The Problem with Poison

[n00bdragon]

Poison on Arelith is in a bad place.

I say that from a position of expertise. I have made every poison on the server, and more importantly I have used every poison on the server. I've written IG books about it, and I've probably spent an unreasonable amount of time learning, experimenting, and discussing everything there is to be said about poisons. This topic is the culmination of my meditations on where poison is at and the current issues it faces. I'm going to go over each poison specifically as well as poisons in general because there's a lot of things to unpack about this subject and no really simple blanket statements that apply 100% to everything.

NWN Default Poisons
Some of the things I say about these poisons might sound kind of harsh or mean. I don't want this to sound like an insult to the Arelith devs because these are all NWN default poisons (though some of them have received moderate buffs, detailed within) but for a lot of these I have to call a spade a spade: They suck. They suck HARD, and even with Arelith's minor adjustments to a few the majority of them are still not worth making or using.

Aranea Venom
The low DC means that anything tougher than the sorts of stuff level 3 players fight will only fail 5% of the time and even if they do the effect is pretty minimal in PvE, translating to an average of -2 to hit and damage. Against players you are slightly more likely to make them encumbered but the chances of making them succumb to the poison are almost nil. At least with monsters you can generally chop your way through and 1 in 20 hits will poison something, but against players you may not hit them 20 times before they die of HP loss. This poison's ingredients are far too difficult to acquire for how sad the effect of this poison is. It feels like something a level 3 character should be using but no level 3 could acquire the materials, create, or use it.

Arsenic
DC 13 Fort save or one (1) CON damage. Be still my heart. This poison is so awful for putting on weapons that I am convinced its only purpose was as a crafting component for other better poisons, but in that case why make it a poison at all? Keep in mind that once a creature is poisoned it cannot be poisoned again, meaning you only get one shot at applying the initial effect to a target and then you must wait an entire minute (10 rounds) before the secondary save removes the poison (whether it succeeds or fails), so that 1 CON damage is likely all you will ever see out of this.

Bebilith Venom
The best general use CON damage poison? It has a better DC than Arsenic I guess, but considering its made from monsters you find wandering around in the abyss the DC starts to look more than a little embarrassing. This is a mid-level character appropriate poison that requires high level characters to create.

Black Adder Venom
This poison is actual hot garbage. It literally does absolutely nothing for its initial effect. The only way to get anything out of this poison is to successfully poison someone with this DC 12 crap and then wait an entire minute for them to fail their save a second time, and then they suffer a pretty minor STR penalty. For how hard this is to make you'd think this could be something that someone might have a use for, but I struggle to think of a character of any level that would choose to use this. Who is this for?

Blade Bane Poison
This poison is really bad, but what really makes it a stinker is that it requires crafting another poison as an ingredient. This is like a cruel joke on poison makers: a poison that is so hard to make you figure it has to be good and then you make it and it does nothing.

Bloodroot
If Black Adder Venom is a poison in search of a user Bloodroot is a poison in search of a target. What target is this for? 1d3 WIS damage initially and 1d4 CON secondary, all packed behind a DC 12 saving throw? There's no appropriate target for this.

Blue Whinnis
This is the poison that got me interested in poisons. I saw this recipe and was like "wow, that's gotta be something cool". Here's a poison that requires a loot drop as an ingredient and Wolfsbane, a VERY rare plant used in no other crafting recipe. And what does this poison do on hit? 1 CON damage of course. DC 14. Stuff like this is the sort of thing you have to undertake a quest to make. Please devs, make that quest yield something meaningful.

Carrion Crawler Brain Juices
Unlike every poison discussed so far this poison is actually good. You want to know why? Because it doesn't do ability score damage. It applies a really powerful combat debuff (paralysis) on initial hit. The DC is garbage but since 1 in 20 hits the target will roll a 1 on the save that doesn't matter. The only downside is that the ingredients can only be acquired from one single area in the whole module.

Chaos Mist
Arelith has increased the DC on Chaos Mist from its NWN default by 10. Sadly, this is still not enough to make this poison usable. The ingredients are fairly difficult to acquire without a party of level 30 characters and the effects are so laughably forgettable that you might not even notice the target was poisoned.

Ettercap Venom
The DC is bad and the effect is just minimal stat damage. Pass.

Greenblood Oil
This is just terrible. The primary effect is useless. The secondary effect a minute later is also useless. The DC is awful. Not even low level characters want to use this.

