn't even work under the rules because it's minimum DC would have to be 12.

This is also absurdly complicated for something who's problem is that immunity is rampant, not that the base DCs were too low (there were some high DC high damage ones, IIRC.)

DracoDei
2010-02-03, 07:27 PM
FWIW it does have a way around Type immunities...

Milskidasith
2010-02-03, 09:29 PM
FWIW it does have a way around Type immunities...

True, it works on natural immunity, which is helpful... but there are also problems with immunity due to annoying things like class features, magic items, and spells.

Viletta Vadim
2010-02-03, 09:45 PM
Personally, I'd go for a more 'guesstimation' approach. Anything with exponents starts to get too complicated for me.
Complexity tends to be a natural drawback of the kind of flexibility I'm going for. However, as Draco pointed out, most magic items in the game are on a quadratic scale; magic weapons cost Base + 300 + 2000 x Effective Enhancement Bonus^2 gold, for example. That ^2 is the kind of scaling I'm trying to keep in here, to keep things in line with the rest of the game. Even the scroll formula of 25 x Caster Level x Spell Level is roughly quadratic.

However, the larger number of variables at work when dealing with poisons (amount of damage, save DC,

Could you give us a few examples of poisons created by your system?
Certainly.

Case 1: Vampire Blood First, let's say we want to murder every man, woman, and child in a small village, or at least drive them out, and rather than taking the direct approach, we decide to poison the well. So, we want to make a cheap, low-damage ingested poison that will kill them over an extended period of time. Since this is long-term, we don't want natural healing to outstrip the damage the poison does, so we decide it will do permanent ability drain rather than ability damage. Ability drain is expensive, so we'll only do a single point of ability drain as initial damage, with no secondary damage whatsoever, and since we want to murder these people, this poison will target Con. Again, we're patient, so it doesn't have to take effect instantaneously. We'll go with day/week onset. We're only interested in killing humanoids, so we can save a little money by restricting our poison to humanoids. And finally, we'll make the save DC as low as possible to keep the price down (after all, we are patient).

So, we want an ingested poison with an onset of 1 day for initial, 1 week for secondary damage, that deals 1 Con drain as initial damage, with no secondary damage. 1 Con drain is effectively 5 damage for determining price and minimum DC. The minimum DC for an ingested poison is 2+damage, so 7 in this case.

Now, then. First, we calculate the damage costs. One point of drain is effectively 5 points of damage, so when calculating, we treat average damage as 5. Since this is constitution damage, we double the result.

Damage cost: (.02 x 5^2 x 2) + 0 = 1g

Now, we factor in the modifiers. The DC is 7, the modifier for ingested poison is /8, the modifier for day/week onset is /16, and we're restricting this to humanoids for /2.

1g x 7^2 /8 /16 /2 = .19g, or 19 cp.

Now, to calculate the Craft DC. 10+7/2=13.

Now, we have a dirt cheap poison. We can whip up a thousand doses for 190g, pour 'em down the well, and start wiping out the village.

This is our poison:

Poison- Vampire Blood
Type- Ingested DC7
Initial Damage- 1 Con drain
Secondary Damage- None
Onset- Initial damage after one day, secondary damage after one week
Special- Only affects humanoids
Cost- 19 cp
Craft DC- 13

Case 2: Stalker's Kiss Now, let's say we have a Ranger. A bounty hunter, even, and she wants a poison to put on her arrows and track down her prey. In this case, we're talking about some sort of injury poison. The bounty hunter is going for a nonlethal take-down, and lowering strength can cause encumbrance, keeping them from escaping, so we'll go that route. We want initial onset, but we're fine with landing a few arrows and then retreating and waiting for the secondary effect to kick in, so the normal immediate/1 minute onset is fine. We ultimately want to reduce strength to zero, so we need a fairly meaty amount of ability damage, and since we don't want the target escaping, higher secondary damage makes a good failsafe. Let's go with 1d6 Str initial (3.5 average), 2d4 Str secondary (5 average). That's a total of 8.5 average damage, for a minimum DC of 19, but we'll bump that up to 20.

Damage cost: (.02 x 3.5^2) + (.01 x 5^2) = .495

Now, modifiers. The DC is 20. The modifiers for injury and immediate/1 minute onset are both x1, and we don't have any sort of special modifier.

.495 x 20^2=198

Now, to calculate the Craft DC. 10+20/2=20.

