Updates to Poison

[Halaster]

Here's the general plan with poisons.

All of them with have varying levels of potency.  Poisons found in the wild will always be of the lowest potency levels, with crafting required to get the highest.  Taking a poison found in the wild and crafting it to mid-tier potencies will not be overly difficult, but crafting the highest potencies will be both difficult and likely require additional ingredients.

Poisons will have onset timers that will be largely based on potency.  Lower potency poisons will generally take longer to kick in, higher will affect you more quickly.  But there will be a good bit of variation among poisons.  Some of them will be intended to be quick onset, while others long.  I expect this will make poisoning someone's food/drink a more viable option than today, as it may take a while to kick in and they won't necessarily know when they were poisoned.

Many of the poisons will have various effects based on potency as well.  For example, low potency peraine may take a few minutes to kick in and only make you feel sluggish and slow, lowering your agility or giving you the slow affect.  It would require higher potencies to actually paralyze someone, and even then not likely right away.

Poisoning weapons will still be possible, but the poison will fade over time losing potency before finally being useless.  Each of the poisons will be more adaptable to certain methods of poisoning, so for example poisonX might be more suited for coating weapons and so won't lose much potency, whereas poisonY really works better in foods, so if you try to coat that on a weapon it dramatically loses potency.

Cures will not be an instant cure, but will be more like an antidote that works over time. Cures will also have potency and so the more potent a cure is, the more effective it will be against a poison.  Lower potency cures may not even actually remove the poison, but will instead just lessen the effects.  There will also be some other methods introduced to lessen the symptoms of poisoning.  For example, "drink the special tea and it will take away the nausea", reducing the harmful effects of terradin.  Taking a cure proactively will give some benefit in resisting poisons.

There will be no such thing as a total saving throw to completely resist a poison, but successfully saving against one will dramatically reduce its effects.

A handful of new poisons will be added to the list of existing poisons - none of which are going away, though many will be altered to take potency into account.  Availability of ingredients will be added to SimDesert, which means their location will have a large random component.  Instead of knowing that "terradin is found on the bush in this exact spot", it will be more generalized areas:  "Terradin will be found somewhere in this half of the forest".  The poisoning skill will aid in finding these in some capacity.

There are other features around this that are still being worked out and discussed, if they happen at all.  Among these are:
   a way to better identify your cures
   foraging for some poisons/ingredients
   building immunity

With all that said, this is going to be a very long-running project.  My general plan is to work on one poison at a time until it's where we want it, then move on to the next, with appropriate announcements as they're done.

[Halaster]

The first poison on the new system is live:  Grishen.

Grishen has an onset time, potency that has different effects and decays over time, and the most potent varieties can only be crafted.  There are two forms of Advanced Poisons:  paste and vials.  Paste is what you need to coat weapons, vials are what you need to poison food and drinks.  Crafting the absolute highest tier of poisons requires skill and knowledge of both brew and poisoning, though a proficient brewer can nearly get there.  In terms of what determines potency, the wild poison item has the largest factor, the crafter's brew skill has a moderate factor in the process, and the crafter's poisoning skill can give a small boost to produce the most potent poisons known.

The way to craft these new Advanced Poisons (just Grishen for now) is to continue to use the Brew skill.  Here's the general process.

For Paste:
1. You must first brew the mash as normal (see help brew).
2. Combine the mash with the wild form of the poison (a gland, leaf, etc):  craft mush gland

For Vial:
1. You must first brew the mash as normal (see help brew).
2. Combine the mash with a normal vial (same as brew process).
2. Combine the vial with the wild form of the poison (a gland, leaf, etc):  craft vial gland

Helpfile for poison (https://www.armageddon.org/help/view/Poison) has been updated, and I have added help grishen and help poison grishen

For now cures still work the same, and the natural versions of the poison can still be used as normal, they're just low potency.

IMPORTANT NOTE:  Unfortunately, any stored/saved poison items you have now will be defaulted to the lowest possible potency.  I tried to work around that, but correcting that was determined to be more work than worth the effort.  For the moment, potency ONLY matters with Grishen.

Grishen                                                            (Gameplay)

   This class of poisons is known to break down the victim's stamina, causing
them to become very tired.  This is known to sometimes cause victims to fall
into a deep, unwakeable sleep.  The most potent versions can even cause the
victim to feel rundown and lethargic, causing them to move more slowly.
   Grishen tends to hold its potency for a very long time, regardless of what
method is used to employ it.  It is a generally fast-acting poison, the victim
beginning to feel the effects within minutes.  Grishen relies on a quick, deep
introduction to the body. It works best on arrows and bolts, though it is still
rather potent on any type of slashing, piercing, or stabbing weapon.  While
still possible, it does not lend itself very well to being introduced by food
or drink.

Q&A Thread:  https://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,58210.0.html

[Halaster]

Apologies, forgot to update this thread recently.

Potency values on CURES were added, to Grishen only for now.  Potency of a crafted (grishen only for now) cure is determined largely by your brew skill, and a little bit on your poisoning skill.  Tablets can be crafted up to middle tier strength, and vials can be crafted up to the highest tier strength.

It's easier to tell what color liquid is in a vial because 'of <color> liquid' is appended to the end of vials.  To go along with this, Oleupata added several new shapes of vials to the game where the normal vials are bought.  So you can now have:
- a square glass vial of blue liquid
- a square glass vial of red liquid
- a round glass vial of blue liquid
etc.

You can assess poisons and cures to get an idea of their strength if you have the poisoning skill (poisons) or brew skill (cures).

