My history with tabletop RPGs is a short one. My younger brother told me about how rad Pathfinder was to play with his army buddies a while back, and I stumbled into a weekly D&D 4E group last year at the invitation of an old friend of mine. I showed up to observe for a few sessions in the middle of their campaign, and was then handed a character sheet of some knight dude named Sven. Thus began my newest hobby.

We’ve recently made the swap to Fifth Edition, and it’s gotta be said, I love it. I might hash out my impressions of the three systems I have some experience with at a later point in time, but for now it suffices to say that Fifth Edition is the perfect system for introducing new players to the nerdtastic world of tabletop roleplaying.

However, Fifth Edition does lack mechanical depth in a lot of ways. It’s a blessing and a curse: it means that there’s not much material for new players to try and learn, but it also means that, for example, the poison rules contained in the Player’s Handbook are just balls. I coat my weapon, and I swing at stuff for a minute, and if I hit and the bad guy fails his save, he takes 1d4 poison damage. That is the entirety of the basic poison mechanic.

True, the Dungeon Master’s Guide has more poisons, and introduces a mechanic for different ways a target can become affected by poison (ingestion, contact, inhalation, and… I think “attack?” Whatever, it’s when you get nicked by a weapon with poison on it, you know the one). But I’d say most of the poisons either (1) are just “do damage or half damage on save” poisons, or (2) are poisons that functionally accomplish the same thing, but in a more roundabout manner (you will save or take damage at the stroke of midnight!).

So I’ve been trying to think of ways to improve the poison mechanics of Fifth Edition, and I’ve landed on two rough ideas. The first is just the introduction of other kinds of poisons that have different kinds of effects. The second, however, is a little more complicated. Roughly, it’s a system for modifying poisons, increasing either their potency or the duration of their effect.

New Effects! Pathfinder-esque Ability Score Damage

As 5E poisons stand, they either do damage or knock you out, or both. That’s more or less it.

Pathfinder’s poisons favor doing ability damage over direct damage to HP. Generally, however, ability damage is a thing in Pathfinder: spells and monster abilities and tetanus from that rusty nail can all damage different abilities, and Pathfinder has very specific explanations of what happens when a given ability drops to zero (spoiler: death or coma, mostly death).

5E, not so much. I can’t recall seeing a single anything with an effect that lessens an ability score. Saying that a given poison imposes disadvantage on all ability checks of a specific ability–“Fumblemore’s Dunce-Inducing Drought” causing disadvantage on all checks related to Intelligence, for instance–seems like a good way to incorporate the spirit of Pathfinder’s poisons into 5E, but it’s worth noting that the basic Poisoned condition means disadvantage on all attack rolls and ability checks. So there would never be a reason to seek an ability-specific poison, when good ol’ fashioned poison would cover all of your bases.

An idea I’ve been considering is having a poison negate ability score -related bonuses in addition to imposing disadvantage on checks related to a given ability. For example, suppose I trick Redbird the Wizard-Bounty-Hunter into drinking some of Fumblemore’s Dunce-Inducing Drought. Redbird fails his CON save, and so his mind starts to go foggy. When he tries to strike me with a firebolt, he has disadvantage on the attack roll… but wait! He also notices that the firebolt is much less accurate than before: the poison has taken away that sweet, sweet +5 to his spell attack bonus from his 20 INT. Realizing he can’t hit the broad side of a particularly broad barn with his firebolt, he opts for burning hands. To his dismay, he sees me roll nimbly out of the way of relatively sluggish flames; sure, I took some damage, but since the spell save DC didn’t include the +5 from Redbird’s INT score, I was able to walk away from that spell relatively unscathed. As the hamsters in Redbird’s mind start to wear out their respective hamster wheels, Redbird realizes that he has a much harder time passing his Arcana check in order to remember something about the poison he’s consumed: for one, he has disadvantage on the check, and for two, his +5 INT bonus is yet again denied to that skill. [Never mind that an Arcana check probably wouldn’t be used here–just illustrating!]