Id Moss
Another poison that Arelith bumped the DC up by 10 on, the ingredients are easier to get than Chaos Mist so it has that going for it, but like Chaos Mist it just deals weak ability score damage to abilities that, at very best, might cause certain casters to forget a spell or two.

Large Scorpion Venom
Similar to Aranea Venom and terrible for most of the same reasons.

Malyss Root Paste
How to take valuable herbalism ingredients and make something worthless out of them. This poison doesn't do anything in any fight against anyone. It's useless.

Nitharit
Another one of those poisons with no initial effect at all. You have to poison them (DC 13) first and then wait an entire minute for them to make a second save (DC 18, strangely) to suffer any real harm.

Oil of Taggit
I wonder if there was some kind of competition to make the worst poison possible because this somehow edges out Blue Whinnis in being awful in so many ways that I am certain it is a cruel joke on the players. The poison has no initial effect at all, an embarrassingly low DC, and to top it all off it is easily far and away the hardest poison of all to make. Creating this poison takes a truly obnoxious amount of Fairy Dust, an item that can only be acquired from one particular area from one rarely spawning mob.

Sassonne Leaf Residue
On a successful poisoning Sassonne Leaf Residue deals hard damage to the target, 13 on average. Because of this and the fact that creatures fail the save roughly 5% of the time we can calculate that this is equivalent to an essence that deals 0.65 acid damage per hit on average with a cap of once per enemy. Yes, that does stack with essences, but man is that weak.

Striped Toadstool
Another one of the poisons that deals only a single point of ability score damage on its primary hit and notable only for having the lowest DC of all poisons: 11. Along with Greenblood Oil it's just totally useless, a threat to absolutely nothing and no one.

Ungol Dust
Yet another 1 ability score damage poison. Nothing to say about this trash.

As I finish up the default NWN poisons one cannot help but get the impression the developers of NWN were going for symmetry above all things by making sure there was an array of poisons that could affect each ability score starting with 1 damage and ramping up to things which could deal as much as a d6 or two. I think the idea was that poisons would just be something monsters used against players and they didn't want poisons to be something that would instantly ruin your day. A little pain to make sure you feared the snake's bite, but mostly an incentive to pack various remedies or plop your Snuggybear down to rest because of the secondary effect. But then someone had the idea for players to be able to put them all on their weapons and it was just kind of thrown on there, so the nerf-bat poisons meant for easy mode campaign play became tools for players and they just sort of kept their nerf-bat status. Because of this, any changes to these poisons need to be made extra carefully because many of them are probably used my monsters in the module. If they are tuned up it needs to be understood that the difficulty of those monsters will likewise be tuned up accordingly. That's not to say they can't be changed but just to do so with open eyes.

As for how that could best be done I leave it to the wisdom of the devs but the places I think the safest places (and "safe" is the operative word here) one could make adjustments would be to continue tuning the DCs up. Some poisons I already note have a substantially increased DC and that's a good start. Second would be tuning up all the poisons which deal ability score damage to have that ability score damage become far more crippling. Arelith has so many ways to cure ability score damage (or prevent it outright) that for STR and DEX damage poisons going ham on the ability score damage won't be too much of a setback for anyone. If your STR gets dumpstered you often can't move and your melee attacks become trash but you're not incapable of fixing yourself and moving on. DEX damage that drops you even to 3 is sometimes not even noticeable until you look at your AC, so this is very safe to buff damage against. CON is where things get a bit squirrely and you can see the original NWN devs hesitation on these poisons. CON loss affects players more and more severely the higher level they are to a point where at level 30 losing 6 CON means stripping 90hp off of you, which even if its temporary can get deadly in a hurry. For CON damage poison I think it's safer to focus on DCs and keep the stat damage low. Nothing feels less fun that being basically immune to poison from an enemy's random hits because your Fort is so high except that random hit where you roll a 1 and then lose so much CON you die on the spot. INT, WIS, and CHA poisons all have the unenviable position of being utterly pointless against most of the players (and monsters!) in the module while potentially being ruinous against a specific caster if tuned too much. Here, it wouldn't matter if you pushed the DC to 100, Joe the Fighter would simply not care about mental damage poisons. As far as he would be concerned that's 1 minute of further poison immunity for him. Likewise if you tuned the ability score damage up to 100d6, Joe the Fighter still doesn't care because NWN caps ability score damage by not letting players go below 3. Sadly there's no good solution for these besides ignoring them and focusing on other poisons or totally changing their effects into something with more general threat, which is sad because it takes away a unique effect that could have specialty applications in PvP. I like the idea of a poisoner choosing a poison to fit a target and picking out an INT damage poison against a wizard should be a strong choice, and in that context the poison should be strong enough to make the choice feel worthwhile, but I'm not sure if that can be accomplished while keeping everything fair feeling with the default poisons.

