Poisoning ammunition

[ShampooBoy]

I have a question about rules in pathfinder 2e.

The specific rule in question is poison.
If you are going to use poison on ammunition for bows or crossbows will you poison one pice of ammunition or will you poison 10 for 1 hour as it works for silversheen?
Becuse as I have read the rules I can poison the bow like a melee weapon that then will be a poisond weapon until I hit an enemy.

[BellyBeard]

Lots of debate on this in other threads. The rules written seem to assume a melee attack with poison. Its clear one application of poison is for one attack however, not a stack of 10.

[HammerJack]

Yes, if you search threads that already exist about poison, you will see people saying "you poison the bow until one shot hits, because that's the RAW" and people saying "No, the poison goes on the arriw, because putting it on the bow makes no sense and is an obvious oversight." Inside of those, you'll find disagreement on the details of implementation, and attempts to find textual support. With luck, you may find this omission addressed in the errata document that's supposed to be released tomorrow.

You won't find anything suggesting a single dose of poison should apply to 10 arrows, though.

[Qaianna]

When poisoning an arrow, it makes a Fortitude save against the poison's DC or suffers ... oh, right.

I'd agree, the only reason to apply poison to a bow, crossbow, or sling is if you use a contact poison on your enemy's weapon. Which is kind'a a jerk move but what'cha gonna do.

If there's ever a poison effect rune, I can see that going on a weapon and magically poisoning ammo, but that's its own thing.

[Baarogue]

Yeah, wait for the errata. I anticipate they'll change the wording on what injury poisons can be applied on to read more like PF1, which roughly says "a weapon or piece of ammunition". I also hope they alter the wording on contact poison similarly to indicate they can be used as injury poisons.

[albadeon]

Errata v1.0 wrote:

Page 550: Under Method of Exposure, in the Injury section, change the first sentence to read “An injury poison is activated by applying it to a weapon or ammunition, and it affects the target of the first Strike made using the poisoned item.” This allows you to poison ammunition as well as weapons.

Along with the "using ammunition destroys it" that is also in the errata this still makes using poison less effective when used on ammo (the applied poison is destroyed on the first strike whether that hits or not, while on a melee weapon it stays on until the first hit).

I think an additional balancing step should be considered in the future (maybe use one dose to effectively poison 2(?) arrows) to compensate for that, but for now I'm happy with the clarification.