A friend expressed his desire to play a poisoner in my game, so I wanted to see how they work and so on... Yeah, they don't work. So I thought I'd change that.
Without pasting up twelve pages of text and wasting precious time screenshotting the various tables, I'll just post a ling to my work here. First off, the Poisoner. Once I was halfway through with it, I realized that poisons are really clunky, unstandard, somewhat awkward to use, etc. So I redid Poisons as well.
After working on those, I saw that alchemy and non-caster crafting as a whole needed some help, so that is going to be my next goal. Craft (alchemy) will have four feats attached, divided among the main ways to practice alchemy. First off, there's Poisons. That one is done. My next project is Substances, which would include explosives, acids, glues, etc. After that is done, I want to work on Concoctions, which would include healing poultices and potions, buffs, permanent stat increases, etc. Finally, there would be Materials, which would focus on temporary and permanent transmutation of metals, weapons, things like that. Like the poisoner above, certain classes would get the requisite crafting feat and/or crafting mastery for free early in their development.
I want to create a solid, consistent system that is a valid alternative to the "magic does everything" system that we have now.
How do you like the poisoner and poisons so far? Do you have any advice for the rest of my goals?
I haven't read everything in detail, but I like it so far, and some of it I will use :)
I don't like the poisoner archetype that much, I just offer ninja alternate class (or alchemist or druid or a Poisoner feat). The extra details on poison catagories are interesting, but not in my flavor: higher crafting complexity should be modelled only in higher DCs. So I would stick with one catagory: poisons.
The cheap poisons have some issues IMO.(remember: I didn't read it in detail)
1d3 ability penalty is cheaper than 1 ability damage: to opponents, penalty or damage makes no difference, it's all still "just dying faster". And it matters only little to players out of combat. So the cheaper poisons are better than the more expensive ones - double the effect on average for less money. And in this game of outs price is highly dictated by power-level in combat.
I use some poison extraction rules to obtain poisons from creatures with such(frogs, snakes, schirs, dragons, whatever...)
Craft(alchemy) DC = 5+poison save DC for one dose, for every 5 above DC gives +1 dose, each dose requires DCxDC/10 gp in comsumables and a lab or poison kit for storing and preserving the poison.
----side note----
The idea behind the high prices of poisons in the system is to discourage players from not "being the heroes"; but I too like more options when playing/GMing, so I also modify the poison rules and use more and cheaper poisons. Another way of preventing this is making poisons slower and thereby less useful in round-to-round combat - in real world, many poisons take days (or weeks I guess) to kill a human, the rules on diseases are good for these types of poisons.
EDIT:
I also use a slow working "poison" that cures hp damage, for variation.
I do find that these poisons are a lot cheaper than the paizo poisons, and that may be a problem. Other wise looks great so far
Thanks for the feedback! Let me respond to some of your points.
Categorizing things makes it easier to apply certain mechanics down the road; this will be important for the rest of the alchemy tweak, and is also apparent now, with the poisoner, and how he gets better with first simple stuff, and then more and more complicated compounds.
Ability penalty is cheaper than damage or drain, yes. Its DC is also lower, and it is quite problematic to have it disappear as soon as the poison is cured.
I like the extraction rules, I think I'll use them in some form. Milking snakes, for example, screams Unstable Crafting to me, either that, or obtaining a % of base cost towards some poison. The alchemy rules will later include things like working in bulk, batches, with help, stuff like that.
I like the slower poisons, so I whipped up a modification option right now to make it possible. Good idea, that!
And I want the Poisons category to be only about poison: harmful effects. I toyed with the idea to include antidotes as well, but rejected that; that (and slow working regenerating stuff) belongs to the Concoctions category, which I will expand upon later.
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i would grant immunity to basic at 6th, refined at 12th, complex at 18th...
also, this could sound silly, but have you considered treating poisons like alchemical bombs? crafting rules are whats clunky. but without changing what you've already written, parellel to 'standard crafting' could be a flat-simple X number of 'special poisons' per day (which render inert after 24 hours and come from your friendly encrypted anarchist cookbook prepared every morning) that deals 1d6 damage per odd level or 1d4/1d6/1d8/1d10/1d12 @ 1st/5th/9th/13th/17th ability damage with method and delivery Y and frequency Z (all selected and prepared), with DCs 12/14/16 (basic/refined/complex) + INT or somesuch...
I don't like the idea of one feature overwriting another, so instead of flat immunity, a scaling resistance that adds goodies (swift and lasting poison talents) seems good to me. However, I am unhappy with the current wording on the ability, so I'll change it to be simpler and a tiny bit more powerful.
The alchemist is my next project, and he'll have something very neat and similar to the bombs to replace bombs and round up his kit somewhat. I didn't want to copy that mechanic onto the poisoner directly.
A friend expressed his desire to play a poisoner in my game, so I wanted to see how they work and so on... Yeah, they don't work. So I thought I'd change that.
Without pasting up twelve pages of text and wasting precious time screenshotting the various tables, I'll just post a ling to my work here. First off, the Poisoner. Once I was halfway through with it, I realized that poisons are really clunky, unstandard, somewhat awkward to use, etc. So I redid Poisons as well.After working on those, I saw that alchemy and non-caster crafting as a whole needed some help, so that is going to be my next goal. Craft (alchemy) will have four feats attached, divided among the main ways to practice alchemy. First off, there's Poisons. That one is done. My next project is Substances, which would include explosives, acids, glues, etc. After that is done, I want to work on Concoctions, which would include healing poultices and potions, buffs, permanent stat increases, etc. Finally, there would be Materials, which would focus on temporary and permanent transmutation of metals, weapons, things like that. Like the poisoner above, certain classes would get the requisite crafting feat and/or crafting mastery for free early in their development.
I want to create a solid, consistent system that is a valid alternative to the "magic does everything" system that we have now.How do you like the poisoner and poisons so far? Do you have any advice for the rest of my goals?
My group and I were talking about how the DC's are to low to make it worthwhile. One idea we have considered is to add your class level to the DC (Only if you have poison use. The bonus is levels from the time you get it). For Creatures with racial poison use they would use there race instead. Just an idea.
The Prices stay expensive but are worth using.
Add class level to DC Poison Use!? As in, the whole thing? That would pretty much break the game. Most DCs are 10 + 1/2 class level + pertinent ability. That DC is somewhat difficult to beat for a weak save, but not difficult to beat with a strong save. 10 (or up to 26) + class level? Unbeatable. It'd break the game.
"Reforging" and stacking poisons through multiple applications are more easily controlled, and reward proactive effort as well.
Well, that's at least how I see it.
Thanks to some feedback from other sources, I've modified the things a tiny bit.
I have buffed the poisoner's resistance ability a small bit, which massively improved the wording of it.
I buffed the Poison Use feature to remove self-infliction on attack rolls, making it slightly better.