Synergy between Toxic and Bite?

[Zephyr Runeglyph]

I was looking at the Toxic ability, and it mentions using toxic saliva to coat your weapon in poison. Now I'm wondering, if a race has the ability to produce toxins in its mouth and the ability to bite people, would/should it be able to poison people with its bite, even if it's a limited number of times per day as mentioned in the description?

I'm not sure if you can apply poison to natural attacks, but it's be kinda weird if the two abilities didn't mix in some way.

[draco_nite]

Zephyr Runeglyph wrote:

I was looking at the Toxic ability, and it mentions using toxic saliva to coat your weapon in poison. Now I'm wondering, if a race has the ability to produce toxins in its mouth and the ability to bite people, would/should it be able to poison people with its bite, even if it's a limited number of times per day as mentioned in the description?

I'm not sure if you can apply poison to natural attacks, but it's be kinda weird if the two abilities didn't mix in some way.

Even if Jason says that it would make the game completely unplayable, I'd still allow it. Since Toxic doesn't distinguish between natural and manmade weapons, I assume that it would let you envenom your natural weapons.

Also, a bit off-topic, but something funny I noticed with how the Toxic racial ability is written.

Playtest wrote:

A number of times per day equal to your Constitution

modifier (minimum 1/day), you can envenom a weapon
that you wield with your toxic saliva or blood (using blood
requires you to be injured when you use this ability).

In other words, this could be misinterpreted that you can envenom a weapon that you use your toxic saliva or blood to wield.

[GoldenOpal]

I’d say that would work.

A small nitpick/question on Toxic... Obviously a creature would be immune to its own poison, but what about others of that race? How would y’all rule in most cases?

[Bwang]

GoldenOpal wrote:

I’d say that would work.

A small nitpick/question on Toxic... Obviously a creature would be immune to its own poison, but what about others of that race? How would y’all rule in most cases?

A nice place to gradate! Could also include a Weakness of being susceptible to your own poison...

[qaplawjw]

GoldenOpal said wrote:

A small nitpick/question on Toxic... Obviously a creature would be immune to its own poison, but what about others of that race? How would y’all rule in most cases?

First Post!

Just some things I've learned from various reality TV shows and documentaries.

A creature with venomous saliva (or at least venom separate from the saliva, like a rattlesnake) would be immune to it because its stomach acids break down the venom. Similarly, a human could drink rattlesnake venom safely (and potentially develop a higher vulnerability to it, if their immune system is thereby trained to react to it like a normal beverage). But if a rattlesnake bites itself for some insane reason, and gets the venom directly into the bloodstream, it will not be immune.

So, I think that (unless someone with something like a biology degree says otherwise) that two venom-capable creatures should be capable of poisoning each other with their attacks, but also capable of kissing without poisoning each other, provided they are inclined to that sort of thing.

[Zephyr Runeglyph]

Well, since I've already made this perfectly good thread about the Toxic ability, I'm going to throw some more questions in there: does ammunition count as a weapon you're wielding? I think in most cases when you can add an effect to ammunition, it's explicitly mentioned as doing such, but it'd be kinda strange if it only worked on melee weapons.

Also should the toxin be able to be stored for short periods of time (maybe like 8-24 hours) for the handful of classes/archetypes who can mix and modify poisons? I don't think it would seriously unbalance the ability (as you would still have daily limits to worry about, and there likely wouldn't be much of a market for such a short-lived poison), and it would give a nice nod to classes that actively use poison.

[GoldenOpal]

Welcome to the madhouse qaplawjw...

Well Toxic allows you to poison a weapon with your spit or blood so it would be a bit strange if you could poison yourself by getting your own blood in your bloodstream.

I’m inclined to agree that intraracial poisoning is possible. I wasn’t so much thinking along the ‘can’t kiss each other’ angle since the poison requires injury to take effect, but that is an interesting thought. A race whose culture is influenced by the fact that mixing fluids with each other risks poisoning. That could be really cool actually.

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On Zephyr’s questions...

I don’t see why you couldn’t poison ammunition. Though the ‘Serpentine’ sorcerer bloodline ability called ‘Envenom’ does specifically say it must be a melee weapon, so that could also be the designers’ intention for Toxic.

I wouldn’t allow the poison to last for hours with the toxic racial feature as is, but a different feature worth more RP that allows that would be great. (Maybe this exists; I haven’t scoured the advanced or monstrous options yet.) Assuming you are not going to try and sell it, the benefit would be freeing up your swift action. I find that too cheesy for my taste without additional RP cost.

As is, it is a cool cinematic ability. I don’t like it when players’ mitigate the costs down to almost nothing. Plus you’d lose all the cinematics of coating your weapon with your blood midbattle. It would just be another thing you handwave over every morning. While the fighter dons her armor and the cleric prays, the rogue spits on some arrows... boring.