Arelith-Specific Poisons
So here's the thing about Arelith-specific poisons: All of them are currently bugged and their secondary effects do not proc. This is known. I know its being worked on. I'm not going to say much about that aspect in my review except that the jury is still out on if some of these are worth it because we still don't have half the picture. Well, sort of. If you haven't noticed by my almost total disregard for the secondary effect of poisons so far the initial effect and secondary effect of poisons are not created equal. The initial effect is something that even if the DC is 1 you can count on inflicting 5% of the time and because of how long it takes the secondary effect to apply and how rarely it will even do so (if the DC is bad) for the vast majority of poisons its already like they don't have a secondary effect beyond making your target immune to further initial poisonings for the rest of the fight. Anyway, I'm reviewing the Arelith-specific poisons as they are now with no secondary effects to describe where they sit as it is because some feedback is better than none and it's pretty obvious that they've been, if not designed, balanced around having no secondary effect.

Because the effects of these poisons are supposed to be FOIG (as much as I disagree with that I respect it) I will be pretty cagey with the exact effects of these poisons.

However, to my knowledge no enemy in the module uses these poisons so the developers can act more freely in the balance of these poisons as their use is only by players. I think there's a lot more opportunity to tune these up for PvE and particularly PvP uses.

Myconid Rot
This is a clever little poison with an extremely unique effect but the effect just doesn't match up with the materials used to make it. This feels like a nice and fun poison for mid level characters but by the time you reach a level where making this feels like something that can be undertaken in preparation for another action instead of being the big adventure itself the poison itself is pretty useless because of the low DC, and adding the effect that inflicts more time-delayed fort saves just doubles down on the core problem of poisons where targets tend to run out of HP long before they see the secondary save of a poison. Currently this inflicts a non-poison status condition but its still a default NWN one. A solution might be to make a new non-default status condition like has been done with the poisons and have Myconid Rot inflict it. Given that this poison has little application in PvE and is clearly mainly just for end-game PvP based on its ingredients the DC can be massively shifted upwards and the ongoing effect can be tuned up slightly. The damage can probably just be removed since its so inconsequentially small and if the DC is increased it may become too good as a sort of second essence, which I don't think is the best place for it.

Cave Terror
Like Carrion Crawler Brain Juices this is poison is one of the few generally useful poisons because it has a brutal initial effect. The DC is suitable for mid-level play and the ingredients are common enough to make it generally available to that audience. All in all this poison is a great example of what poisons should be. For high level play the DC is too low to come into play as much but even rolling for 1s its still useful. I think any sort of buff to this poison has a high chance to make it too strong in a lot of contexts so be careful with it.

Eyeblast
Like Cave Terror Eyeblast is another generally useful poison because of its good (and slightly longer lasting) effect and slightly higher DC. The downside to it is that its ingredients are noticeably more difficult to gather. I see people make this and use it when they happen to get the stuff for it or find the poison in loot drops but rarely does anyone set out to make this stuff in batches. Everything else I said about Cave Terror applies to this too.

Elemental Rime
This is a really strange poison because it does a ton of things that don't seem to have anything to do with each other and they all kind of trip over each other to make this awkward for anything but weird wombo combos with a blackguard and a sorcerer or something. My suggestion is to cut out the DEX damage to this poison, cut the fire vulnerability (due to perverse incentives with essences), and have it inflict steep saving throw penalties against fire or other elements. The saving throw penalties don't give much incentive to melee poisoners to use it on their own but it would make a nice combo piece with a caster in the party, which I think is the intention. Make sure the penalties are stiff so that anyone poisoned it almost guaranteed to fail their saves against any fire spells thrown at them. When secondary effects finally come you can probably stuff some huge elemental damage (10d10-ish?) on this with an explosion vfx or something.

Widow's Kiss
This poison is just in such a sad state. It's a very cool concept gutted by the lack of secondary effects for custom poisons. I don't feel good reviewing it because its purpose and use will so drastically change when secondary effects are added. The only thing I will say is that, obviously without having tried it yet, a minute is a long time to wait for that proposed effect. What's the imagined use case here? Poison the target and run away while you wait for the effect to apply? That just gives them ample opportunity to cure the poison once combat is over. Continue fighting them? One of you will probably die before the secondary effect procs.

