Multiple doses of poison?

[SilverLeaf167]

Don't know if this was obvious to everyone else, but I somehow only thought of it recently.

I always thought the classic plot of "poisoning someone's drink" was highly unreliable in D&D, because even if nobody notices, there's always a chance of the target simply making their save, and few poisons are guaranteed kills anyway.

However, is there some mechanical reason you couldn't just stuff more poison into someone's drink, forcing them to make several saves at once or suffer the stacking consequences? I know you can't stack Injury poison on one attack, but how about Ingested, Touch or Inhaled?

I'm not too worried as a DM, since Detect Poison is a cantrip, I have little interest in pulling a "Gotcha!" on the players (unless they bring it upon themselves) and don't really mind if they want to attempt assassinating someone. Just curious for future reference.

As a side note, is there a way for the assassin to delay the poison's first onset? By, say, a minute?

[Zanos]

I'm not sure if you can stack multiple poisons, but the only poisons that can actually cause death are ones that either specifically list it as an intial/secondary effect, or constitution damage poison. No amount of other stat damage will actually kill. Dark Reaver Powder has a decent chance of killing a normal person in a single dose, since it's 2d6 con intial and then 1d6 con secondary, which averages to 10.5, plus the save DC is rather high.

Poisons stack, but not in any way that's particularly interesting. If you drink a glass with 5 doses of ingested poison, you have to make 5 intial saves and 5 secondary saves.

[SilverLeaf167]

I'm not sure if you can stack multiple poisons, but the only poisons that can actually cause death are ones that either specifically list it as an intial/secondary effect, or constitution damage poison. No amount of other stat damage will actually kill. Dark Reaver Powder has a decent chance of killing a normal person in a single dose, since it's 2d6 con intial and then 1d6 con secondary, which averages to 10.5, plus the save DC is rather high.

Poisons stack, but not in any way that's particularly interesting. If you drink a glass with 5 doses of ingested poison, you have to make 5 intial saves and 5 secondary saves.

Well, when you're going through the effort of poisoning an important target, an average person dying from average damage on an average save may not be sufficient. :smalltongue: After all, someone with just +3 to their Fort save already has a 25% chance of flat-out ignoring the poison, never mind the risk of rolling low damage, and a botched assassination will make all future attempts harder.

The effects in this case don't need to be "interesting", just reliable.

[Zombimode]

However, is there some mechanical reason you couldn't just stuff more poison into someone's drink, forcing them to make several saves at once or suffer the stacking consequences? I know you can't stack Injury poison on one attack, but how about Ingested, Touch or Inhaled?

I agree with that and. If a Spider bites a target two times, the target can get two doses of poison. If someone Drinks two doses of poison at once, I see no reason why only one of those should apply.
It makes ingested poisons actually a useful assisination tool, which is how it should be anyway.

[Inevitability]

To balance it out (aside from the increased gold cost), I'd rule that the higher the poison concentration, the easier it's to detect. Not too big a deal as players have access to illusions (and Prestidigitation) anyway, but a reasonable way to justify NPC's using only a single dose in their poisoning attempt.

[SilverLeaf167]

To balance it out (aside from the increased gold cost), I'd rule that the higher the poison concentration, the easier it's to detect. Not too big a deal as players have access to illusions (and Prestidigitation) anyway, but a reasonable way to justify NPC's using only a single dose in their poisoning attempt.

Good point. I didn't seem to find any mechanics for non-magical poison detection through sight, smell or taste (as a last resort, hopefully). Do they exist, or should I just make something up (which won't take long)? More subtle poisons would be more expensive, but not necessarily vice versa.