D&D 5E Crafting poison

[Glomb175]

My rogue wants to start crafting poisons to apply to his daggers. I read the info in the dmg, it says poisons aren't the kind of thing that can be easily purchased for obvious reasons, but it did say they can be crafted if the right ingredients are found. However, I couldn't find any list of ingredients for specific poisons, so presumably it's a player discretion thing like;

Rogue: "what ingredients would I need to make a paralysis poison?"
Dm: "taproot and spider venom"
Rogue: "I search for ingredients to make a paralysis poison"
Dm: "you find a taproot, and spider venom"
Rogue: "I craft a paralysis poison"

This is a very basic example for sake of argument. Then would he need to make some sort of check to determine the strength of the poison? Or would it take a few days to craft? Or is it entirely ad-libbed?

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[jaelis]

The only way I've seen it played in practice is that certain monsters can be harvested to create poisons. So pretty much the poison becomes a form of treasure.

 

[LordEntrails]

Specific rules are up to the GM (not player). That said, there are several lengthy documents on the net about poisons and such. Both from crafting rules to ingredients. Though most are 3/3.5, they should generally be usable with minimal effort.

For instance; http://brilliantgameologists.com/boards/index.php?topic=4854.0

Remember, Google is your friend.

 

[discosoc]

Just remember that the more accessible poison creation is to the player, the more likely they are to see enemies use those same tactics.

 

[Lanliss]

My rogue wants to start crafting poisons to apply to his daggers. I read the info in the dmg, it says poisons aren't the kind of thing that can be easily purchased for obvious reasons, but it did say they can be crafted if the right ingredients are found. However, I couldn't find any list of ingredients for specific poisons, so presumably it's a player discretion thing like;

Rogue: "what ingredients would I need to make a paralysis poison?"
Dm: "taproot and spider venom"
Rogue: "I search for ingredients to make a paralysis poison"
Dm: "you find a taproot, and spider venom"
Rogue: "I craft a paralysis poison"

This is a very basic example for sake of argument. Then would he need to make some sort of check to determine the strength of the poison? Or would it take a few days to craft? Or is it entirely ad-libbed?

Sent from my HTC 10 using EN World mobile app

I like the basic idea for this type of thing of having two ingredients, a dry and a wet. You need enough wet to make the dry into a paste, so Spider venom would take a bit of time to make usable. I would allow the player to visit Apothecary shops and such, since a lot of venemous things also have medicinal properties. Once they have enough of the ingredients, I wouldn't make the actual construction take longer than an hour or two, short enough to do over a short rest.

I would also give basic quests for some stuff. For example, Spider venom. You need a lot, so you need to find a lot of spiders, or a large spider. Either way, I am sure it can be handled by a Survival or Nature check, to either forage for small spiders or find evidence of a large one in the area.

Finding a large one triggers an encounter, where they must kill it in such a way as to not make it unharvestable. I would say any bludgeoning weapons are too risky to use, as they might paste important parts, and Fire damage would burn out the poison. Now they must kill it using only weapons and spells that fall into the allowed categories, making it more interesting. Once they finish the fight, assume they harvest it succesfully and give them 1-3 doses worth of Spider venom, allowing them to make 1-3 batches of Poison, which get 4 uses per batch. That means one spider could give them enough poison for 12 poisoned arrows, or as little as 4.

If they go the route of only looking for small spiders, give them 1 dose worth for every 8 hours of foraging.

 

[Greenstone.Walker]

And, of course, a Tools: Poisoner's Kit roll at some stage (maybe using INT, maybe using DEX). A fail uses up some of the components (costing the character time and money). A bad fail poisons the character.

 

[Li Shenron]

If I remember right, the PHB or DMG don't have a specific section of the rules for crafting poisons, but why not just using the Downtime rules in the DMG for crafting any object?

Just notice that, unlike the description of Poisoner's Kit in the Tools section of the PHB (which mentions only the benefit of being proficient i.e. adding proficiency bonus), the Downtime rules for crafting actually require proficiency in order to be able to craft items of that type.