To discuss what it currently does: The use this poison currently gets is an illustrated guide in why to be careful with CON damage and high DCs. Since this poison can, with certain class configurations, reach as high as DC 30, even the small amount of CON damage the initial effect applies can be downright deadly in PvP between high level characters.

Consumable Poisons
Sorry Arelith devs, these are just awful and disappointing in so many ways. The concept is amazing. I think we all love the fantasy of someone poisoning a drink and then having the target drinking it and dropping stone dead. That's great, but a mixture of buggy implementation, kid gloves DCs, and inconsequential effects makes every last one of these totally useless. Some of these problems can't be fixed, like the fact that people metagame that this water doesn't stack with that water (though the person who did that to me did eventually get banned for an unrelated activity so I guess karma is a thing). You can't fix people being tools but you have to recognize it's a thing. Some of these problems are coding related, like the fact that you can poison most food but currently the only drink you can poison is water. I know these issues are being worked on and I'm not intending for this space to be used to crab about them but I am stating them because they are problems that do currently exist and factor into the current state of poisons. Some of these problems are due to low DCs and weak effects and I think these can absolutely be addressed.

I think its curious that poisoning wells and bushes is enabled because it makes balancing these poisons MUCH more difficult. A poisoned drink or food is usually only aimed at a single target and requires much prep work and RP to put the scenario together. The DCs are too low and the effects too weak to work in this situation most of the time. However, poisoning a well requires almost no preparatory RP, only a lot of crafting time, and the potential targets could be (almost by definition are) anyone, from high level right down to level 3s hopping off the boat. How is it fair to level 3s if they drink from a creek and are slapped with a DC 50 fort save or die? It's not. So, consequently, it feels like the poisons have been balanced around the well-poisoning usage and it leaves the food-poisoning usage high and dry.

All the consumable poisons follow the same general rule. They all have roughly the same DC (about 20, plus or minus a few, with one exception) and all of them do nothing but inflict moderate damage to a single stat on their initial effect and then more severe damage to the same stat on their secondary effect (with one exception).

Illithid Serum
This is the INT damage poison. There's little to say about it except what's already been said above in multiple places. This is only dangerous to wizards and only in the sense that it might make them forget a few spells. Dramatically increasing the INT damage this does is probably safe. I don't think its unfair for any wizard succumbing to this to basically lose their ability to cast until cured, or maybe people can RP being turned into amnesiacs or something if their INT score drops enough.

Strychnine
This is the DEX damage poison. I cannot think of a single use for this. Remember again: this is a poison you must consume. You are almost certainly out of combat and this is going to hit a stat that is ONLY useful in combat. Maybe you can RP being paralyzed or something but why not make the poison actually paralyze you then?

Blighted Mandrake
It's the same as Illithid Serum except for CHA damage. Everything that I said about that can be said about this as well.

Concentrated Spider Venom
Unlike all the other edible poisons this one has a substantially higher DC and more potent effects AND it applies to a better stat: STR. If more of the edible poisons were like this one it would be a marked improvement, but even in this state I still don't consider it "worth it" outside of well poisoning because there are just so many ways to fix it outside of combat and the DC, while improved, is still not something high fort characters will worry about rendering all that preparation and RP pointless with a decent saving throw.

Deadly Nightshade
I feel like this is the poison everyone thinks of when they think of consumable poisons. The initial effect applies CON damage, quite a steep amount at that, and the secondary effect kills the consumer. The primary problem with this poison is the DC, which is so low because I think the devs are afraid it being used to poison wells (which is a valid concern) and kill lowbies, but in higher level settings it renders this a joke and asking someone to fail that twice is asking a lot.

Draft of the Daft
It's Illithid Serum and Blighted Mandrake for WIS.

Poisons in General
In general poisons suffer from a couple serious problems that make them poor choices in PvE or PvP contexts. First, as hinted at before, is the problem that if you have to attack something to apply a poison there's almost never a situation where you or the target will not run out of HP before that secondary save procs. The secondary effect of poisons is almost entirely an out-of-combat thing and that pretty much only matters to players when they themselves become poisoned by monsters that they killed, but which left something on them. But since Arelith's custom poisons aren't used by monsters, only players, that secondary angle becomes more complicated. Against monsters you have to make that secondary effect strong enough that it's worth poisoning a target and running away for an entire minute, or against players it's not even clear you CAN make that secondary effect impactful enough because poison is so easy to cure.

