MoPoison
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Prelude
I see poison as an effect with the primary dramatic purpose of dealing damage over time. It also has the purpose of bypassing armor. Thirdly, it is exceptionally lethal to mortals. I believe that the poison rules, as presented in the core, are effective in creating a simple system for dealing damage which bypasses armor, making Stamina and Resistance more useful traits, and easily killing mortals, but I use a system which helps to simulate poison's damage over time and the versatility of the amount of damage poison can do. This system is more complex, however.
What follows is an explanation of the system with a view of the system in action, descriptions of the new poison stats with examples, example poisons, fixes for existant charms to fit the system, and optional rules for storytellers who may need to make more extensive use of poison or prefer a more realistic feel.
Poison
Poisons are non-living substances which are harmful to the body. For the purpose of this game, allergens, deadly chemicals, toxins delivered by poisonous animal, and similar things which can damage your bodily systems through contact or internalization use this system. Drugs can be handled with this system, but it's unwieldy. Living harmful agents such as disease or infection have their own system.
Poison System
Poisons are rated in 4 ways:
- Deadliness - How much damage the poison can do
- Potence - How strong the poisons other effects are
- Interval - How often the characters may roll to resist the effects
- Speed - How quickly the poison works through the system.
- *It should be noted that many poisons are much more than just this, and will possess unusual qualities which will provoke....interesting responses in the victim.
These replace the normal Success Damage, Difficulty, Failure Damage, Penalty, and Duration.
The poisoning proceedure for mortals and exalts works like this, mortals first:
- Tenjo the Heroic Mortal (Sta 4, Res 4, End 4) has been bitten by a fairly dangerous striped rattler (Spd 1, Int 20, Dea 8, Pen 4).
1. To determine whether the character rolls Sta + Res or Sta + End, consult the poison's speed. If the speed is 0, the character rolls Sta + End. Otherwise, he rolls Sta + Res.
- The striped rattler has a speed of 1, which is not 0, so Tenjo will roll Sta + Res.
2.The character immediately makes the above roll, applying wound penalties and modifiers which affect the strength of the character's body, but not general modifier for pain, distraction, etc. This roll is compared to the poison's Deadliness and Potence.
- Tenjo rolls his Sta + Res (8) immediately and gets 3 successes. This is 1 less than the poison's Pot, and 5 less than the poison's Dea.
3. If the number of successes is less than the Potence, then the character will take a penalty equal to the difference. This penalty occurs halfway into the interval. This acquired penalty is cumulative, and so can build up over intervals. However, this penalty will not normally increase beyond the poison's Potence. Once the Potence is reached, only a botch on the Resistance roll will increase the penalty for the character, and then only by 1. In that case, the penalty will reset to the poison's Potence halfway through the next interval.
- Tenjo's 3 successes missed the poison's Potence by 1, so halfway into the current interval, Tenjo will be incurring a -1 penalty to all actions from fever and weakness.
4. If the number of successes is less than the poison's Deadliness, then the character will take a level of unsoakable lethal damage. This damage occurs at the end of the interval.
- Tenjo's 3 successes are nowhere near the poison's deadliness of 8, so after 1 minute, he takes 1 unsoakable level of lethal damage.
5. After a number of turns equal to the poison's Interval, the current interval ends, and a new interval begins. The character rolls again, reapplying wound penalties, but not other penalties from the poison.
- After 20 rounds, or 1 minute, Tenjo rolls Sta(4) + Res(4) again, and gets a lucky 6 successes. Tenjo began taking a -1 penalty from the poison's Pot 10 rounds ago, but that penalty was not subtracted from the Sta + Res roll.
6. The roll again applies to the poison's Deadliness and Potence. Successes from the previous rolls carry over for determining whether the chracter has made enough successes to not take damage. Successes do not carry over for the purpose of determining whether the character takes penalties from the Potence.
- The poison's Pot is 4, and he rolled 6, so he will take no additional penalties this interval. The poison's Dea is 8. Tenjo's 6 successes would not normally make that DC, but they are added to the 3 successes he got last time, giving him a grand total of 9. Tenjo will take no damage this time.
7. If the accumulated successes equal or exceed the Deadliness, then the character is considered to have "Achieved the Deadliness." Only successes gained in excess of the Dealiness are carried over to the next roll.
- Tenjo's 9 successes exceed the poison's Dea of 8, so he has achieved the Dea. Only one success will carry over to the next roll for the purposes of determining whether he takes damage.
