Poisons/Toxins

What I don't get are games that make poisons a damage over time effect.

Most poisons don't immediately cause noticeable damage. You may feel immediate weakening but only after a general period of time (anywhere from 2 to 30 minutes, depending on the poison and amount) do you suffer the actual, immediate effect. This can be paralysis, mass internal clotting, blood thinning or asphyxiation due to swelling.

Wouldn't it make sense for toxins to cause no damage until they triggered and then dealt a massive amount of damage in one go? Or otherwise apply some other sort of effect?

Make the toxins act wyrd

That's the problem with a "one size fits all" rule that trys to cover near instantaineous nerve agents, mid-term injested/injected poisons and long-term environmental effects using one in-game mechanism.
Unless you want to complicate things with adding homebrewed rules, just accept that it won't model everything realistically.

I guess the question is which is better overall, homebrewing new rules or just accepting the one rule for all.

Depends on the system. Some games already treat poison in a realistic way. Easy example: GURPS, though you can make it actually like"regular" RPG poison too if you so desire.
It's not appropriate in every system. I'd say it's below the resolution of something like D&D but YMMV.

Venoms usually start having an effect immediately (some will only affect, say, your hearth or your kidneys, and nee dot et there to do their thing, but the first few molecule should get there pretty fast, and then it's just a general slowdown as trickles there). But as you've pointed out, it doesn't start at full effect. Instead it's a gradual fading in as it keeps doing its thing, sometimes helped along by spreading around. The "threshold" effect that you want to turn into the effects suddenly manifesting is more matter of the gradual onset making it so it take s awhile for you to notice anything.

So if your venom does physical damage, DoT is the way to go. Especially as we take the gradual damage causing and compress it down from hours to a timespan meaningful in an RPG combat. Now whether this or that venom are suitably modelled through HP damage is of course a different question. While many viper venoms causes significant local tissue damage, far form all do, and it's extremely rare for the elapid venoms to do so.

Depends on the animal. Some snake venom acts as a blood thinner, where you'll bleed out in a slow but steady trickle. Others cause your blood to clot and kills you with an embolism or stroke.

Other animals have other toxins. The blue ringed octopus' venom paralyzes the diaphragm, which means you can't breath. Everything else works fine but your ability to breath. So if somebody was to give you mouth to mouth, you could survive.

Box jellyfish toxin typically shuts down the nervous system, resulting in full paralysis.

Bee stings, if in high quantities, kills by anaphylaxis.

Yes, different toxins affect different parts of the body in different ways. But they are all rather gradual in onset, due to their gradual spread throughout the body and the effective reaction rates involved not being those of high explosives. The anticoagulants spread through the blood stream and knock out this or that coagulation factor, gradually removing the blood's ability to coagulate, and with that you start having blood slowly leaking out here and there (sometimes helped along by another toxin in the venom attacking the blood vessel lining), gradually building up in the wrong places or being depleted form the right places. A coagulating venom on the other hand will also start a process, taking some time, where a lot of the blood clots up. This then starts secondary damaging processes (local loss of blood flow killing tissue, kidneys getting clogged up, and with depletion of prothrombin or other clotting factors you run into a general inability to coagulate and all that brings). Neurotoxins of all kinds don't move out to their assigned nerves, waiting for a signal to activate all at once, they simply bonds to whatever part of the nerve they are made to mate with when they get there during their spread throughout the body.

Singing an old tune here, but hp isn't meat points. That damage over time is the ticker to your character eventually succumbing to the effects of the poison.

I really wish we had a better term than "HP" to signify this.

yeh but even then there are a bunch of poisons that can't be properly expressed by damage over time

take something like say, the Amatoxins
first they act like regular ol food poisoning, nausea, diarrhea, vomiting etc, which goes away after a few hours
then after a few days you get catastrophic liver failure with no symptoms in between

"Combat Effectiveness"?
Once it reaches 0 you fall unconscious, which makes sense, and then dying rules could just be seperate

Out of morbid curiosity, what venom would kill the fastest? I remember reading the Lost World and to protect themselves they used Cone Snail venom shot from darts.

it doesn't just depend on the venom but how it's injected and in what doses the particular animal can inject them

take the gaboon viper, it's venom is fairly weak as far as vipers go, but it injects such stupidly large amounts of venom per bite it's still highly lethal

Whatever directly hits the organ, it damages the most.
If it fucks the lungs, and hits you near the lungs, then gg.
Muscle spasms? Well, you don't really do well if that is near to the heart. Otherwise its just a nuisance until it spreads too far.

And then you have bonus points, such as EVERYTHING IN THE KINGDOM OF LIFE, being toxic, because it gives them breathing space. If something for a animal exists, its toxic to something in the cycle of life.
Normal examples include that spit is poison to fungus and mold, to prevent infection.

I dunno, cyanide works in like 30 seconds.
I'm unsure if there's actually a cure or not.

