Poison Making

Several comments have come into staff in regards to the making of poisons. IIRC there is no actual system for this so if folks want to make their own, we'll need a system in place for checks and balances.

Thoughts on this?

One suggestion was to use the same system as the making of explosives.

That sounds reasonable. The more rules you come up with, the more people are going to try to break them. Leave it simple.

Page 114 of The Armory details creating explosives, the most overpowered and dangerous weapons in the game. I'd recommend any poison manufacturing be based on the same ideas.

Creating Homemade Explosives
Dice Pool: Intelligence + Science + Equipment
Action: Extended (each roll represents one hour of work).

By mixing the right ingredients together, anyone can create an explosive. Whether or not the maker will live through the process is another story . . . .

Roll Results

Dramatic Failure: Your character is overwhelmed by toxic fumes created from the chemicals. The fumes inflict 5 (B) damage.

Failure: Your character fails to create an explosive.

Success: Your character successfully creates an explosive. One success creates an explosive with a damage of 1
(L) and primary blast area of five yards. Each additional success can be used to either to increase the damage of
the explosive, increase the primary blast area (in five-yard increments) or create one additional quantity of the same explosive (in order to create more than one bomb).

Suggested Equipment: Military demolition manuals (+2), Chemistry textbooks (+1), High-quality chemicals
(+2), Internet access (+1), Quiet work space (+1)

Suggested Penalties: Incorrect or misleading reference material (–3), Poor-quality chemicals (–2), Lack of reference material (–1), Distractions (–1)

Example: Mad Dog is preparing for the attack on a vampire’s haven. Mad Dog’s job is to create enough explosive to blast through the vault wall. He begins by using the Internet (+1) to download a copy an Army field guide (+2). Working in his garage so no one will bother him (+1), he lays out what ingredients he can find (–2; he had to get by with what he had, not exactly what the book listed, but they’ll do). Mad Dog’s Intelligence is 3, and his Science is 5 with a total bonus of +2. His player rolls a 7, 6, 5, 7, 8, 9, 8, 4, 2, 8; four successes. Mad Dog decides to create enough explosive material for two uses, each with 2 (L) damage and a blast area of 10 yards.

You didn't need to recreate the entire posting on explosives. How would you see this system being rebuilt to work with poisons and such?

That is up to Staff, and what level of choices and details it wants with poison making. The simplest would be to figure out a difficulty of successfully making the listened poisons and drugs, and allow that if you roll that your batch comes out fine.

Now if you want something more complex, like building a poison's toxicity level, how many rolls it makes before it goes inert, or how many resistance successes you need to stop it, and whether its lethal, a paralytic, a hemotoxin, a nasty cocktail. and how fast acting it is, how easily counteracted it is, that's another story. I would still get rid of the extended roll process, like crafting, same reasons. If you want more successes to work with, again, say the process always gets N number rolls, I usually suggest 3 because on average you'll get as many successes as your dice pool has dice, so you can gauge the value of stat, skill, equipment, and materials.

(I don't have Armory, so I admit I appreciated the information.)

Don't get rid of the extended roll process - time is important in crafting anything. I think the same basic process would work, just vary:

First success: you have a single dose of Toxicity 1 poison, with one damage cycle. The poison can be delivered by one of the possible methods, determined before creating the poison.

Each subsequent success allows you to:

1. Add a level of Toxicity.
2. Add a damage cycle. (Default is each day for the number of successes that is added to this area.)
3. Intensify a damage cycle (Add one success, the cycle becomes 'once per hour', add another and it is 'once per turn'.)
4. Add a delivery method (i.e. now the toxin can be ingested AND injected and still be useful.)
5. Add a penalty to damage resistance. (Each success added here penalizes the Stamina+Resolve roll by one die.)
6. Adjust Damage (A single success devoted here would let you change the damage done by the poison from Lethal to Bashing, allowing you to create knockout drugs.)

So, if I get 5 successes on my extended roll, then I could make a Toxicity 4 poison which damages someone 8 L over two days to slip into someone's tea, or I could coat my weapon with a Toxicity 2 poison which delivers 4 L over 2 turns.

Seems reasonable, at first glance?

At a glance, yes. The only problem I see is with the poison rules per RAW, not your system.

I see a small issue in that this system could be abused to create something that could kill someone from a single exposure. Doing a few extended=6 6 rolls, I'm getting 10-15 (with the odd roll of five) successes. That's a level 10-15 toxicity (meaning you get that as a penalty to your Stam + Comp roll, then take that much damage if you fail). Figure an average of 8 health, a failed roll with a 15 toxicity poison puts them at 7/8 agg. Next turn the toxin is reintroduced, they fail because of the wound penalty, and die. That's a bit too overpowered.

And yes, the same could be said for EoD but we don't have a lot of people whom make explosives. Last person to have a job in to craft them was my own plot mule which died March 25th.

Honestly, though, if one character /really/ wants to kill another character without giving them any chance to fight back, there are about five dozen ways to do that in the system that are easier than crafting an uber-poison to kill someone. Half the PCs walking around on the grid could tear the other half apart without even breathing hard. (5/6th of them could tear Thomas apart without trying hard.) I think the fact that we have not yet descended into a frothing mass of PK and torture speaks to the general responsibility of the player base, so perhaps we should be given the benefit of the doubt?

Or, if you like, the easiest way to deal with that would be to say that damage taken from poison can never actually kill a character, for dramatic and narrative reasons. Put them at death's door so that it's easy to strangle them or cut their throats, fine, but it can never just outright kill them, only weaken.

Personally, though, I think that we've mostly proved mature enough that no one is actually going to try and poison the Atrium water supply, or something. And if someone /is/ an OOC dick, then call them on being a dick.

I would say that you are only going with the toxins described in the books, which provide ranges. That would be your guideline. And time to create is not equal with extended rolls. No one says a streetwise check takes 3 seconds, it can be the same for any one roll, ST's discretion with a reasonable minimum.