It would be fairly easy to work out similar poisons that affect other ability scores. Naked barbarians who had once placed so much confidence in their unarmored AC are suddenly trivial to hit, wise druids revert to the mental state of stoned tree-huggers, and the bard can’t carry a tune in a bucket. All in all, I’d say this would be much more interesting to use–and be affected by–than a simple “Did you save? No? Take… 23 poison damage. Yes, I’m serious,” poison.

Modular Poisons! Potency, Persistency, and Bane-cy

I have three ideas for upgrades that can be applied to poisons: Potent, Persistent, and Bane. To upgrade a poison, a character must dish out a percentage of the base price of the unmodified poison. More than one upgrade can be applied to a given poison at once. For ease of illustration, I’ll consider the basic poison of the Player’s Handbook and what the various upgrades to it will do. It’s worth remembering, though, that I’m still trying to check for balance issues, etc. Consider this a rough draft of some home rules, in other words.

So first, there’s the Potent upgrade:

Potent: Add 25% to the cost of the poison for each increased level of potency. For every level of potency above the basic poison, add an additional damage die to the damage dealt by the poison (if applicable) and increase the save DC by 2. It is assumed that a basic poison can have no more than five levels of potency.

So a basic poison with two levels of potency would do 3d4 poison damage on a failed CON save of 14 and cost 150 gp. Not too shabby.

Next, there’s the Persistent upgrade:

Persistent: Add 50% to the cost of the poison. For poisons that have an instant effect, the target must make repeated saves at the start of its turn, suffering the effect upon failures, until the target succeeds at a save. For poisons that have a continuous effect, double the duration of the poison’s effect. For poisons that have both an instant and continuous effect, apply both persistent upgrades with different saves for each effect. Subsequent applications of persistent poison do not “stack,” but they do “refresh” the effects of the poison.

So a basic poison with the persistent upgrade would cost 150 gp, and it would cause a target to take 1d4 poison damage on a failed save and another 1d4 poison damage on the target’s next turn if it fails its CON save for that turn. This continues until the target succeeds at a CON save.

Admittedly, I’ve got some work to do with this one. The Persistent upgrade as I have it written doesn’t go super well with some of the poisons from the Dungeon Master’s Guide. How would one make Midnight Tears “persistent?” Would the “save or massive damage” happen on two successive midnights? Does the target of Midnight Tears take 9d6 necrotic damage every round until it saves? Neither of these seem satisfactory to me, although I quite like the Persistent upgrade as applied to basic poison.

Last is the Bane upgrade. The explanation of Bane is pretty simple: some creatures, like dwarves and demons (always a pair in my mind), have some kind of bonus against poison, whether it’s advantage on saving throws, resistance, or total immunity. So a Bane upgrade is narrowly tailored to one group of creatures, and negates whatever bonus they have against poison. For example, Dwarfsbane poison would negate the Dwarves’ advantage on saves vs. poison, and Demonsbane would negate the poison immunity of demons. Prices for a given Bane upgrade would probably depend on the level of strength against poison they’re negating: I could see Dwarfsbane being relatively inexpensive, but Demonsbane being incredibly costly.

…And that’s pretty much what I’ve come up with so far for homebrewed 5E poison rules. I like the track that I’m on: poisons could be as useful an arsenal for rogues as spells are for wizards, and a more imaginative array of poisons suits a fantasy setting. My immediate plans are to tweak the persistent category to better fit with non save-or-damage poisons and think of a few other poison effects. I like the idea of a poison that causes hallucination in targets: I could see getting advantage on an orc that’s been poisoned into believing that it’s covered in ants. On that note, it might be worth checking the Insanity Table and the 5E Diseases section of the Dungeon Master’s Guide for inspiration. Lastly, my friend suggest looking at potions, and coming up with “negative” versions (e.g. a poison of slow vs. a poison of haste). All in all, I think I’m on the right track, and hopefully my thoughts on this have helped present and aspiring DMs come up with their own ideas for poisons and the homebrewing thereof!