8. Once the character has achieved the Deadliness a number of times equal to the Speed of the poison, the Interval of the poison is multiplied by 60, effectively turning minutes into hours. After that, the roll becomes Sta + End. This is called "Extending the Duration." If the poison has a Speed of NA, then this doesn't ever happen, and if the Speed is 0, then the roll is already Sta + End, and the duration also stays.
- After 2 rolls, Tenjo has achieved the Dea of the poison a number of times equal to the Spd (1). The poison's Int now becomes 1200 (Spd 20 x 60), or 1 Hour. Although he's still in danger, he's earned some reprieve. If the poison's Spd had been 2, then he would have had to achieve the Deadliness 1 more time.
9. The poison continues to take effect for a number of intervals equal to the Deadliness, or until an antidote is administered. After that, the poison stops doing damage.
- The striped rattler has a Dea of 8, so it will do damage for 8 intervals. Tenjo has already put up with 2, so there are 6 to go. At 1 interval per hour, the poison should run its course in 6 hours.
10. If the poison ran its course, the character rolls Sta + End once per scene, applying wound penalties. These successes are subtracted from the penalty from the negative effects until they reach 0. If an antidote is delivered, penalties may fade much faster.
- Example: Little did we know, Tenjo is a skilled forager with the ancient medicinal wisdom of his shaman, and knows how to make the antidote. He just needs the heart of a mouse. So, he begins searching the desert for a mouse. He's already taking -1 from fever and fatigue after the first 2 interval. An hour later, he still hasn't found what he's looking for, and has to make another roll, this time Sta (4)+End (4), and gets only 2 successes. That misses the Pot by 2, so in a half-hour, his fever will increase from -1 to -3. To determine if Tenjo takes damage, the 2 successes are added to his remaining 1 success from the previous roll, netting 3. This is compared to the poison's Dea of 8 - not enough. In an hour, he takes another health level, bringing him down to his first -1 health level. He'll be taking a total -4 penalty to his Survival rolls. After another hour, Tenjo makes another roll, this time taking -1. But, he spends a willpower, and gets 5 successes. He takes no additional penalties from fever, and got all he needed to avoid taking damage. But he still hasn't found an antidote. 4 hours and 4 rolls later, the poison has run it's course. Tenjo survived the bite, taking 4 total levels of lethal damage. Then, he finds the mouse. Now, he's at -4 from fever, and -2 from the damage the poison has done to him. He rolls Sta + End -2, and gets 2 successes. Now he's only at -2 from fever. Luckily, he's still clever enough to bait and capture the mouse. He prepares the antidote and drinks it. The rest of his penalties fade at one/minute(because he took an antidote), leaving him at -2 from wounds.
Exalts
- Exalts and other magically fortified beings halve the Deadliness, rounded down, before making any rolls. The Penalty is usually unadjusted.
- Exalts apply their successes twice for the purpose of determining penalties they may take from the Potence.
- Exalts apply their successes twice for the purpose of determining how quickly their penalties fade after the poison has run its course.
- Further Example: A few months later, Tenjo is feeling much better, when the Avatar of Mice shows up at his door, and wants Tenjo's heart in trade. Oops. Tenjo likes his heart. A battle ensues in which Tenjo is injured but continues to fight on, using every improvised weapon in his cave. Luna hands him one frying pan that seems particularly effective. The Mouse Avatar flees. "Luna!" Tenjo is now Tenjo the Lunar. As luck would have it, though, an angry striped rattler does not respect Exalted, and bites ... again. This time, however, the Dea is only 4, and he counts successes twice on the roll to resist taking penalties. He manages to score 4 successes on his first roll, easily resisting any penalties, and taking no damage as well. Now, he rolls once an hour. He scores at least 2 successes every hour, so he takes no penalties from the poison, but one of his rolls failed to net the required 4 successes, so he takes a health level of lethal damage. The whole thing runs its course in about 3 hours. Tenjo smiles.
Poisons
A poison has 4 ratings which determine its effects, though the way these effects manifest can vary greatly from one poison to another. Also, some poisons do things which go outside the bounds of this system, particularly magical poisons. One poison might remove the target from fate, while another might make him impossible to refuse until he dies. These effects will be left to the poisons' descriptions.
What follows are descriptions of the 4 statistics which make up poisons, scales to help use and compare those statistics, and makeshift appendices for the different stats, detailing how they work.
