poisons...

[big teej]

it's a commonly held assumption that poisons suck.

as I understand it, this is because....

1) by the time you get your hands on a poison, the poison isn't going to have a good chance of harming things.

2) poisons are freaking expensive and you're not getting alotta bang for your buck.

3) you can poison yourself.


so, leaving item 3 alone for now. how can we change price and effect of a poison to be either a) more viable as written (channging the price) or a bigger bang for the buck (changing the effect)


thoughts?

could one not, possibly, simply raise the DC in accordance with a much higher HD on the part of the milked creature?

[Arundel]

3.5 is like the hill of Sisyphus. On one side is Truenamer. On the other side is Pun Pun. Every other concept is a boulder embedded somewhere in the hill. Some boulders are in "broken" territories, some are moderate. The problem comes in moving the boulders. They tend to roll in ways that are difficult to predict (see any innocent addition in a splatbook ever).

As they sit, poisons are a bit schizophrenic. They may or may not be evil, they have wildly varied effects, they have low saves, they damage inconsistently. Its a bit of a mess, even before ravages.

[TurtleKing]

How soon could you get an Eternal or just regular wand of Minor Creation. That wand could summon/make quite a bit of poison such as Black Lotus. Black Lotus also sells for a lot so you could easily make all that money back. So at what level could you get a normal wand and what level for an Eternal wand of Minor Creation. Depending on how soon might be a viable way of getting and using poisons.

Edit: Scratch that is there any magical item other than a staff that lets you "cast" Minor Creation? Or can it be "freestyle"?

[ericgrau]

There are old threads on this that you can search. What makes them strong is mostly action economy, in that you're not losing any attacks and something is bound to fail its save eventually, even on a low DC. Poisons remain effective until level 10ish and are affordable past level 5ish. So they're great to use within that range. Technically with good planning & coordination you can go a bit past level 10, but most parties don't bother with coordinated strikes. For general uncoordinated use drow poison is very cheap and very strong. Oh hi one of your rolls against my 4 attacks was low? You're out of the fight. You got lucky and made all your saves? Ok I'm just as effective as I would have been anyway. As for #3 you generally apply poison outside of fights when poisoning yourself doesn't matter and there's a cleric nearby.

[JaronK]

One big issue with poison is that while it's indeed far too costly for what it does in general, it's actually easily to make plenty free. Hidden Talent: Psionic Minor Creation gets you an hour of either Black Lotus Extract or Sinmaker's Surprise, and enough to use it through that time continuously. If you can cast Minor Creation or the Psionic version, same thing, only longer. And then it's hugely powerful.

So really, you need to first make it so that no poison is purely vegetable matter.

Then you need to make poisons work on lots of things (there's already positoxins for undead, so really there could be a poison for everything). And they need to vary in effectiveness and price so that it's worthwhile to use them in daily combat with cheap stuff where sometimes it'll really help, but so that you can also get that one special poison that can kill a god for the right price.

JaronK

[Thelion]

I myself never use poison as a PC, but as a DM I like to terrorize my players with some poisons, just to spice things up. Last week they encountered a dervish with Carrion Crawler Brain Juice on her scimitars. Even though they all have decent fortitude saves (DC 13), there's always someone who fails it, resulting in temporary paralysis, which just makes it a little more exciting.

[Thelion]

Doublepost