So if I poison a weapon and hit an NPC foe once with it. The poison has been used and a save vs poison applies.
If I poison a cup of wine the poison is used and triggers a save.
What if I poison a meal? Is it still assumed that the target of the poison only gets one does of poison regardless of how many poison olives they sit there and eat for the next hour?
I'm thinking about it from the stand point of running a game in which an npc is too heavily poisoned for the 7th - 8th level PCs to be able to do much about because they cant over come the degree to which he has been screwed over. Is there such a thing?
Also if a potion of cure light wounds had some sadist put a poison in it, are there any rules which suggest the poison would be neutralized due to the magic of the potion or is this a valid (although really freakin dirty) trick?
Any help or advice are gratefully accepted.
Poison Rules
Check below the poison table for the summarized poison rules.
What if I poison a meal? Is it still assumed that the target of the poison only gets one does of poison regardless of how many poison olives they sit there and eat for the next hour?
If every one of those poison olives were treated with separate doses of poison, then you could make an argument for poison stacking. This would however be very expensive, and probably out of the question for all but very wealthy organizations.
If we assume that the poison has an onset period of 10 minutes (most ingested poisons do), then you could potentially eat a ridiculous amount of poisoned olives before the first ability damage kicks in.Bear in mind that the poison might not taste good, though.
Also if a potion of cure light wounds had some sadist put a poison in it, are there any rules which suggest the poison would be neutralized due to the magic of the potion or is this a valid (although really freakin dirty) trick?Probably valid. But as said in the thread, there are no rules for it.
I'm thinking about it from the stand point of running a game in which an npc is too heavily poisoned for the 7th - 8th level PCs to be able to do much about because they cant over come the degree to which he has been screwed over. Is there such a thing?
lv 7th-8th level PCs (especially casters) should have some tricks up their sleeves, but if they don't have access to them it doesn't matter. Spells like Neutralize Poison would cure the npc instantly.
A Heal check + the alchemical item Antitoxin would give any npc a good chance of surviving poison (+9 to saves), so even mundane ways could save your npc.So if the PCs have the options, the npc should have a greater than 50% chance of surviving most poisons with their aid.
An alternative would be to interrupt the PCs from reaching the npc in time to help, but then you'll have to plan for the off-chance that they actually make it (dimension door and such) and saves the npc.
If you want to instantly kill the npc with poison, while still keeping player agency, there is a way.
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The PCs are walking down the main road of the city with their favorite npc nobleman 'Friedrich' . It's early afternoon. The sun is shining, the kids are playing, the merchants are bartering, and the drunkards are walking home. The city is alive.
Suddenly, a cloaked man appears as if from thin air directly behind Friedrich, with a hand on his back.
The pickpocket approaches using a scroll of Vanish, and uses his surprise round standard action to cast a scroll of Delay Poison. He will use the following round to steal Friedrich's money pouch and then try to escape. Since he was invisible/undetected while casting the spell, the PCs would have to use detect magic on Friedrich to notice something is wrong. But even then he would only have a weak Conjuration (Healing) aura. Easily attributed to any of the lesser magic items a nobleman would carry.
The PCs and Friedrich splits, and later meets up at a charity ball, with the PCs as Friedrich's guests.
He greets the PCs and jokingly says he's eager to eat, since he almost fired his chef over the garbage he ate for lunch.
At any dramatic moment now, the Delay Poison spell the pickpocket cast on him will end, and all the poison he had for lunch will trigger at the same time. An examination of his body will reveal that he had eaten around ten times the deadly dose of your poison of choice.
Beautiful!! Love it! For the great idea with Delay Poison.
Here is also a mechanic I tend to play with: Dead is sometimes "mostly dead". In other words sometimes getting hit with the full value of loosing health (hp, stats damage from poisons, a wraith's level drain, etc) don't leave the NPC "dead" but rather in a state which is so messed up they will die from their wounds even in the presence of the best medics.
Obviously clerics with higher level raise dead, restoration, etc can still reverse this sorta thing but your average bard or ranger with a good heal check would get to them only to discover that they are simply too far gone from their wounds.
This plays well with more "gritty" campaigns in that it drives home the point that even the PC's cant over come every situation. Of course had the PCs gotten to them during the damage phase instead of after the fact they could have done much more.
The most deadly poisons do CON damage, like wyvern poison. However, it isn't that good as a plot device, since it's so fast-acting: 1d4 CON per round for 6 rounds. If the NPC misses a few saves, it's game over in just a few rounds. Black lotus is even worse.
The most insidious poisons should be like the Mummy Rot disease, which is both a disease and a curse, requiring specific conditions to cure. Plus, it's slow-acting.
But whatever you inflict, sufficiently high-level magic can overcome it. So you have to look at the level of your PCs and the level of NPCs who might conceivably intervene.
Of course, if you're the DM, you have carte blanche to invent some uber-poison that behaves as you intend it to behave. Kind of like Mummy Rot, in that it requires very specific conditions to neutralize.
Just be careful to make its source nearly impossible to duplicate, otherwise your players will start using this uber-poison on their foes.
Definitely agree. For higher level campaigns I tend to swap poisons for curses for that "screwed over time" effect! LOL