So how easy are poisons to cure? Poison cures itself after you pass or fail its secondary save, but there are additional ways that allow you to remove it before the secondary save applies. There are three ways to cure poison: Heal kits, the Neutralize Poison spell, and Greater Restoration. The main concern is the first two because literally everyone has them on hand at all times.

Heal Kits: Heal kits are a strange addition to NWN to patch up 3.e's lack of self healing options if you aren't a cleric because while it was designed to be a multiplayer game it had to be playable single player. Normally, I'm all for anything that reduces reliance on casters but heal kits are so good at that role that they actually invalidate caster healing instead (note all the clerics who would rather patch themselves with kits than cast a cure spell), and then to boot they also cure poison and disease... why wouldn't everyone be packing these all the time? The one saving grace (that turns out to not really be one) is that healing kits require a skill check to remove poison (and disease, but that's outside the scope of this topic), but out of combat you get to roll a free 20 and every healing kit has a minimum bonus of +1 on it, making any DC to remove below 23 absolutely inconsequential to anyone with a heal kit and one point in Heal. The initial effects linger, but as detailed above they are often fairly minor.

Neutralize Poison: The bad boy in this topic. This spell is just too good. Removing poison AND disease AND all of their negative effects might be one thing, but on a commonly available potion that can be bought at any temple for a couple hundred gold or from players for a fraction of that is just the bane of any poison user. To give you an idea of how cheap and common this is people keep stacks of this stuff around so they can keep moving when they run low on food/water/sleep etc. I don't know how to fix heal kits, because so much of their balancing is tied to their HP restoration effects which are essential to non-casters just to play the game, but fixing Neutralize Poison is something that I think can be easily done. If I had to take a stab at what might be a good solution I'd make Ironguts and Neutralize Poison allow a saving throw against the poison. Iron Guts with its +4. Neutralize Poison with something steep like +10 or +15. Though that alone won't fix poisons; it just lowers one of many barriers to them being viable.

Assassins and Blackguards
The next thing I want to talk about is these two classes which get to increase the DC of the poisons they use. Clearly there's some sort of recognition that the DCs on poisons are too low and the hope is that these two classes, as the primary users of poison because of their class features, can start to make use of them if they invest enough levels into them. There are a couple problems with this: First, it excludes anyone else, even those with the Use Poison feat (e.g. Goblins), from making use of poisons in a useful capacity. Second, even with 20 class levels in these prestige classes the DC bonus is not substantial enough to make most poisons useful at the levels where they are reasonable to manufacture. The base DCs of the poisons is simply too low. If the base DCs were increased this might become a much more substantial buff without any further modification, but the underlying problem that the DCs aren't scaling properly still remains. I think poison DC and possibly even effect amount should scale with the total level of the user. This way a level 3 character using Greenblood Oil (somehow) would find it effective in its current state at that level, but a level 30 also using Greenblood Oil might get a DC and effect more appropriate to that level of play. If it tickles your fancy you can give assassins and blackguards an additional bump on top of that or make it scale more harshly with their levels than with generic class levels.

I hope this feedback has been helpful and maybe illustrates a few of the challenges poisons face and adequately explains why there's no silver bullet fix here. If you've just scrolled to the bottom and are thinking "Jesus Christ, are you insane?" the answer is yes, I have probably put far more thought and research into this than is in any way adequate. That's just how I am.

[Diilicious]

Cant speak on the state of poisons as ive no interest in them, as for the curing sides though, would making neutralise poison take 6-12 turns to fully remove a poison be better? would seem a bit more realistic just reducing its affects over that time until its gone, the castable spell remove poison does not remove diseases as far as i have been able to test with those tiny annoying snakes in the swamp that give you both.

As for tampering with the healing kit singularity perhaps make the poison removal the same as above, and make the DC for removing diseases and poisons a third of the persons skill point allocation, OR make an entirely different set of healing kits for that specific circumstance, Affliction Treatment Kits or something.

[Petrifictus]

Water is not the only drink you can poison, as they work on milk too.

[TimeAdept]

Bravo on the effort and the thorough examinatino of every poison. I hope this goes somewhere.

... I also hope they consider letting poisons work on bludgeoning weapons, because there is absolutely 0 reason they wouldn't.

[CosmicOrderV]

*Applause*

Very comprehensive. I have to echo most of the sentiments here. Blunt weapons would be cool. DC's are low. Secondary effects take a long time to proc.

[Durvayas]

Generally speaking, the DCs are so laughably low, and cures so laughably easy to stockpile en masse, that I've never even considered what the secondary effect is when selecting a poison to attempt to use. Everything on arelith has such inflated saves they are useless for PvE for the most part, and nothing will ever survive long enough for the secondary effect to proc.

