Some Initial Thoughts on Poisoning in GURPS

I've been unsatisfied with poisons in GURPS for a while.

My current campaign, DF Felltower, has compounded my dissatisfaction.

Some of it is my own fault. Characters get poisoned, and I forget to keep applying the effects. Players, let's face it, has zero incentive to remind the GM to kill them off with the poison that affected them. They often don't even know if they've been poisoned, especially if the GM is enforcing fog-of-war to avoid PCs casting Instant Neutralize Poison a split-second after because they meta-know the character was poisoned with an ongoing effect. It's one more thing for a GM to track, and with the size of my group and my battles that's asking a lot. Add in the delay of some poisons - especially if the victim is SM+1 and adds an additional delay - and it's tough to deal with.

Some of it is the fault of games in general. You get poisoned, you usually get a roll to avoid the effects. Most of the time, you either suffer a lesser effect on success or a bad effect on failure. Cyclical poisons have an ongoing effect, but again, you generally get to keep rolling and usually this negates the effect. So poisoning isn't that scary, especially if your hearty and healthy PC can shrug it off. In a game with GURPS with point-buy, even the least healthy and least hearty among the PCs will be superior to the average human in HT.

One way to deal with it - that I've done - is to make poisons much more instant and save-or-die. My DF game features a lot of quick poisons that have HT rolls in the -3 to -5 range, and almost always have an effect even if you make your resistance roll (a D&D "save.")

Despite all of that, poisons aren't terribly scary. You can usually tough them out and deal with the effects with a couple-three healing spells and move on like it never happened. Neutralize Poison is a useful spell but it's not critical to have; you can get away without it most of the time. It's just convenient. Antivenins, magical and otherwise? Don't waste your cash, it's likely you'll shrug off the effects or just heal the damage.

I'm not pleased with that. Getting poisoned should be a big deal. In some games, especially video games and some PBM games I was involved it, it was major - you got poisoned and you needed to deal with it in a specific way or eventually die/suffer long-term from it. How to make that the case?

Here are some ideas.

- Poison resistance should determine the severity of poisoning, not negate its effects. A straight HT roll means that 50% of people exposed to a poison show no effects from it. It should be more like 50% suffer less than the other 50%.

- Poisons should all have some kind of medium-term and long-term effect; this may be curable or something you can tough out and eventually heal, but the effects should require specific cures. It shouldn't be enough to just drop down a lot of Major Healing spells or drink plenty of Minor Healing Potions and be done with it.

- Getting poisoned may not be obvious to the PC, but the player may need to be informed so they can track it. You can deal with the meta-issue by required people to make some kind of roll to understand they've been poisoned. Either that, or under any threat someone may have to be flagged as poisoned until they know they're not.

- There needs to be some kind of way of physically or virtually (in a VTT) tracking a poison. That way the effects aren't left to memory.

I'll be working on the first two for my venomous creatures; the second two I think I can implement right away. I'd like poison to be a lot scarier and a lot easier to implement. It's supposed to be a threat, and it's supposed to be the way a creature deals with foes without just inflicting massive direct trauma (in other words, high damage rolls.) This isn't meant to punish players or PCs, but it is meant to challenge them and bring poisons forward as an actual threat, not just a roll to make and then forget about.