Question: Poison while unconscious / dying

[souldreamer]

G'evening! My group just started a new campaign and decided to use PF2. We figured we'd have a lot of questions and this is our first one.

Tonight, we faced off against maggot-like-things that had a mild poison. One of the PCs was bitten by one and brought to 0 (dying 1). She immediately failed her fort save and took 1 point of poison damage (dying 2). On her next turn, she failed her con check (dying 3) and then failed the fort save for the second round of poison for 1 damage (dying 4). So, she went from conscious to dead in 1 round. I had thought that the new dying rules were supposed to help keep players from dying so quickly, so I wanted to make sure that we were doing it correctly. Is that how it should have worked?

(To clarify, I'm not complaining, just making sure we didn't screw something up.)

[Edge93]

Hmm, that's interesting. I do believe that is correctly handled, I think it was just a really harsh corner case that resulted in a more rapid death than anything normal.

That is unfortunate but yeah, I think it's correct. Normally you'll have a couple of rounds to get someone healed/stable, but with poison in play it gets a bit more urgent.

Just to check though, did the player not have any hero points left? Because you get at least one per session and one application is to go from Dying to conscious at 1 HP. Not to say you shouldn't use them for their other applications but if you're about to bite it then it's definitely worth using one if you still have it.

And on an unrelated note, if your group does not have it already I recommend downloading and studying the errata for the Playtest. A great many changes have been made since the release of the Playtest and while it's a fair bit to get through the changes have made MANY improvements. (Dying rules have undergone notable revision since the Playtest release, but I'm not sure if any of it would have made a difference in this one situation. I think the only relevant change is that stabilization checks are now just a flat check [a d20 roll with no modifiers] instead of a Fort save.)

I'm assuming by new dying rules you mean the most recently errata'd ones but I wanted to check because you might have meant new as in PF2 dying rules instead of PF1 dying rules.

[souldreamer]

Thanks!

Yeah, we were using the errata, though I wouldn't swear that we had it all right (thus the query). And yes, we forgot about the hero points until later. I keep forgetting that you get a new one each session, because somewhere I read that you only get it if you earn it. For the most part, I like the new dying rules, but it did just seem weird to me that a minor poison that only did 1 point of damage killed the character way faster than it would have in the PF1 system. Oh, well, we can't have everything perfect! Thanks for the clarification. :)

[Malk_Content]

Did you also remember to move the character's initiative to immediately before the maggot that casued him to drop? That rule guarantees that every other player has a turn to try and help.

[Draco18s]

souldreamer wrote:

I keep forgetting that you get a new one each session, because somewhere I read that you only get it if you earn it.

You only get an *extra* (or two) if you earn it. The first one is free.

[Starfox]

A hero point would not help much in this situation. A hero point would have put have set her to 1 hp, which she would immediately take again from the poison. Poisons that deal Hp damage are very dangerous this way.

[Edge93]

Starfox wrote:

A hero point would not help much in this situation. A hero point would have put have set her to 1 hp, which she would immediately take again from the poison. Poisons that deal Hp damage are very dangerous this way.

It still would have reset the Dying and Wounded levels to 0, giving notably more time to recover.