Poison

[cbarchuk]

I have an Assassin in my current campaign who successfully created some poison. My question is how many uses should I allow from that 1 vial of poison he's made? I assuming one...lol...since poison is basically instant death. Just wondering how others have ruled it. Right now I'm thinking of going with something like this:

If the poison is save or die than he gets one use per vial of poison. Or I could go with the optional poison rules where the target suffers 1d6 damage per round for 6 rounds. If I went with this option maybe allowing 3 uses per vial would be sufficient.

Any thoughts?

[Ironwolf]

Nobody has played an Assassin at our table yet, but here are my homebrewed poison rules for the class. I wanted scalable damage per level of the Assassin, rather than allowing 1st level Assassins to have an insta-death ability.

Poison: Given an hour of brew time and the
proper ingredients (costing 100 GP per dose per
damage level), the Assassin can create a
virulent poison. The poison can be applied to
edged weapons, or to a victim's food and drink
(done in secret with a successful Poison roll).
The poison must be introduced to a victim's
bloodstream to inflict damage.

At first level the Assassin's poison does 1d6 hp
damage, with an extra 1d6 at levels 3, 9, 12, 15,
and 18. The poison does 1d6 damage per round,
until the available d6's of poison are used or the
victim is dead.

A Saving Throw is allowed during the initial 1d6
hp loss and if successful, all damage done is for
half damage as the poison runs its course.

The Assassin can also make an antidote for the
poison. When given it stops all damage.

Both poison and antidote have a shelf life of a
number of days equal to the Assassin's level. A
dose of poison is used up during a successful
attack/application

[cbarchuk]

Thanks Ironwolf! Gotta a few questions:

With your rules once the Assassin makes a virulent poison how many uses does get from it? In other words if the poison is applied to say a dagger would the poison be used up?

Is the poison skill only rolled when applying the poison either to a weapon or to food?

The Assassin in my group is level 4. His poison damage would be 2d6. Say he applies the poison to a crossbow bolt and hits his target. From there he would roll 2d6 to see what is total damage is. Rolls a 10. Then he would roll a 1d6 to see how much damage is done per round until the full 10 points of damage is done. Is that correct?

[Dimirag]

I use/dose per successful roll would be my take.

There are lots of twists to the poison that you can make to control its aspect on an Assassin.

You can simply give a save bonus based on the Assassin's level, the lower the level, the greater the bonus...

You can give poisons a level, and let the assassin try to create poisons of equal or lesser level than his own (or a variant number), and then apply effects based on poison's level vs victim's level

Effects could be a save modifier like above or a specific effect like a death, unconsciousness, stun, daze progression (the more levels above the poison, the lesser the ill the victim suffers)