Deadliness
Poisons range from inconveniencing to mortals to immediately deadly to most exalts. The amount of death that a poison delivers is a factor of its Deadliness score. The Deadliness of poisons can range from as low as 1 to as high as necessary. Here are how some deadlinesses tend to treat characters, and some possible poisonous examples.
Examples of Deadliness
1-2 - Nuisance to mortals. Exalts don't notice. Spoiled food or moderate food poisoning.
3-5 - Very unpleasant. Serious damage here. Exalts might take a level. Nasty allergies, dangerous plants, weakest animal poisons.
6-7 - Kills children. Very detrimental damage to even adults. Exalts are bothered. Weaker poisonous animals.
8-9 - Perhaps deadly to even strong men. Exalts, not so much. Normal poisonous snakes and that level are here.
10-11 - Deadly to man and beast. Very few survive. Exalts might hit -2. These animals are bright colors, or that's not fair.
12-13 - Mortals die without an antidote. Exalts could take as many as 5-6 levels. Really deadly stuff like coral snakes, doom wasps, etc.
14-15 - This is the sort of thing that tribesmen use to bring down elephants. You'll want magical healing. A sea snake perhaps?
16-17 - I hope you've got some ox-body. Very deadly.
18-19 - Wyld
20-21 - Abyssal
22-23 - Sidereal
24+ It just goes up and up.
Here's how it works
- The Deadliness is the DC of the Sta + Res or End roll which must be made to avoid taking poison damage for one interval.
- The Deadliness is also the number of Intervals that the poison will act.
- If the character does not get the required number of successes during one interval, then the successes carry over to the next.
- If he does, then then only extra successes achieved in excess of the Deadliness carry over.
- A failed rolled indicates that a character will take a health level of damage immediately before the next interval.
- A successful roll means that a character will take no damage this interval. This is called "achieving the Deadliness."
-Exalts-
- Exalts and other magically fortified beings treat the Deadliness as 1/2 (rounded down) for all purposes. Therefore,
- The difficulty to resist taking damage is at 1/2
- The poison only has 1/2 as many intervals
Potence
Potence is a measure of a poison's ability to mess you up. It is a penalty which is applied to rolls involving strength, coordination, or thinking as a whole. It may represent hallucination, fever, paralysis of the nervous system, drunkenness, or whatever. A poison's Potence is often around 1/2 its Deadliness, though this can vary wildly. Many poisons are designed specifically to incapacitate their opponents or cause vivid hallucinations. Other poisons have low Potence to disguise them or allow a person to function fairly well right up until their death. Judging how well a Potence will effect a character is straightforward but difficult, because a character's Sta, Res, and End can have a strong effect on whether or not the Potence affects him quickly, and to what degree. Here are some sample Potences:
Examples of Potence
0 - These poisons may attempt to be undetectable. The character may roll Per + Med or End to detect the poison when it does a health level of damage, and again for every successive level, gaining a die each time. They'll notice if they reach -1. Poison's like this are usually designed to be slow -acting, so that you're too far away when you realize that you're taking damage to retaliate.
1 - These poisons are annoying or enjoyable. These are the sort of poisons that people may consume for fun - on a regular basis.
2 - These poisons can pretty well incapacitate some people, and mulitple doses aren't reccommended. Strong fever or hallucinagens here.
3 - These are the worst that people will do to themselves, and a common Potence for poisons capable of doing irreparable harm.
4 - These poisons will incapacitate strong men. At this state, you're not doing much without a concentrated effort. Many neurotoxins.
5 - These poisons will eventually force people to stop travelling, make it difficult to move much, and confuse them into blabbering idiots.
6 - These poisons stop men in their tracks. They can quickly cause convulsions or total paralysis to men or exalts.
7 - These poisons are either quite strong or specially designed (successfully). This could be a tranquilizer.
8 - Elephant tranquilizer.
9 - This is really bad. Poisons like this may well have been designed to incapacitate exalts. Because they will.
10+ - Everything up here is the realm of magical or wyld poisons. Anything is possible, but this level is already incredibly awful.
Here's how it works
- The Potence is the difficulty of the Sta + Res or End roll which must be achieved to avoid taking a penalty from the poison's effects.
- Every success shy of the Potence is a -1 penalty until the poison wears off or is counteracted.
- Once a character's penalty has reached the Potence of the poison, he will take no more penalties unless he botches the roll, in which case the penalty goes up 1.