Poisoning wells is a neat concept, but in practice, its NEVER done, because one vial of poison= 1% chance of poisoning someone, and except for lowbies, everyone above lvl 5 is going to easily pass ANY poison that you've somehow managed to stockpile to that degree. Additionally, poisoning wells takes you out of stealth and hostiles all the NPCs around you. The only way to do it is if you happen to have ample invisibility handy. And on top of that a single casting of cure poison on the well fixes it instantly, the poison does not persist past resets either. By that point, you've used more than 20-30k worth of poisons. The best case scenario for poisoning a well is that someone gets sick, roleplays getting poisoned, and then some random cleric will show up and save the day by purifying the well; show's over, everyone go home.

All in all, poisoning wells is just not worth the effort to attempt. Ever. I've seen it done once in the entire time I've played the server.

Poisoning food is also laughable. I've seen multiple assassinations fail because someone might get poisoned, and immediately chugs an antidote or applies a kit before hostile can even be set and PvP engaged. If the DCs are going to be so pathetically low that someone needs to roll a 1, they need to all be disabling poisons that prevent immediate self healing(Paralysis, daze, confusion) though then we also have to take into account that the vast majority of people have -pray hotkeyed. Poisoning food is so bad, that the vast, vast, vast majority of the time I've seen it done, its done through OOC agreement of "heh, this plot could be cool". The mechanics are entirely bypassed because, frankly, you have to have several survival meters deep into the negatives to be even affected by a poison DC even if you wanted to be.

I'm 100% on board with Noobdragon's appraisal of poisons. In the nicest way of putting it, they're useless for everything except for ONE instance.

You can use them to great effect on Hijo the deep imaskari in the slave pits. After all my years on the server, thats the only thing I've found them useful for. One fight, one instance, and only because he has enough DR he'll actually survive long enough to get poisoned multiple times.

[Diilicious]

Doesnt the issue with this stem more from staying away from the situation where a single person can aflict many people without retribution. i.e. poisoning wells. sure its something you would do if you're a dastardly villain and trying to fight The Man. but it still lets you affect many more people than would otherwise be affecting you in return and if it was actually effective it would probably get to the point where the wells in cordor would all just probably be poisoned all of the time, or at least the one our front of the Tower would be.

A cleric being able to unpoison the well is a 1:1 situation isnt it? you poison the well, they clean the well, it shouldnt take more than 1 person to be able to undo the work of one person should it?

[TimeAdept]

Except it takes 1 person roughly 30 doses of poison where each individual dose is 1: removed at reset 2: must be crafted 3: turns the entire server hostile to you

in order to get to that theoretical 100%

...

the cleric walks up and casts remove poison and takes it back to 0 instantly.

there is a difference of investment here.

[Durvayas]

Doesnt the issue with this stem more from staying away from the situation where a single person can aflict many people without retribution. i.e. poisoning wells. sure its something you would do if you're a dastardly villain and trying to fight The Man. but it still lets you affect many more people than would otherwise be affecting you in return and if it was actually effective it would probably get to the point where the wells in cordor would all just probably be poisoned all of the time, or at least the one our front of the Tower would be.

You say this like the disease DC of the well is not, on its own, comparable to a best case scenario with poisoning a well. The fact is, that everyone is already carrying 20+ bottles of water. My own character carries a hundred. This, in itself, makes poisoning wells a poor return on investment for effort if you are trying to generate even a minute amount of RP.

The point is that in the effort to poison a well, you're already pouring hundreds of craft points and/or thousands of gold into a system that is so incredibly inefficient and ineffective that when someone discovers a poisoned well, their reaction is not:

"Oh no! Someone poisoned the well!!"

It is instead:

"Oh wow. Someone actually took the trouble to poison the well."

Except it takes 1 person roughly 30 doses of poison where each individual dose is 1: removed at reset 2: must be crafted 3: turns the entire server hostile to you

in order to get to that theoretical 100%

...

the cleric walks up and casts remove poison and takes it back to 0 instantly.

there is a difference of investment here.

Correction: Remember, 1 vial of poison == 1% chance of causing a DC roll

It takes 100 vials of poison to get to that theoretical 100%. I was using 30 in my original number as an example of the threshold where the investment simply becomes madness.

[ActionReplay]

We had some work done on poison but the dev who was working on it got busy with IRL stuff. Most of those poisons mentioned (Non- Arelith ones) are NWN vanilla still but the monster poisons that exist in game but not for players. I believe they are controlled by .2da editing for their DCs. I agree most of them are worthless, most poisons are and the crafting of certain poisons should be looked over.