[Halaster]

Today's release sees the follow updates on the poison project:

Added onset to Grishen cures, so taking a cure for Grishen will not act immediately.  Vials will take less than 1 minute to kick in, tablets will take a few minutes.

Both Grishen poisons and cures can stack to increase their effect, although it will take a fair amount to raise the potency.  Taking enough weak cures (or being poisoned by enough weak poisons) can potentially add up to greater potencies.  Like poison, a cure will last in your system for a while.  During the time that the cure is in your blood, it will reduce, and even nullify the effects of the poison, if strong enough.

Note:  Cures still not degrading, that will probably be next release.

Q&A / Discussion on poison project:  https://gdb.armageddon.org/index.php/topic,58210.0.html

[Halaster]

This coming Sunday will see the release of Cure degradation timers put in place for Grishen only.  Cure degradation will mean that over time a cure will lose its potency and eventually become useless.  A vial that does this will just become empty again and can be re-used.  A tablet that does this will see the keyword old added to it.

Tablets can last nearly 6 RL months, and the timeframe for vials are in the order of a few RL months.  A mash, which is meant to be an intermediate crafting item, will only last one RL day.

[Halaster]

With today's release cure degradation (for grishen) has been put in place as described above.

Also, saving throws have been revamped for how poison works.  First, it was standardized as many forms of poison delivery previously simply gave you no saving throw.  Now, all forms do, however saving throws do not outright negate poison, they simply make you suffer a considerably lower potency of the poison.  In most cases those lower potency versions are not directly lethal, unless of course you were already in really bad shape.

Note that this is only true with Grishen for now.  All other poisons still use the old "all-or-nothing" approach.

[Halaster]

Today sees a few bug fixes to advanced poisons, and the addition of a 2nd poison to the list:  Terradin

Now that Terradin is an advanced poison, that means it operates on this new system:

- has an onset timer before kicking in
- poison uses the potency scale
- cures have an onset timer
- cures use the strength scale
- Terradin items found in the game now have randomized locations instead of static
- cures and poisons have degradation timers on them
          - Terradin poison will decay over the course of weeks to a couple of months (RL)
          - Cures are the same across the board (many weeks to months for tablets, weeks to months for vials)
- saving throws do not completely negate the poison's effects, but even low level cures can help offset the worst of it

Updated https://www.armageddon.org/help/view/Poison
Added https://www.armageddon.org/help/view/Poison%20Terradin
Added https://www.armageddon.org/help/view/Terradin

[Halaster]

A point of clarification since I've been asked this a few times.

ONLY Grishen and Terradin operate under the new system, and that includes assessing them to see strength / potency.  Apologies for not being more clear about that.

Poisons and cures that are not Grishen or Terradin will not show potency/strength with assess, do not decay, do not use potency, they're still under the old system.

[Halaster]

Today's release adds Generic (also known as Bloodburn) poison to the advanced poison/cure system.

Updated:  https://www.armageddon.org/help/view/Poison
Added:  https://www.armageddon.org/help/view/Poison%20Bloodburn
Added:  https://www.armageddon.org/help/view/Poison%20Generic
Added:  https://www.armageddon.org/help/view/Bloodburn

[Halaster]

Today we added Peraine, Heramide, and Methelinoc to the new advanced poison system, leaving only Skellebain on the old (which is going to be a bit different of a beast to tackle).

Updated:  https://www.armageddon.org/help/view/Poison
Added:  https://www.armageddon.org/help/view/Heramide
Added:  https://www.armageddon.org/help/view/Poison%20Heramide
Added:  https://www.armageddon.org/help/view/Methelinoc
Added:  https://www.armageddon.org/help/view/Poison%20Methelinoc
Added:  https://www.armageddon.org/help/view/Peraine
Added:  https://www.armageddon.org/help/view/Poison%20Peraine

[Halaster]

Skellebain and Plague are going to be a little delayed on the new system, as they act fundamentally different.  Just FYI, I've been asked about them.

[Halaster]

Today was the final installment of the updated poisons and cures, which added Plague (as a cure only), and Skellebain.

Updated:  https://www.armageddon.org/help/view/Poison
Added:  https://www.armageddon.org/help/view/Poison%20Skellebain
Added:  https://www.armageddon.org/help/view/Skellebain

Any magickal spells that have to do with poisons have been updated and balanced as well.  Finally, the Cure affect was added to the stat command as it seems only fair for that to show up if Poison does.

This concludes the new system and updating all poisons to use it!  There'll be new poisons being added but they're going to be their own individual projects, this main project is done besides follow-up bug fixes and balances that may need to happen.

[Oleupata]

Maybe that wasn't literally the final installment. I've added pill presses to the game that will allow people to shape tablet cures into various different shapes through the 'use' command. This should help people struggling to sort tablets by giving you another parameter you can use in any system you so desire. You can figure out where to acquire these presses and how to use them in-game. The only thing I'll say is that some clans may have access to shapes that are restricted from general use - as long as they keep their presses.

[Oleupata]

Important announcement regarding poisons and cures: as of the time of this writing, we've discovered that cures are not working properly. We'll work to get this fixed as quickly as we reasonably can, but unfortunately I cannot offer an ETA on the fix.

Until then, avoid getting poisoned. Also, don't go poisoning people; that would be a scummy move. Will update as soon as the fix is in.

[Oleupata]

Cures have now been fixed. If you died to poison in the last week, and you would like a resurrection, send in a request and we'll look at it and probably grant it, depending on the circumstances. ("I died to fighting this mega-NPC that was clearly going to kill me anyway, but happened to poison me too," might not count.)