Poisons in D&D | Toxic Portrayals | Wandering DMs S8 E29

So poisons.

I think that this was suggested by one of our viewers maybe at the beginning of the summer.

And again, it's interesting because I tend not to think about it.

And this was, for me, an opportunity in the last couple of days to dig back into early D&D.

Like, frankly, a lot of surprising, frankly, a lot of surprising little twists and turns to how Poison has got to where it currently is like for fifth edition.

And I was kind of entertained by remembering all the things that the original designers were grappling with in weird, unexpected ways, actually.

So thank you to the viewer who suggested this, actually.

i

feel like there's a lot of overlap here with the disease topic you know i feel like you're going to end up with a lot of comparisons to the real world how does this work in the real world and then how it's modeled in the game and um anyway i don't know i always find that interesting and then i also find it interesting going through the books and looking for the entries and being like are they right next to each other are they farther apart do they bear any resemblance to each other or not and it's uh it's not really consistent so that's

I can see that.

I think that the first obvious difference, diseases tend to be long-term ailments and poisons, at least initially, were instantaneous, immediate things.

And in original D&D, I think if you look in the original D&D Little Brown Books, I think you're probably going to see poison there.

There's a specific saving throw category just for poison.

And if

you're playing modern D&D and you're accustomed to the ability score related saving throws, it might be surprising that in original classic D&D, there were about five saving throw categories.

And I believe the first one was specifically just for poison.

So it's kind of fundamental in some sense in the rule set and diseases kind of were added on a little bit later.

I'm

curious about that, Dan, about where that comes from and is it universally applied to all poisons? I mean, it just says poison.

That's what I'm used to seeing.

Character sheet has a box labeled poison.

There's a saving throw for it.

And then I start to wonder, well, what's the trajectory for this? Is this the same for injected venom versus ingested poison? Is this coming from...

you know, monster attacks? Is this coming from an assassin dripping something into my food? How are we getting here?

yeah traditionally it's all you're right dnd uses the word poison for all those things all at once probably in in this chat here it doesn't make any sense of this thing because initially dnd doesn't and there's going to be the someone that says like one up when a uh when a deadly snake bites you it's injecting you with venom poison is something you'd ingest which is different but dnd doesn't make any difference in any of those things at the outset so probably it doesn't it isn't worthwhile for us to think about the difference.