Noxious Poison + Ninjutsu

By MrObscure, in Rules Questions

Hi everybody.

How Noxious Poison (p. 244 Corebook) work with ninjutsu such as Deadly Sting and Noxious Cloud (p. 226-227 Corebook)? Do poison enchance the severity of the critical strike, which can be inflicted for the opportunity?

As i see, with Deadly Sting this poison increase only physical damage by amplifying deadliness of weapon. Am i right?

But then using it with Noxious Cloud doesnt make sense because we dont have any weapon with deadliness here.

On 11/22/2020 at 12:17 PM, MrObscure said:

Hi everybody.

How Noxious Poison (p. 244 Corebook) work with ninjutsu such as Deadly Sting and Noxious Cloud (p. 226-227 Corebook)? Do poison enchance the severity of the critical strike, which can be inflicted for the opportunity?

As i see, with Deadly Sting this poison increase only physical damage by amplifying deadliness of weapon. Am i right?

But then using it with Noxious Cloud doesnt make sense because we dont have any weapon with deadliness here.

You are correct. Noxious Poison would cause physical damage (not a critical strike) equal to the weapon’s deadliness +4 with Deadly Sting and depending on how you interpret using no weapon with Noxious Poison and Noxious Cloud, it would cause either 0 damage or 4 damage.

In the case of Deadly Sting, it deals damage equal to whatever weapon you're using's deadliness + bonus successes +4, as Noxious Poison increases the deadliness by four.

In the case of Noxious Cloud, what happens is that it deals 3 damage, as the technique describes. Deadliness doesn't enter into the technique (and thus Noxious Poison doesn't do anything - it only affects deadliness, after all) unless the opponent cannot defend against this damage.
In that case, you're right, the game tells you to use the deadliness of a weapon (+4) that isn't involved in the first place, so ??? If in doubt, you can look to Unspecified Deadliness on p270, of which I think that Extreme Temperature is the most fitting - a poison cloud feels like a dangerous terrain more than a fall or a kihō. So the deadliness would be 9, imo. (This is likely much nastier than a weapon, but hey, make poisons dangerous.)

Edited by Myrion
tpyo

Thank you, now I have no doubts.