On Poisoner's Tools, usage and table

[Humkin]

I found a post that dives deep into poison crafting with a homebrew table, which lists a variety of different poisons (can't post links from this account). Based on that system, I created one that is much more simplified and altered the parameters slightly.

Looking for opinions to the rules applied below:

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The Poisoner's Tools

- Can safely hold up to 8 vials.
- Crafted doses cannot be traded or sold.
- Crafted poisons can only be for the use of the player who originally created it.
- Proficiency allows you to handle and apply a poison without risk of exposing yourself to its effects.


Harvesting Poisons

- Poisons can be harvested from any creature that deals poison damage or from a plant (see below.)
- The player must first make a DC 15 Nature/Survival Check to see if they can extract 1 dose of poison or 2 doses from a natural 20 roll.
- On a failed attempt of 5 or more, the character is subjected to poison damage.
- If proficient in Poisoner's Tools, poison damage applies only on a critical fail roll.
- No damage is taken from a failed antidote extraction.


Harvesting from Monsters

- A monster that deals some type of poison damage can be harvested.
- The type of poison is based on the monster's write-up.


Harvesting from Nature

- In any environment that can potentially support vegetation, the player can check the surroundings for poisonous plants.
- This check takes at least an hour.
- The player must make a Nature/Survival Check to see if they discover any plants. The check is based on the type of environment starting at 15 for jungle/forest and up to 25 for wasteland/mountain.
- On a successful discovery, the player rolls a 1d100 and finds a plant from the Table. They can then attempt to harvest the poison.


Nature Harvesting Table

1-10 ---------- Jewel Weed ------------ Antidote
11-70 --------- Hemlock Leaf --------- Injury (1d4)
71-94 --------- Morning Glory -------- Injury (1d6)
95-100 ------- Nightshade ------------ Injury (1d8)

[Slayn82]

I think those rules seem very balanced for gameplay, but would add a bit more rules for sake of both entertainment and realism.

Most poisons obtained from plants should work by being ingested, and the few vegetal poisons who deal damage by injury need moderately difficult Nature Knowledge checks (Curare production, for instance, was usually the responsibility of the oldest person in the tribe, among South American natives, due to high risk of self poisoning).

You should also be able to create basic poisons using alchemy. Their effects should be better, and they should last longer after being prepared, but they also should be on the expensive side and easier to detect.

Poisons obtained from creatures by raw survival checks should be the one with lowest shelf life, and bigger risk of accidental poisoning on handling. The difficulty of harvesting should be proportional to the challenge rating of the creature, with any failure causing self poisoning.

On the other hand, some strong poisons could come from weaker creatures, somewhat rare, requiring some time to search, needing moderately difficult survival checks to find, and yield low amounts of doses (like those extremely poisonous mini frogs, each offers 1 dose, but you take a while to find each one). Anyway, poisons harvested by survival skills from animals should be short lived, and either be used soon or be stored to be used as ingredients on crafting later, to avoid stockpiles.

Then, if you still wanted to add something else, we could have more complicated poison crafting, available only to Alchemy or Nature specialists. In it, you can use different poisonous components to create a stronger and exotic poison.

It would be pretty much an alternative and more expensive method to create a single use scroll of some spells, with constitution saves and the damage type, when applicable, being changed to poison. You could have effects like confusion, paralysis and fear, and the delivery could be by injury, ingestion or a 5" radius cloud of gas released from a flask you can throw (more expensive).