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Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Poison Effects

I talked a little bit about the Judges Guild poisons and how I would change them to get away from using a table. However, the JG poisons also have additional effects on a failed save, beyond mere damage. The three main effects are:

  1. Illness: Unconscious most of the time, limited movement the rest of the time. There's no guideline here for determining consciousness, so I'd require a 5+ on a 1d6 roll to remain conscious for 1d6 rounds.
  2. Paralyzed: Conscious and unable to act. I think I'd ruled that the character can still speak, with difficulty. Otherwise, there'd be little practical difference.
  3. Coma: Unconscious and unable to act.

There are also two minor effects, Half Move and Half Action, that only occur in a couple places.

I tried to work out some kind of pattern in the table, but then I realized that, aside from the first three poisons listed, we're dealing with fantasy poisons, so we could just reassign the poison effects in a better pattern to eliminate the table completely. Divide the HD of the creature by 3 to get a quotient and remainder. Quotient 0 means the poison only affects man-sized creatures or smaller. If the quotient is 1 or higher, the remainder tells us which effect the poison has (1 = Ill, 2 = Paralyzed, 0 = Coma.) Add the quotient and the remainder and subtract 2 to find the effect on ogre-sized creatures; subtract 3 to find the effect on dragon-sized creatures.

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