Lonely Tylenol
2012-03-19, 02:43 AM
EDIT: After receiving an awesome suggestion that might not work based on MY lack of intelligence, I present the following basic information:
1) The party is level 4.
2) They have little gold (most of their wealth is in magic items, and I don't know how intent they are on selling them). I suspect the party member who is going to be committing these acts himself has about 600 gold (if the books are on the level).
3) These are the stated intentions of a single party member, who wishes to act behind the backs of his party members. (He's the evil member of the party who is actively trying to conceal the fact that he's evil.) As such, he wants these actions to be committed without the knowledge of the other party.
4) He also expects the party to attack the encampment in full-force in a few days' time, and wants to enact his plans before the party does so themselves.
Because of these facts, his plan, as it is now, needs to go off in a small window of time (enough to travel to the nearest large city about a few hours' travel away, use the rest of his money to buy the poisons, travel back and poison the lot of them before the party attacks directly, but not more) with mostly just the resources the PC has on hand (600 gp, plus a few masterwork items he may be able to sell, plus some magic items he definitely won't).
----------------
ORIGINAL POST:
So, in my campaign, two members of my group, while pursuing the leader of a strike team who cast invisibility and fled when combat turned sour, came across their encampment in a clearing by a creek, which I described, from their perspective, as being fenced off by a spiked wooden wall, with (from the perspective of the trees) about three dozen people, armed and unarmed, plus a series of tents (which they obviously couldn't see into). They elected to head back into the nearby town and alert them of the enemy encampment, so that they could make preparations to strike the encampment in full force, end session.
Here's the kicker:
One of the members in the party (hint: he's the evil one) wants to poison all of them. He's elected to slip an ingestion poison into the pot, so as to poison the whole lot of them in one fell swoop (or at least, those who eat the fish (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080339/quotes)) so that they don't even have to bother with the assault; they'll die more or less on their own. However, he's discouraged by the fact that, in his opinion, in order to poison a single pot with, say, 20 servings worth of stew, he'd need to put 20 doses in the poison (the equivalent of separating the pot out into individual servings and then poisoning each). I don't disagree that a single dose of poison would be diluted, somewhat, by being split along multiple people, but don't think that you would necessarily need 20 doses of a poison to affect 20 people (after, ingesting less than a full dose of poison is still ingesting poison).
The problem is, upon further inspection of the rules (and a number of searches to the effect of "3.5 d&d poison use rules", "3.5 d&d mass poisoning rules", "3.5 d&d poisoning multiple people", and so on ad nauseum), I can't seem to find any rules about poisoning multiple people, or splitting the doses of poison, or mass dosage at all!
Are there any rules for this? Does one dose applied to a 20-serving pot of stew affect everyone the same as a dose into a 1-serving bowl, or is it completely ineffective, or is there some more reasonable middle ground between the two, as per the rules?
Also, if there are no specifics, what's a reasonable houserule that I might use for this situation?
I was thinking something to the effect of the DC reducing by 2 for every power of 2 that the poison is spread out, representative of the dilution from a small dose into a larger serving.
For example, applying a dose of dark reaver powder (Ingestion DC18, 2d6 Con initial, 1d6 Con + 1d6 Str secondary, 300 gp, SRD) would be divided up as follows:
{table=head]
# of doses|# people affected|save DC
1|1|18
1|2|16
1|3-4|14
1|5-8|12
1|9-16|10
1|17-32|8
2|2|18
2|3-4|16
2|5-8|14
2|9-16|12
2|17-32|10
3|3|18
3|4-6|16
3|7-12|14
3|13-26|12[/table]
And so on.
What are your thoughts on this, Playground? Are there any rules for this, or more sensible methods that one can use?
1) The party is level 4.
2) They have little gold (most of their wealth is in magic items, and I don't know how intent they are on selling them). I suspect the party member who is going to be committing these acts himself has about 600 gold (if the books are on the level).
3) These are the stated intentions of a single party member, who wishes to act behind the backs of his party members. (He's the evil member of the party who is actively trying to conceal the fact that he's evil.) As such, he wants these actions to be committed without the knowledge of the other party.
4) He also expects the party to attack the encampment in full-force in a few days' time, and wants to enact his plans before the party does so themselves.
Because of these facts, his plan, as it is now, needs to go off in a small window of time (enough to travel to the nearest large city about a few hours' travel away, use the rest of his money to buy the poisons, travel back and poison the lot of them before the party attacks directly, but not more) with mostly just the resources the PC has on hand (600 gp, plus a few masterwork items he may be able to sell, plus some magic items he definitely won't).
----------------
ORIGINAL POST:
So, in my campaign, two members of my group, while pursuing the leader of a strike team who cast invisibility and fled when combat turned sour, came across their encampment in a clearing by a creek, which I described, from their perspective, as being fenced off by a spiked wooden wall, with (from the perspective of the trees) about three dozen people, armed and unarmed, plus a series of tents (which they obviously couldn't see into). They elected to head back into the nearby town and alert them of the enemy encampment, so that they could make preparations to strike the encampment in full force, end session.
Here's the kicker:
One of the members in the party (hint: he's the evil one) wants to poison all of them. He's elected to slip an ingestion poison into the pot, so as to poison the whole lot of them in one fell swoop (or at least, those who eat the fish (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080339/quotes)) so that they don't even have to bother with the assault; they'll die more or less on their own. However, he's discouraged by the fact that, in his opinion, in order to poison a single pot with, say, 20 servings worth of stew, he'd need to put 20 doses in the poison (the equivalent of separating the pot out into individual servings and then poisoning each). I don't disagree that a single dose of poison would be diluted, somewhat, by being split along multiple people, but don't think that you would necessarily need 20 doses of a poison to affect 20 people (after, ingesting less than a full dose of poison is still ingesting poison).
The problem is, upon further inspection of the rules (and a number of searches to the effect of "3.5 d&d poison use rules", "3.5 d&d mass poisoning rules", "3.5 d&d poisoning multiple people", and so on ad nauseum), I can't seem to find any rules about poisoning multiple people, or splitting the doses of poison, or mass dosage at all!
Are there any rules for this? Does one dose applied to a 20-serving pot of stew affect everyone the same as a dose into a 1-serving bowl, or is it completely ineffective, or is there some more reasonable middle ground between the two, as per the rules?
Also, if there are no specifics, what's a reasonable houserule that I might use for this situation?
I was thinking something to the effect of the DC reducing by 2 for every power of 2 that the poison is spread out, representative of the dilution from a small dose into a larger serving.
For example, applying a dose of dark reaver powder (Ingestion DC18, 2d6 Con initial, 1d6 Con + 1d6 Str secondary, 300 gp, SRD) would be divided up as follows:
{table=head]
# of doses|# people affected|save DC
1|1|18
1|2|16
1|3-4|14
1|5-8|12
1|9-16|10
1|17-32|8
2|2|18
2|3-4|16
2|5-8|14
2|9-16|12
2|17-32|10
3|3|18
3|4-6|16
3|7-12|14
3|13-26|12[/table]
And so on.
What are your thoughts on this, Playground? Are there any rules for this, or more sensible methods that one can use?