This week we once again take a closer look at an area of the rules which saw significant changes over the course of the playtest process. In this case, the similar areas of poison and disease. Both of these are parts of the rules that players are likely to encounter, whether they like it or not, but only one of this is likely to be a tool used by player characters. For this reason, although both poison and disease behave similarly in terms of their mechanics, the design goals of each have diverged over time in order to better serve their roles.
POISON
As the Menagerie has developed, poison has essentially split itself into two distinct types. Natural poisons are those that are typically perils of encountering venomous monsters, while alchemical poisons are the sort that people are most likely to buy, sell, find in play and use. And yet, one of the unrestricted uses of the Crafting skill is for harvesting natural poison, and Toxicologist Alchemists are immediately able to Reverse Engineer these poisons to learn formulas to replicate their effects. So while both classes of poison often behave quite dissimilarly, they must remain similar enough that the mechanics of usage are consistent.
Since most poisons players can see and use by default are items, these were heavily impacted by the change from item level scaling from the original 0-20, to the current 1-10. This change turned out to be quite positive for alchemical poisons for many reasons. First, it broadened out the pool of available poisons from each item level. With four different means of exposure, although many poisons can be used with more than one of these, this makes it much more likely that the type of poison you're looking for is available. Second, it becomes much more intuitive to understand how to counteract a poison in practice. Since counteract levels scale from 1-10 like items do, there is no additional math required when trying to remove a poison this way.
Perhaps most importantly, however, when the items and alchemical items were overhauled into the current level scaling scheme, alchemical poisons were given the ability to scale up in level. All alchemical poisons you can find have intrinsic benefits for making (or finding) them at a level greater than the base. These benefits are typically an enhanced maximum duration, if not an increase to the debilitating effects. When combined with the Crafting rules to ensure that poisons you make yourself use your Crafting DC instead of the default DC, this can keep even low-level alchemical poisons relevant throughout an adventure. In the early stages of the playtest process, many characters that could have made effective use of poison didn't. With these upgrades and the addition of the ability to make a batch of consumables during Daily Preparations, the poison rules became much more accessible and could be used more fully, even by those that do not put a lot of character specialization into doing so.
Natural poisons are somewhat less straight-forward, because they need to be able to scale up or down in level with the monsters that they belong to. The creature stat blocks in the Menagerie are all level-agnostic, and so natural poisons must be too. From a GM perspective, this is necessary and good. While it might seem like this imposes an unnecessary complication when it comes to player interface with these rules, it actually has turned out to be the opposite in practice. Because player-facing alchemical poisons are able to be leveled-up by default, harvesting more potent versions of a natural poison from a higher-level variant of a monster is not a strange occurrence.
In fact, because natural poisons tend to improve in potency with higher level monsters, rather than increasing the duration like most alchemical poisons, this gives natural poisons a useful niche if you find yourself with access to them. Similarly, if you have gained the capability of learning formulas for typically natural poisons, getting one or more of them into your arsenal is somewhat equivalent to damaging spells, in that they increase in power with you. This key difference between these two classes of poison ends up making both more interesting overall and, while not every character will care about using poison, those that do find the experience more rewarding and intuitive.
DISEASE
Disease is a bit of an odd duck compared to poison. While it is actually possible to be able to weaponize disease from a player standpoint, doing so is difficult and obscure. The long time scale of disease makes this even more difficult in most adventures, which tend to be somewhat faster in pace. Indeed, this pacing issue is one of the key challenges in making disease relevant and effective, even from a GM perspective.
Because Realm of Runes includes a character's level in most of its important statistics, such as saving throws, lower-level diseases were typically not much of a threat to higher-level characters. Conversely, because higher-level diseases needed to have DCs that are relevant to high-level characters, they turned out to be overwhelmingly deadly to lower-level characters. Because diseases are often contagious, this poses a significant difficulty in world design, as most significant plagues should likely have entirely wiped out everyone, everywhere.
While diseases are not items, they were also changed to use the same 1-10 level scaling as most other areas of the rules besides character and monster levels. This was part of the key to making disease functionally relevant at most levels, the other was inverting the diseases interaction with the difficulty table. Whereas before, most diseases were either a Medium or Hard DC of their quickly escalating levels, they were changed to be instead an incredible DC if their more slowly increasing levels.
This ended up dramatically extending the relevant life of lower-level diseases without making them exceptionally overwhelming at the levels where they were first encountered. An Incredible DC is difficult for a level-appropriate challenge, but not insurmountable if you have tools at your disposal, like antibiotics. One of the interesting quirks of the challenge table, however, is that an Incredible DC of one level is eventually the same value as a Hard DC of a higher level, then a Medium DC of an even higher level, and may even eventually become an Easy DC.
Conversely, an Incredible DC of a higher level is typically well out of reach of lower-level characters. But since the diseases cap out at level 10, while characters can grow to level 20, the worst DC that a character will face from a disease is not so extreme compared to its capability that it will pretty much always be critically failing saves against it. With proper care, made easier by the slower scale of disease, even low-level characters have a fighting chance against high-level diseases, while low-level diseases can still threaten higher-level characters somewhat. While the highest-level characters will eventually reach the point where low-level diseases pretty much stop being relevant altogether, this happens slowly enough that it feels earned, and is a feature rather than a bug.
Poison and disease are interesting and useful aspects of the rules which have shown a lot of growth in order to ensure that they are relevant to characters and adventures alike. Next week we'll once again introduce another class exemplar, the Paladin!
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