The secondary effect not applying used to work but I think EE did something. I've been meaning to look this over and will bump it up so we can get this fixed. Perhaps we can add Herbalism rank to the DC of poisons say Rank / 5 gives you another +1 DC or something.

I'll read this more in-depth once I go over Poison again, but thanks for the feedback and clarification on the status of poisons. Also we were working on moving over consumable poisons to the new system so they could work on both weapons and wells, bushes, drinkables etc as we wanted to updated that as well.

[Diilicious]

I conceed that the investment is off, I dont really think that is in dispute though its obvious. but if you have all these poisons, would you make each one need an equal and opposite craftable antidote to make the investment equal? (If yes what doesnt that start to get a bit realistic and less fantasy)

how would you address the commitment value without making cleric spells impotent?

[TimeAdept]

simple, cleric spells cure 1 percent per 2 cleric levels, and can affect a well once per 24 hours. you will need multiple clerics and consistent help to combat a dedicated team of poisoners.

[n00bdragon]

We had some work done on poison but the dev who was working on it got busy with IRL stuff. Most of those poisons mentioned (Non- Arelith ones) are NWN vanilla still but the monster poisons that exist in game but not for players. I believe they are controlled by .2da editing for their DCs. I agree most of them are worthless, most poisons are and the crafting of certain poisons should be looked over.

The secondary effect not applying used to work but I think EE did something. I've been meaning to look this over and will bump it up so we can get this fixed. Perhaps we can add Herbalism rank to the DC of poisons say Rank / 5 gives you another +1 DC or something.

I'll read this more in-depth once I go over Poison again, but thanks for the feedback and clarification on the status of poisons. Also we were working on moving over consumable poisons to the new system so they could work on both weapons and wells, bushes, drinkables etc as we wanted to updated that as well.

It's difficult to reply to stuff like this because I realize you haven't had a chance to go through the post in depth but I just want to reiterate what might have gotten lost in the wall of text:

• The problem with poisons isn't just DCs (though DCs are an aspect of the problem in many situations). Many of the effects of default NWN poisons are not useful to players no matter what the DC. Ability score damage can be useful to players but not in the "wear a target down with multiple weak poisonings" method that monsters inflict on players. It needs to be immediate and it needs to be crippling.
• There is large difference in the potential use of poisons in PvE and PvP contexts. PvE tends to see players making attacks to many targets over the full duration of a poison's application, leading to multiple poisonings regardless of how low the DC is. The secondary effect also never comes up in PvE. PvP tends to see players making attacks against one target for a fraction of the poison's total duration. Whether the poison applies at all is HIGHLY DC dependent and if it does apply the secondary effect becomes a relevant property of the poison.
• Some poisons (detailed above which ones) are already very strong despite their low DC because they inflict a status condition on their initial effect. A higher DC on these poisons might become a problem, but they also don't feel very "poison-like" in the sense that you are just smacking people until they roll a 1.
• Consumable poisons suffer from a need to be balanced for extremely different applications, trying to satisfy both and ending up satisfying neither.

My suggestions would be as follows:

• Leave the default NWN poisons as they are in case anyone still wants them (nothing feels worse than taking stuff away, even if the stuff sucks) but perhaps drastically reduce the crafting requirements of some of them and clearly label them in the crafting menu as deprecated so as not to encourage people to invest time into them.
• Continue creating new poisons to fill the gaps. Ability score damage poisons that are immediately crippling to one or more stats is the most obvious choice but many more unique effects could be applied.
• All custom poisons should be altered to go absolutely ham with the secondary effects. Failing a primary save to a poison happens to everyone 5% of the time. Failing that secondary save means you have to basically willfully ignore the poison for an entire minute AND be unlucky. Secondary effects should mean a very bad day for you. I don't think anything up to and including death is at all unfair here.
• Disallow the current consumable poisons from poisoning wells and the like. Make a new poison(s) that can only be applied to wells and the like. Balance the two groups according to their individual uses.
• Poisons for drinks and food should do on the primary save what normal poisons do on the secondary, or possibly have the secondary save proc just one or two rounds later if possible instead of the normal ten.
• If possible some of the ways poison can be cured should be trimmed back, but adding new ways to deal with poison is good too. More options, less of which are absolute and immediate hard counters, is fun for everyone.

