Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Rederik 01-05-07, 12:00 AM	I am running a game where the characters need to "salvage" much of their raw materials in adventures and use those raw materials to have their weapons and armor crafted. I am using the same rules for extracting raw venom from a critter to later use the Skill: Craft Poison to get a usable poison. I am looking for what people think is a reasonable DC to extract the poison. Bonuses come from the following Salvage skill (intellegence, ranks) Master work Tools +2 Synergy (from Craft: Poison) I DC I am think is 35. This allows a character of level 4 to to succeed on a Nat 20 (with all bonuses) (20+4int+7ranks+2synergy+2circumstance), by level 9, they are at a 75% chance of success and level 14 a 50% chance of success. Does everyone feel this is a reasonable progression? Any advice would be helpful. Thanks in advance...
Wayside 01-05-07, 10:44 AM	waaaaaaay too harsh. maybe the poison save DC, or 5+Poison DC. Or 10 or 15+Challenge rating of the monster it's being harvested from. It should be something that a character, of any level. Who is trained in doing so should have a fair chance of getting an appropriately leveled poison out of a monster. I would also throw in a 50/50 chance that killing the monster ruptured the poison sac and the poison cannot be harvested. you could also just base harvesting the poison off of survival.
Rederik 01-05-07, 11:10 AM	I am liking your ideas. The one thing I am thinking, I used to the sample DC chart and the DC to pick a "good" lock is 30,a dn the DC to pick a "masterwork" lock is 40. Does the skill to surgically remove a venom sack equal the skill nessessary to pick a lock between good and master work?
Thiez 01-05-07, 12:55 PM	The DC is much too high. Compare with the "Heal" skill (assume cleric without synergies, feats, and masterwork stuff, having a +3 wisdom modifier). Ranks in Heal Poisons healed with 'take 10' 0 Nitharit, Striped toadstool, Arsenic, Black adder venom, Small centipede poison, Bloodroot, Drow poison, Greenblood oil 1 Id moss, Blue whinnis, Medium spider venom 2 Oil of taggit, Ungol dust, Insanity mist, *Auto-stabilize* 3 Sassone leaf residue, Malyss root paste, Terinav root 4 Lich dust, Shadow essence 5 Dark reaver powder, Burnt othur fumes, Large scorpion venom, Giant wasp poison 6 *none* 7 Black lotus extract, Deathblade 8 *none* 9 *none* 10 *none* 11 Purple worm poison 12 *none* 13 Dragon bile Assuming the cleric rolls a natural 20 instead of taking 10, he can take 3 ranks in Heal at first level and succesfully treat all of the above poisons. What I'm trying to say is that by the time you can extract something easy like black adder poison, the chance of doing primary damage is very low, and the chance of doing secondary damage is exactly 0% (So that makes Nitharit, Oil of taggit, and bloodrot quite useless indeed, with a primary damage of nothing.
Paladin's Pride 01-05-07, 04:16 PM	First of all, are you going to allow characters to take 20 on this check? The reason that open lock checks are so high is that in general a character can take 20 on them. Even so, 35 seems quite high. I'd go no higher than 30, or possibly make the DC equal to 10+the creatures hit dice, so that more powerful poisons are more difficult to harvest successfully (I'm not sure that makes sense logically, but it would be fairly balanced).
lint trap 01-06-07, 07:42 PM	I'd make the skill a function of Survival (skinning game), with synergy from Knowledge (whatever the monster is). As for DCs, you might make it based on creature size: Tiny or smaller - DC 20+CR, 30 minutes Small to Large - DC 15+CR, 1 hour Huge or larger - DC 10+CR, 2 hours
Dex 01-07-07, 01:44 AM	I'd use Survival, with the DC 10+CR
Thiez 01-07-07, 09:51 AM	Come to think of it, I'd use Heal. With a synergy from survival, or maybe a synergy if you have at least 5 ranks in the Knowledge skill related to the creature.
Shaftiel 01-07-07, 09:49 PM	10+DC sounds good. Not to go off on a tangent, but has anyone else wondered why the DCs get higher as the critters get larger? This is pretty much the exact opposite of how it works in the real world... well, a while ago when I was running a poison-harvesting game this came up and the answer we produced with was that large monsters effectively use more than one dose. The poison from a Colossal scorpion doesn't kill you because it's the most potent poison in the world, it kills you because when he stings you roughly a gallon of it gets pumped into you, most of which would fountain out of the gaping hole in your chest where he struck you... This doesn't fit the high-fantasy stereotype but worked out great for our lower-fantasy harvesting game. -Shaftiel
Thiez 01-08-07, 09:59 AM	Would you allow someone to use two doses of a poison and add them together, distill, roll craft(Alchemy), and end up with +2 DC and a damage dice increase? :) Yes that poison could become quite lethal if you keep adding more and more together, but the price would likely be much greater than a scroll of (random SOD) and poison immunity isn't all that uncommon at the higher levels (especialy among evil outsiders) and some enemies (elementals, undead, constructs, ooze (iirc)) are always immune to poison.
Rederik 01-09-07, 12:18 PM	Thanks everyone for the fantastic input. I am pretty good on the DC to extract, now I am wondering about quantity, ie, how many doses can be extracted per monster? I am thinking that "small" and smaller creatures warrent 1 dose. Medium creatures and up have the ability to have 1d4 doses per size increment. (A dose being about 1 oz)