- If the penalty is greater than the Potence, the penalty returns to the maximum penalty of the poison's Potence halfway through the next interval.
- Once a poison has stopped dealing damage (after a number of intervals equal to its Deadliness), characters may roll Sta + End once a scene to fight off the penalties.
- Each success on one of these rolls reduces the penalty by 1.
-Exalts-
- Potence is unaffected by a character's Exalted or magical nature.
- However, successes on the Sta + Res or End roll are counted twice for such beings for the purposes of determining whether they take a penalty or how much of a penalty.
- Successes on the rolls to determine how quickly the penalties fade are doubled as well.
Interval and Speed
Interval and Speed measure how quickly a poison takes effect, does its businss, and stops. Interval is an amount of time measured in turns. Speed is a rating, from 0 to 5 or more, or NA. The two are closely connected, and will be described together. Sample intervals rate intervals, tranlate them into more usable units, and describe what kinds or poisons might have those intervals. Sample speeds describe what it means for a poison to be a certain speed. It is recommended that a bit of playtesting be used to get a feel for how quickly poison take effect and run their course for different characters if the players and storyteller are used to the canon rules.
Here's how Interval and Speed work
- The Interval is the amount of time between rolls to resist the poison.
- Characters make the rolls to reisit the poison at the beginning of every interval. The first interval starts immediately.
- Characters take penalties from the poison's potence in the middle of every interval.
- Characters take one level of unsoakable lethal damage every interval unless they achieve the Deadliness on their roll to resist the poison.
- Characters take damage from poison at the end of every interval, just before making the next roll.
- Unless the Speed of the poison is 0, or the duration is extended, the roll to resist the poison is Sta + Res. Otherwise it's Sta + End.
- The Speed is the number of times that the character must achieve the Deadliness to extend the duration.
- Extending the duration multiplies the Interval by 60, turning minutes into hours, and makes the roll to resist the poison Sta + End.
- If the Speed is NA, then the duration will not be extended, and the roll is always Sta + Res.
-Exalts-
- Being magical normally has no effect on a poison's Speed or Interval, though charms may still modify these qualities.
Examples of Interval
- These estimates are for relatively deadly poisons, and weaker poisons will run their course more quickly.
1 - 1 Turn - This poison takes effect every 3 seconds. It's probably magical, though it could probably just be really really fast-acting.
2 - 2 Turns - Same as 1, though just slightly more realistic. These are combat poisons, which are few and far between.
3 - 3 Turns - These poisons can take little more than an hour to run their course. Deadly poisons will kill within a minute.
5 - 15 Seconds - This Interval is reserved for poisons which can take people apart quickly, and be done just as quickly. 3 hours max.
10 - 30 Seconds - This is a normal Interval for a fast-acting poison. You'll start to feel the effects after just 15 seconds.
20 - 1 Minute - This is a common interval for poisons. Initial damage occurs every minute, but the poison may take hours to finish.
40 - 2 Minutes - This is another common interval that usually represents poisons which take up to a day to run their course.
60 - 3 Minutes - These poisons may still work quickly, but could also take over a day.
100 - 5 Minutes - It will take a few minutes to begin feeling the effects of this poison, and the effects may continue for even 2 days.
200 - 10 Minutes - These effects are often very drawn-out, lasting half a week or more. As often, these are simply drugs with a short span.
500+ 25+ Minutes - The purpose of these poisons is usually to have a finite durations measured in hours, but sometimes they are dangerous poisons which do their damage over days, weeks, or months.
1200 - 1 Hour | 2400 - 2 Hours |7200 - 6 Hours | 14200 - 12 Hours |etc.
Examples of Speed
0 - These poisons are always slow-acting. They have an extended duration, and rolls against them are always Sta + End
1 - These poisons are not particularly fast-acting, and are prone to extended damage and duration.
2 - These poisons are not easily dissuaded from their course, and are more likely to finish quickly.
3+ - These poisons are increasingly more likely to end, either through death, or duration, quickly
NA - These poisons are always fast-acting. They never have an extended duration, and rolls against them are always Sta + Res.
Errataish
Below are some example poisons which use this system and rules for using pre-existing charms to compliment Poisonforme.
- Morpheus/ExamplePoisonsForMe
Optional Rules
These are rules that I think will make this poison system better, but others may not. At least, they could be interesting considerations for other systems and games.