[Diilicious]

simple, cleric spells cure 1 percent per 2 cleric levels, and can affect a well once per 24 hours. you will need multiple clerics and consistent help to combat a dedicated team of poisoners.

Is that fun gameplay? for anyone involved?

It doesnt sound like fun gameplay, all it will yeild is people will stop drinking from fountains and use the ever abundant water bottles that you cant poison and can be carried in the hundred.

[Heroic Spirit]

simple, cleric spells cure 1 percent per 2 cleric levels, and can affect a well once per 24 hours. you will need multiple clerics and consistent help to combat a dedicated team of poisoners.

Is that fun gameplay? for anyone involved?

It doesnt sound like fun gameplay, all it will yeild is people will stop drinking from fountains and use the ever abundant water bottles that you cant poison and can be carried in the hundred.

Well, bottled water has to come from somewhere. I'm not sure how possible this is, but what if any purchased water had the same effects of the closest well?

I'm not sure how variables are handled on stackables, but I think it'd be a pretty dope concept

[Irongron]

I just wanted to say thanks for a really thorough feedback post (complete with suggestions)

I think poisons are in a far better place than they were a few years ago, but there is still a long way to go.

Poisons, and traps have long concerned me in NWN. They're both coded into the game, but neither really have the utility to go with it.

I could write at great length as to why I think this is, especially with traps, but I think the short version is to say that rather giving an advantage they needlessly slow things down.

I recall when I first played Arelith (I was informed recently I was the 17th person to join the server) I played a rogue, and would spend a lot of time laying traps, much to the chagrin of my fellow adventurers. Why? Because it was pointless. The time it takes to craft and place and sucessfully encourage an enemy to trigger it, is, quite frankly, far less efficient than simply rushing them.

Similarly going to the effort to poison an enemy that is likely going to explode in a shower of entrails within 3-10 seconds of combat is also kind of a waste. Those secondary effects will never trigger, and the primary ones may not even be noticable. Sure, there are a few cases where the combat is more demanding, such as when encountering bosses, but 90% of the time the combats do not last long enough to justify this kind of investment. It's a similar deal with the Taunt skill.

I recall speaking with Mithreas quite some years ago, where we were saying that combat would likely be more fun with less, but more durable enemies, offering the same XP reward. Combat that last long enough to do this kind of thing, or even manage a few lines of RP. That's not going to be the case on Arelith, but I'm sure we'll find a way to improve poisons by some other method.

[n00bdragon]

I recall speaking with Mithreas quite some years ago, where we were saying that combat would likely be more fun with less, but more durable enemies, offering the same XP reward. Combat that last long enough to do this kind of thing, or even manage a few lines of RP. That's not going to be the case on Arelith, but I'm sure we'll find a way to improve poisons by some other method.

[cries in D&D 4th Edition]

But in all seriousness, thank you for taking the time to look at this in detail and for understanding the trouble runs pretty deep into assumptions and realities of how the game is played. I feel much better about the future of this subsystem after seeing posts like this.

[Iceborn]

I just wanted to say thanks for a really thorough feedback post (complete with suggestions)

I think poisons are in a far better place than they were a few years ago, but there is still a long way to go.

Poisons, and traps have long concerned me in NWN. They're both coded into the game, but neither really have the utility to go with it.

I could write at great length as to why I think this is, especially with traps, but I think the short version is to say that rather giving an advantage they needlessly slow things down.

I recall when I first played Arelith (I was informed recently I was the 17th person to join the server) I played a rogue, and would spend a lot of time laying traps, much to the chagrin of my fellow adventurers. Why? Because it was pointless. The time it takes to craft and place and sucessfully encourage an enemy to trigger it, is, quite frankly, far less efficient than simply rushing them.

Similarly going to the effort to poison an enemy that is likely going to explode in a shower of entrails within 3-10 seconds of combat is also kind of a waste. Those secondary effects will never trigger, and the primary ones may not even be noticable. Sure, there are a few cases where the combat is more demanding, such as when encountering bosses, but 90% of the time the combats do not last long enough to justify this kind of investment. It's a similar deal with the Taunt skill.

I recall speaking with Mithreas quite some years ago, where we were saying that combat would likely be more fun with less, but more durable enemies, offering the same XP reward. Combat that last long enough to do this kind of thing, or even manage a few lines of RP. That's not going to be the case on Arelith, but I'm sure we'll find a way to improve poisons by some other method.

While it's hardly related to poisons, I'd like to see ONE new dungeon that applies this philosophy of "less quantity more quality", and we could see if it's enjoyable to deal with.