Hi All,

I was wondering if someone could help me answer a query i have on Poisons?

Firstly i want to say that i think Anima is fantastic and i have recently started running it for a group of friends who are also loving it! Once you get your head round most of the rules i think the game is brilliant and has so much potential for great storylines.

I have just started getting my head round Poisons and wanted to check something as it just didn't feel right. The Assassin in our group wants to create a poison so we RP him getting some componenets etc and then it comes to creating it. He makes a Poison skill check to determine the level of the poision, say its 120 so he can create a lvl 30 poison. He doesn't add any additonal modifiers to the poison so the VR check is 60 vs a Lvl 30 poison (I realise adding additional modifiers only changes the level of the poison and not the starting VR difficulty).

My query is that the VR check of 60 feels awfully low and should the Assassin be making an additonal roll to add to the 60 for someone to roll against with their VR? I couldn't see anything in the core book that explained this further but maybe i missed it?

Can anyone help me?

Cheers,

Ade.

After reviewing the rules, yeah that's pretty odd. I'd actually houserule it that a poison gets a roll to affect the target - effectively making it into a contest rather than a challenge. Remind your players that if they want more effective poisons, it works on their characters, too. It doesn't seem they put a lot of thought into the poison system at all...

Then again, you should be making poisons at least level 40 or 50, if you have the skill and are competent enough, at around level 4. Putting more time into it can get you a level 60 poison. Check it:

30 Base + 40 Class (lvl 4) + 10 (natural bonus) + 10 (Int bonus) = 90 Final ability. Rolling a d100 will give you an average of 50, naturally, and 140 is Very Difficult; A level 40 poison has a VR of 80.

If your player hasn't invested many points into Poisons, well, then he hasn't had much practice, has he? A low-level Assassin should be putting DPs into his Assassin Class skills so that he can do what he needs to do!

Here's the same assassin, at level 2:

30 Base (Bare minimum for a class skill to be useful) + 20 Class (lvl 2) + 10 (Int Bonus) = 60 Final Ability. With an average result of 50, that's 110 - fairly often, he should be able to get 120 for a Level 30 poison, and sometimes a Level 40 if he's lucky. If he puts time into making poison and stockpiles it, a couple of months could bring it up to Level 50 if he's lucky. That's fine for a low-level character, by the way.

You're not going to be killing many nobles that way, but if you make the poisons cause Weakness and hope for a fumble, you can definitely use it to gain an advantage.

The more I look into it, the more I see that the system is more than a little under-powered. I would probably add the creator's Presence to the poison's creation, simply to make it more powerful.

tasuret said:

Or, if you have an assassin that specializes in poisons they can easily have at level 4;

50 base (100 pts, a little over 10% DP) + 40 class + 40 natural + 30 Int bonus = 160, getting a 180 60% of the time, and 240 about 20% of the time. This gives a poison of level 50-60 or 100-120 VR, not incredibly high but much harder to resist, with most level 4's having 60-80 VR this gives a 20-60% chance of success.

As far as I can tell the reason that the assassin in the example isn't making good poisons is because either;
A) He is not trained in poisons well enough or
B) You are not using the skill bonuses added in Core Exxet (I think), but now that I think about it this only accounts for the reason behind A

The main problem (In my opinion) with the skill system is that if you do not get really high in a skill it is useless. Poison, for example, starts with poisons of VR 20, which can not effect a human, to 180 which can effect a level 16 (though ~20% chance). If I were to make an assassin that specializes in poisons we can make this at level 4;

90 base (180pts, 20% of total DP), +40 class, +40 natural, +50 INT = 220, getting a 240+ 80% of the time and 280+ 40% of the time. This gets you a level 60 or 70 poison and a VR of 120 or 140, considering level 4 enemies have about 60-80VR this gives a 60-80% of effecting their targets.

But with 20% of all DP going into this it costs about as much as attack, and specializing this much in a single skill is normally not realistic. This is not the only skill with this problem - traps, acrobatics, almost all skills need a lot of skill points in them before they are useful.

I was making it on the assumption that they weren't necessarily specializing in poisons. What got added in Core Exxet? I have a Spanish PDF, but I've only incorporated a couple of rules that others have translated. I've been working on a couple of chapters that have not (yet) been translated from Arcana Exxet... mostly the Intro and the Theory if Magic.

I am not 100% sure where it was added, but;

A) Every level choose 5 skills and get a +10 bonus to it. The skills these are placed in are considered trained.
B) 2 Natural Bonuses every level, one for a physical (STR, DEX, CON, AGI, or PER) skill and one for a mental (INT, WP, and POW) skill. This adds the bonus again to a skill (so with INT 10 it would add another +15 to the skill, with WP 7 it would add another +5 to the skill)
The combined bonuses from these cannot exceed 100.

See this thread http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp?efid=85&efcid=3&efidt=519624 for a better description.

Also, I realise you were assuming someone who wasn't specialized in poisons. My point was, with all secondary skills, if you don't specialize they kind of suck, but they are really, really good if you do specialize (often almost overpowered). This creates a problem in which if you make secondary skills usable without ridiculous amounts of training, those that specialize will become even more overpowered.

In the example of poison, assuming 60-80VR, someone with;
Dabbler skill makes VR 40+ success 0%, seldom 20% (example that started this)
Casual skill makes VR 60+ success 0-20%, seldom but possible 40% (your example)
Expert skill makes VR 100+ success 20-40%, sometime 60%, seldom but possible 80% (my first example)
Specialized makes VR 120+ success 40-60%, sometime 80%, seldom but possible 99% (my second example)

For poisons (a rare, difficult, and dangerous ability that is often illigal) this does make a lot of sense. However, you will see this trend with almost every secondary ability in the game, which does not make sense so much. But, as you can see if you increased the ability of the skill the Specialized person would have 80-99% chance almost all the time, while the Casual person would become competent, 30-50% or so.

I am using that rule for leveling now. Holy cow that's a pretty big change. In the original rules, you only get 1 natural bonus, no skill training at all. Ok, I like that rule a lot better.