Poison Damage - Poison damage is separate from wound damage. They overlap, and do not stack. However, when a character takes a health level which makes the number of health levels that overlap even, then he takes an additional health level of the same type in his completely open health level. So, if a character has 3 levels of wounds, and takes 2 levels of poison, then the character has 3 levels of wounds and 3 levels of poison, but he's only taken 4 total health levels. His sheet would have two levels with both poison and wounds, one level with just wounds, and one level with just poison, in that order.
-Poison damage is not exactly the same as wound damage, just as lethal damage is not the same as bashing damage. Poison will kill you, and wounds do not help, but they do not necessarily stack perfectly. To keep people who are relatively lightly wounded from dying quickly from poison, this system separates the two. It's not difficult once you get the hang of it.
Dosage - One dose assumes as much as an appropriate animal uses to kill in one round or as much as you can put on the portion of a blade which you can bet will pass through someone. However, less poison is less deadly, and more poison is more deadly. Every time the amount of poison used is halved, the deadliness is reduced by 1. Every time it is doubled, the deadliness increases by 1. So, if you use a half-dose of striped rattler venom(Dea 8), the Deadliness is only 7. If you use a quarter-dose, it's 6. This can bring the Deadliness down to nothing. If you use 2 doses of rattler venom, the Dea is 9, 10 for 4, 11 for 8, 12 for 16. But you can't bring it up by more than 5. In addition, every two the Dea goes down, the Pot goes down 1. And every 2 the Dea goes up, the Pot goes up one.
-Dosage just makes sense, and this simple system seems to work pretty well.
Comments
Ok, cool,
but how do you get over poison? I mean, poisons have finite effective durations in a body (the ones that don't kill, anyway). People recover from rattle-snake bites with no ill effect for the rest of their lives.
~*~Braydz~*
Nice Mouse Avatar fight. :) I bet the God of Cats would've kicked Tenjo's ass regardless.
I think it would be helpful if you put some sort of real-life example under each step. This would help explain your real-life comparison reasoning, which I'm not sure I entirely follow (though I follow the system pretty well).
~ Shataina
Nicely done. Like I said, makes poison more than just the numbers attached to the end of the Infinitely Useful Tube. Makes 'em fun. Makes me want to see how the God of Cats would measure up against Night Caste Simon.
~Adam~
Since you're demanding comment on the front page of the wiki... why do you think these rules are necessary? I don't mean this in any aggressive way; it's just that it all seems unnecessarily complicated to me. - Quendalon
I agree. It seems to me that the effort/return ration here is dramatically too low for me to want to use these rules, and based on that I don't feel good commenting on, say, their consistency with other existing rules.
I do think that you could easily unify poisons and most diseases, based on this: Poisons strictly decline in concentration from the first encounter with them; diseases can rise. - willows
One thing I still don't understand; the poison damage overlap. I think you need to explain that (at least to me) again. When does a person take another level of damage from overlap?? How do you determine that?? The rest was complicated, but I think (especially with the cool example) you explained it well enough. It's really not even that complicated in the end -- if poison was a large and important part of the game, I could see using this as important. I don't think I'd use it for every rattle snake, though;P - CrownedSun
Thanks for all the comments. Addressing Quendalon and Willows, I understand. I've always gotten that comment, since I do a lot of complicated houserules. It's just the way I like to work things. I understand why other people like to keep the dice rolls as minimal as possible. I just never liked the fact that poison didn't even do damage over time, and I wanted to experiment to come up with my own system.
Thanks for the comments, CrownedSun. I'll try to explain the poison damage here, and modify my description in the system to make it more clear. Basically, poison damage and wound damage don't stack. You could do something like make a vertical slash for wounds and a horizontal slash for poison, and a cross would mean that a health level has both wounds and poison. What makes them stack at all is that when you take a health level of damage, and that makes the total number of health levels that have both types of damage (crosses in them) even, ie 2,4,6,42,etc, then you take another health level of that type of damage. And that health level causes you to lose a health level. It doesn't go into the nearest box with only wounds. It goes into the nearest open box.
So, if you had 3 health levels of damage from wounds, and you took 2 levels from poison, you would have 2 crosses, then one wound level, then one poison level, for a total of 4 levels. -- Morpheus
Very interesting. I've been contemplating writing a house rule for poison, to make it a little more realistic. This seems like overkill to me, but it will definitely influence what I do, if I do anything. --MF
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