Drinkable poison.
Posted: Sat Feb 05, 2011 1:13 am
Okay, so I started tackling alchemy, and lo' n behold, i can make poisons.
But hey, I can't help but wonder, what the heck is use of a drinkable poison?
Poisons for weapons and arrows make sense, but who would you possible use drinkable poison on?
Clearly poison was intended as either a tool of treachery for villain characters or a weapon of druids. I mean, the recipe exists for something. Which is cool. But currently it's pretty ineffective, because with lack of stealth or pickpocketing in the game, it's neither possible to sneak a potion into someone's bag and switching it with another, nor doing so unnoticed.
So you're left with blatant social interaction.
Now, if you trick someone into drinking it instead of a healing potion, you're pretty much permanently screwed in your career. You can delete the character pretty much right away, because people -will- remember you. As their poisoned ghosted self drools out of their mouth, they will !name you 'Evil Druid Who Poisoned Me' and so will every witness. Alternatively, you could spread such poison through a middle man, but then you screw both the middle man, and yourself, because now it can be traced to you.
So I wonder, would it be possible in VBU to maybe do more versatile things with such poisons? Maybe apply them to food and drink? That could be a lot nastier, and could introduce quite a good bit of fun paranoia, more in tact with medieval novels.
"Have a drink with me to victory, friend."
"My thanks, good Duke, but I prefer my own wine."
"You do not trust me? Amusing."
"Very well, hmm, it wasn't poisoned after all."
"Oh, I wouldn't say that, just wait till tomorrow."
Especially since so much food and drink circulates in whole stacks daily, that it's pretty easy to mix in the bad.
If druids were meant to be the silent power to be reckoned with because of their potential as assassins, that would probably be the way to go with poison.
Naturally, if poisoning food and drink was made possible, I would suggest to include ability to detoxify them with an antidote, and an ability for characters skilled at either alchemy or cooking, to tell that the particular food/drink item is not normal, with differing degrees of precision. A high level cook would get a vague message that something is off about this food, where as a druid would get a precise reading.
Opinions, explanations? Maybe i missed something about this concept?
It's just to me it seems that the so feared poison is just pretty much a one time trap for characters who act stupidly and would pick up a potion off the ground and drink it out of curiosity. Usually, those are just newbies.
But hey, I can't help but wonder, what the heck is use of a drinkable poison?
Poisons for weapons and arrows make sense, but who would you possible use drinkable poison on?
Clearly poison was intended as either a tool of treachery for villain characters or a weapon of druids. I mean, the recipe exists for something. Which is cool. But currently it's pretty ineffective, because with lack of stealth or pickpocketing in the game, it's neither possible to sneak a potion into someone's bag and switching it with another, nor doing so unnoticed.
So you're left with blatant social interaction.
Now, if you trick someone into drinking it instead of a healing potion, you're pretty much permanently screwed in your career. You can delete the character pretty much right away, because people -will- remember you. As their poisoned ghosted self drools out of their mouth, they will !name you 'Evil Druid Who Poisoned Me' and so will every witness. Alternatively, you could spread such poison through a middle man, but then you screw both the middle man, and yourself, because now it can be traced to you.
So I wonder, would it be possible in VBU to maybe do more versatile things with such poisons? Maybe apply them to food and drink? That could be a lot nastier, and could introduce quite a good bit of fun paranoia, more in tact with medieval novels.
"Have a drink with me to victory, friend."
"My thanks, good Duke, but I prefer my own wine."
"You do not trust me? Amusing."
"Very well, hmm, it wasn't poisoned after all."
"Oh, I wouldn't say that, just wait till tomorrow."
Especially since so much food and drink circulates in whole stacks daily, that it's pretty easy to mix in the bad.
If druids were meant to be the silent power to be reckoned with because of their potential as assassins, that would probably be the way to go with poison.
Naturally, if poisoning food and drink was made possible, I would suggest to include ability to detoxify them with an antidote, and an ability for characters skilled at either alchemy or cooking, to tell that the particular food/drink item is not normal, with differing degrees of precision. A high level cook would get a vague message that something is off about this food, where as a druid would get a precise reading.
Opinions, explanations? Maybe i missed something about this concept?
It's just to me it seems that the so feared poison is just pretty much a one time trap for characters who act stupidly and would pick up a potion off the ground and drink it out of curiosity. Usually, those are just newbies.