A better possibility is to instead use the expanded Downtime rules (from the UA article) for crafting, which carry complications. Or as an alternative, for poisons you could even use the rules for crafting magic items instead of those for non-magic items, or mix the two as to link the gathering of ingredients to encounters.

If you want to have more control on how much poison is crafted by the character, you can always later restrict the availability of the ingredients. Just make a deal with the player, that you'll allow poisoncrafting but reserve yourself the rights to slow it down later if it becomes too powerful.

As an even further possible complication, in the 3e era we used some house rules on expiration dates (not just for poisons but also for magic potions), which basically meant that you couldn't amass too many doses of them because they would simply lose effect after a while. If you don't mind a bit of loss of suspension of disbelief, such rules could be simplified into a maximum number of doses a character can own at any time (narrated as the character crafting replacements when the oldest doses expire).

 

[schnee]

This is a very basic example for sake of argument. Then would he need to make some sort of check to determine the strength of the poison? Or would it take a few days to craft? Or is it entirely ad-libbed?

Rules as written say you need to be proficient in the Poisoner's Kit. You craft something at 50% cost and get 5gp of progress per day, so 10 days for one person to craft it. More people (who are also proficient in the poisoner's kit) can combine their efforts to craft, working in parallel, so two people in 5, etcetera.

I'd assume the time and money spent assumes - and just abstracts out - the gathering of the raw materials and all the stuff needed for the poison.

Anything other than that, IMO, is campaign flavor - and is totally your call. Making them roll skill checks to forage with high DCs, or just say they can't find the necessary plants, etcetera.

 

[GhostGirlJezz]

I might suggest looking at some real poisons in the world (poisonous plants/animals, or various animal venoms perhaps?) and look at their effects. Elderberry bush, for example, contains trace amounts of cyanide. It would take a lot of distillation to kill someone, but it might (when paired with the right ingredients or magical effects) work well enough to cause extra damage when applied to a weapon. Look at monsters in the MM that cause poison damage, and maybe require the player to gather ingredients from those monsters.
I believe that somewhere in the DMG there is a list of poisons, rated by cost. You could look at where those poisons would likely come from, and see what kind of ingredients might be available to the people making them in the first place.
All of this basically boils down to something like this:
Drow Poison
Ingredients: Cave spider Venom(1 vial), (Insert poisonous cave mushroom here)(2), a pinch of black salt.
process: *Must be made somewhere with no sunlight whatsoever. If sunlight hits any of the ingredients before they are finalized together, that ingredient becomes inert, and the poison is ruined* distill spider venom (probably takes 1hr or so), crush mushroom, strain, mix salt into mushroom juice, mix in venom. (This process does not in any way have to be realistic, it just has to be believable enough to keep immersion. it is a game after all.)
total time elapsed: 1.5hr, plus gathering of ingredients (Done in game)
Uses: 4 uses per vial (each vial of spider venom/2 mushrooms produces 1 vial of poison)
DC: 16 to craft 1 vial. (DC increases per DM's digression if the player wants to rush it/they try to flub some of the ingredients)
Result: A creature subjected to this poison must succeed on a DC 13 Constitution saving throw or be Poisoned for 1 hour. If the saving throw fails by 5 or more, the creature is also Unconscious while Poisoned in this way. The creature wakes up if it takes damage or if another creature takes an action to shake it awake.

Obviously, since I pulled this directly from thin air, it can absolutely be changed/altered/ignored, but it's interesting to think about. It ads a layer of worldbuilding that the players often don't expect, and are pleasantly surprised by.

 

[aco175]

I would let the player come up with the ingredients and formulas. Have him/her become invested in succeeding and you get to say yes to the request. Of course you get oversight over the difficulty to make, cost, and damage each formula has.

The best benefit is that you have a great supply of adventures waiting to find strange beasts and kill them for poison ingredients.