This is our poison:

Poison- Stalker's Kiss
Type- Injury DC20
Initial Damage- 1d6 Str
Secondary Damage- 2d4 Str
Onset- Initial damage immediate, secondary damage after one minute
Cost- 198 gp
Craft DC- 20

Your generic poison doesn't even work under the rules because it's minimum DC would have to be 12.
Yeah, I just noticed that, myself. ^^U

I came up with the baseline poison first, as an idea of what an extremely low-end poison should look like, and the kind of price it should command. After that, I went through, like, five iterations on the DC portion of the equation, until I ended up putting in the minimum to stay on a quadratic scale while avoiding dirt cheap DC1 poisons that deal obscene amounts of ability damage that you could spam while hoping your enemy botches their fortitude save. It just happened to invalidate the design poison, but not atrociously so. Instead, it'd bottom out as a DC12 version for 4g, 3s, and 2c.

This is also absurdly complicated for something who's problem is that immunity is rampant, not that the base DCs were too low (there were some high DC high damage ones, IIRC.)
Actually, low base DCs weren't so much a target, here. After all, colossal scorpion venom is DC54.

The greater targets were price and diversity. The cheapest poison in the game? Tiny scorpion venom. DC11 injury, 1 dex/1 dex. It costs 40g. That's a lot of money for something so crappy. In fact, once you prune out the poisons that aren't overpriced crap, there's not a whole lot of variety left. Also, a lot of poisons veer in the direction of high damage, mediocre DCs, high price. I want this system to allow for the flexibility to make a poison with low damage, good DC, and a manageable price that allows you to use it regularly.

So, with this system, you could make a DC25 injury poison that deals 1d3 Con damage initially, then another 1d3 one round later so that it actually matters in battle, and it'd only cost 192 gold per dose. Not something to laugh at, but certainly manageable, and something you can afford to put on a few arrows even in most fights, with a respectable DC for an effect that is gonna put some hurt on most enemies. Especially if it takes effect multiple times.

Diversity and cost were the greater targets here, as well as making more traditional poison scenarios possible (such as tremendously deadly ingested poisons, or very dangerous toxic gases).

True, it works on natural immunity, which is helpful... but there are also problems with immunity due to annoying things like class features, magic items, and spells.
Hm... a modifier to cut through class features might be a good idea, though cutting through magic items or spells would be crossing the line. That, unfortunately, is doomed to stay a pitfall, just as much as Mindblank to enchantment.

DracoDei
2010-02-03, 10:12 PM
When you get this nailed down, you should go back and figure out how to handle things other than ability score damage/drain... Sickening/Nauseating, Sleep, Paralysis, Blindness, Rampant Earwax, Fear Effects (see my extended signature for a link to a post with random examples of most of these).

Latronis
2010-02-04, 02:06 AM
do you really have examples for rampant earwax?

Viletta Vadim
2010-02-06, 12:55 PM
When you get this nailed down, you should go back and figure out how to handle things other than ability score damage/drain... Sickening/Nauseating, Sleep, Paralysis, Blindness, Rampant Earwax, Fear Effects (see my extended signature for a link to a post with random examples of most of these).
Such effects as nausea, sleep, or paralysis, being save-or-lose/die become rather more difficult, particularly when the factor of time is included. The difference between one-round and one-minute sleep is considerably greater than the difference between one-minute and one-day sleep, after all. I would probably have to end up making durations greater than one round prohibitively expensive, since the way the math I'm using works makes it rather easier to raise DCs.

If I treated one-round paralysis as twenty points of ability damage... I'd probably have to rework DC rules, since that'd be a minimum DC of 30. But taking that, and using a DC of 20, with nothing fancy and no secondary effect, that comes out to 3200g. Crafting it yourself at a sixth of normal price, it comes out to 533.33g to make one dose yourself, which sits somewhere between the cost of a 3rd- and 4th-level spell scroll. Comparing that to the most similar spell, Hold Person, using the sorc/wiz version from a mage with 20 Int, that comes out to DC18 from a multi-round spell... it's in the proper general framework.

My bigger concern is in making crazy-high DC save-or-dies... though at the same time, the game is rocket tag, and the default injury poisons are pending an actual hit. with the same poison, ramping it up to DC45, sufficient to affect a titan with 90% effectiveness, making 'em coup de grace bait, it comes out to 16200 market, 2700 self-crafted, but at the level where you can afford to throw 2700g down the drain to slap a save-or-die on an arrow, you're likely expected to be able to utterly rape that titan...