Generally speaking the most fast acting types of venom tend to be neurotoxins and they usually make up a significant port of the venom cocktails used by the various most well known highly venomous animals. (also should be noted that venom is a fairly specific type of biological compound, many lethal creatures are poisonous but not venomous, an interesting case regarding this is that the puffer fish, several poison dart frogs and the blue ringed octopus utilize the same identical neurotoxin, but only the blue ringed octopus is venomous as it is capable of actively injecting the toxin. They're also relevant to your question because tetrodotoxin can kill in minutes and is lethal in extremely small quantities)
Many of the deadliest snakes use neurotoxins
Black Mambas are probably what you're looking for in them, death can set in as quickly as 15 minutes.
Taipans are another fun snake type, lethality within 30 minutes has been observed. Inland Taipans have the deadliest snake venom known to man and Coastal Taipans, while only 1/4th as toxic, still carry a near 100% mortality rate with untreated bites. A third member of that family was only recently discovered and is assumed to live up to it's sibling's potential.
Kraits are also notable in that even with treatment the best you can hope for is 50% survival rate.
Should be noted that the fastest killing snake is not venomous at all, large constrictors like the Anaconda or Burmese Python can reliably kill an adult human in under a minute.

Already mentioned before the blue ringed octopus is another species that can cause death within minutes. Bonus points for paralysis that sets on even faster but leaves the victim completely aware of it's surroundings.
Also a fun venom to use in fantasy settings is funnel-web venom as it is only lethal to primates, so it could be used by a non-primate sapient species to poison humans and possibly other standard fantasy races with very little danger to themselves.

there's treatment for cyanide poisoning but because of how fast it can work usually there's no real point
that said it's not in itself the most poisonous substance we know of, it just works incredibly fast.
the tetrodotoxin I mentioned in the previous post is 1200 times more poisonous and course there's always good ol' polonium with has a 1µg lethal dose. It just doesn't work quite as fast.

Two fun facts about box jellyfish venom.
One: The first noticeable symptom is described as "a sense of impending doom." Because Mother Nature wanted to make sure that you get the full experience even if you didn't notice being lightly brushed by the hair-thin invisible strands of the equally invisible jelly floating ten feet away.

Two: The first step in treating a box jellyfish sting is to restrain the victim before they can attempt to commit suicide. Which they will, without exception.

This is why poisoning makes you slower, not damage your hitpoints.

Poison may make you roll at a disadvatange, or make you move half your normal movement.

My poison never damages you unless its some special cause of turbo AIDS

This is somewhat how Fantasy Craft does poisons. Each poison has an incubation period (usually 1 minute or 1 hour, depending on the poison, though particularly fast-acting poisons have an incubation period of 1 round). You don't even roll your first save until one full incubation period has passed. If you fail, you suffer the effects for another incubation period, after which time you get another save (repeat until you successfully save). When you make a save, you kick the poison.

Effects range from a binary condition (blindness, paralysis, unconsciousness, etc.), an incremental detriment that mounts with each failed save (mainly attribute damage), or damage with each failed save. Characters with the Venom Master trick can skip the first incubation period of a poison they inflict with an attack, skipping right to the save vs effect, but even with Venom Master it still goes by the poison's incubation period past that initial exposure.

there's also the brazilian wandering spider which kills partially through priapism

Stonus toxins (like box jellyfish venom, platypus venom, and Stonefish venom) do one thing.

Hurt.

The venoms are almost never fatal. But they are intensely, incredibly painful. The man who got stung by a platypus said that it hurt worse than when he stepped on and detonated a landmine and survived. He would rather do so gain than be stung by a platypus again.

Box jellyfish venom is not deadly. But it is the single most painful venom ever developed by nature, and the suicidal tendencies are not because the venom is affecting your mind, but because it hurts ~that bad~.

>poison never causes damage
there's a very large variety of necrotic poisons out there that should most certainly be represented by meat point damage

pic related is the result of pissing off a giant centipede

really? I though the bullet ant had it beat by a significant margin

also, while not a venom, there's always the gimpy-gimpy who's poison is not only among the most painful toxins in the world, it persists for sometimes up to a god damn year

>Box jellyfish venom is not deadly
Not true. The venom also causes sharply elevated heart rate and blood pressure leading to cardiac arrest, and pulmonary edema. Around 30-40 people die each year due to box jelly stings.

Here's a fun fact about platypus venom: it binds to nerves throughout the body and takes an extremely long time to dislodge. The result is agonizing pain that cannot be suppressed by painkillers, even morphine, or through amputation, and can persist for up to a decade.

Yes, amputation. Not even lopping off the stung limb will stop the pain.

Bullet ants actually just bite and tear your flesh, they're not particularly poisonous.


Hemotoxins attack the flesh, acting as a digestive agent. The human body doesn't have a way to purge them well because of how complex the molecular structures are (or sometimes how simple they are). That's why most hemotoxins are easily survivable by their nature but often kill more often by secondary infection and destruction of tissue.

it's potentially lethal, but you have a decent survival rate compared to some other critters posted here
also the relatively high number of deaths is because there's a high number of people stung yearly because the damn things are tiny and see-through.
At least with say, a black mamba, if you find yourself within visual range of a snake even resembling it you can sprint in the other direction
course with a black mamba that might not work because the damn things are friggin fast for snakes but hey, at least they're not invisible

being one of the few venomous mammals out there it's still doing a damn fine job of keeping us relevant

>Only poison in breeding season
>Will stab each other
>Pain persists for months
>Electrolocation
>Fucking mammal eggs

King Cobras are the same. Not a very potent venom but fucking lots of it

king cobra venom is still decently harmful by itself

also there's a difference in how aggressive the critters are as well, people have stepped on gaboon vipers without being bit, they're about as chill as a snake can be