Ponder, ponder.

DracoDei
2010-02-06, 05:41 PM
do you really have examples for rampant earwax?

Yeah... I was brainstorming, and after I came up with the idea of hormonally induced fear, I made the jump to "Excessive earwax production to give big penalties to Listen checks"... more than a bit special purpose, but also something that lets you get away with stuff BECAUSE nobody expects it.

EDIT: And HERE (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?p=7805080#post7805080) is a link...

Cute_Riolu
2010-02-06, 05:57 PM
Hmmn... This is a tad off topic, but trap-making rules suffer much the same as poisons do. Do you think you could work on them as well?

Baron Corm
2010-02-07, 12:50 PM
What's the cost to craft Stalker's Kiss? I'm assuming this ranger is about level... I don't know, 7... with that DC. 200 gp is still a lot per shot at that level, though if it's lower for making your own I could see it happening.

How would you deal with poisons that don't have two specific damage points, but deal their damage over time, like most real poisons do? Not that I'm an expert on poisons, but I think they do. And if you move that supposedly makes a poison go through your bloodstream faster.

A standard poison of this type could deal its secondary damage every round after the first (during which it deals its primary damage). If the creature takes only one standard or move action per round, secondary damage is dealt every minute. If the creatures takes no actions at all, secondary damage is dealt every 10 minutes. The poison would last for a total of 30 minutes. These durations could be changed if you pay different amounts of course.

A "standard" poison of this type would deal a minimum of 300 ability damage if they act every round... but that would only be a few damage in any type of normal combat. If they take no actions, it's 3 ability damage. Still, I suppose the base price would be set relatively high. It's more the type of poison that you shoot once at a target, and then run away and hope no one can heal them. Being difficult to heal could even be a price modifier. A standard deadly snake venom would likely deal closer to 10 ability damage after 30 minutes, if no actions are taken at all.

If this is something completely different from what you were trying to do, ignore me, I don't want to hijack the thread.

Viletta Vadim
2010-02-07, 01:31 PM
Hmmn... This is a tad off topic, but trap-making rules suffer much the same as poisons do. Do you think you could work on them as well?
A project for another time, perhaps. Traps are of less personal interest to me than poisons, and by necessity, traps would require a great deal more freedom and finesse to make balanced pricing, and I have little experience with the trap rules to date.

What's the cost to craft Stalker's Kiss? I'm assuming this ranger is about level... I don't know, 7... with that DC. 200 gp is still a lot per shot at that level, though if it's lower for making your own I could see it happening.
Standard rules for crafting poison puts it at a sixth of market price, so Stalker's Kiss would be 33g/dose if you were to make it yourself, which compares very favorably to a first-level spell scroll as expendables go. Though mind, Stalker's Kiss is fairly powerful for something you'd use on every single shot.

How would you deal with poisons that don't have two specific damage points, but deal their damage over time, like most real poisons do? Not that I'm an expert on poisons, but I think they do. And if you move that supposedly makes a poison go through your bloodstream faster.
Simple. I wouldn't. I'm more interested in altering pricing and increasing flexibility within the current system than in overhauling the system or creating poisons that are essentially a new system unto themselves.

I find the current system of abstraction based on sudden ability damage at various increments to be sufficient. Incorporating damage over time and accelerated effect based on physical activity becomes extremely complicated. However, you may want to take a look at Pathfinder's poison rules. There are a lot of problems with them from where I sit, but perhaps it's more along the lines of what you're looking for.

imp_fireball
2010-02-07, 05:49 PM
Personally, I'd go for a more 'guesstimation' approach. Anything with exponents starts to get too complicated for me.

That's why you bring a scientific calculator to the table.


Simple. I wouldn't. I'm more interested in altering pricing and increasing flexibility within the current system than in overhauling the system or creating poisons that are essentially a new system unto themselves.

For once, someone who actually wants to refine the system rather than ratify their own ego and create something completely new?

Thank god.

EDIT: I just had a wild idea - a creature that's a poison factory. Venom flows through its veins and actually keeps it alive (so it'd have both natural poison immunity to its own poison; and other poisons would actually heal it too if it made its fortitude save). It can choose to poison its enemies with a variety of different poisons.