The Articles of Dragon: "Taking the Sting Out of Poison"

One of the characteristics of the Silver Age of Dungeons & Dragons (1983–1989) is its concern with "realism," both in its worldbuilding and in the game rules intended to facilitate them. You can clearly see this in the kinds of articles Dragon magazine published during the mid to late 1980s, a great many of which I still remember to this day. "Living in a Material World," about which I posted last week, is a good example of what I'm talking about, but it's far from the only one.

Another excellent example is Chris Landsea's "Taking the Sting Out of Poison," which appeared in issue #81 (January 1984). At the start of his article, Landsea notes that his piece is, after a fashion, a response to two previous articles on poison that appeared in earlier issues of Dragon. The first is Charles Sagui's "Poison: From AA to XX" from issue #32 (December 1979) and the second is Larry DiTillio's "Poison: The Toxins of Cerilon" from issue #50 (March 1982). Landsea praises both articles for certain aspects of their treatment of poisons but he also has criticisms that he hopes to address in his own discussion of the topic.

The article is a long one – about ten pages, though not all the pages are full ones. Even so, it's an extensive examination of many aspects of poisons and poison use in AD&D, intended to be the definitive guide. In that respect, there's little question that the article does its job, albeit with a great deal more detail than I would care about today. There's nevertheless something strangely admirable about Landsea's thoroughness. He covers all the bases, from the different types of poisons (ingestive, insinuative, contact, poison gas, monster venom) to their relative strengths, how easy they are to detect, how long before they take effect, not to mention much more obvious matters like damage dealt on a successful or failed save. Landsea has probably thought more about poisons in AD&D than anyone else ever has and it shows.

Whether this is good or bad is, of course, a matter of personal preference. At the time "Taking the Sting Out of Poison" was released in early 1984, I was keen on it, if not necessarily enthusiastic. Like a lot of things, such as material components, I was very much in favor of these kinds of hyper-specific, hype-detailed rules additions – in principle. They appealed to my youthful sense of order and the desire to have an answer to any rules question that might come up in play. But did I ever use them in play? I don't think so. If I did, I can't recall it, which tells you everything you need to know about the utility of this kind of article.

Now, it's quite possible that I'm the odd one out here and that thousands of AD&D players were clamoring for an article like this in order to improve their adventures and campaigns. If so, I suspect they would be very happy with "Taking the Sting Out of Poison." It's an exhaustive and very well done examination of its chosen topic. I mean that without a hint of sarcasm. It's really good and, as I said, my youthful self respected all the hard work Chris Landsea clearly had done in writing it, even as I never made use of it. There's a whole genre of Dragon articles like this, consisting of well-written and researched treatments of narrow topics that probably never saw much use at anyone's table, but, to quote Grandpa Simpson, it was the style at the time.

Speaking of the style of the time, another thing the article does is mention again and again AD&D's official stance on the use of poison by player characters who are not members of the assassin class. Even though Dragon depended on a huge number of rules variants for its monthly content, the editorial policy at the time was to remind readers that nothing within its pages was official unless it came from the pen of Gary Gygax or someone to whom he had given his imprimatur. Landsea clearly knew this, which might explain why he seems at pains to emphasize his fidelity to AD&D whenever possible. This has no impact on the quality of the article itself; it's simply a peculiar artifact from another era.

School Rule

From issue #48 of Dragon (April 1981):

Taking the Sting Out of Poison

During the time when I was subscriber to Dragon, there was an article entitled "Taking the Sting Out of Poison." Written by Chris Landsea, it appeared in issue #84 (January 1984) and was itself something of a follow-up to a previous article "Poison: From AA to XX" by Charles Sagui. Sagui's article appeared in issue #32 (December 1979), which was before I was even aware of the existence of Dragon, let alone a regular reader. However, I was nevertheless familiar with it, because it had been reprinted in Best of Dragon Vol. II. As I mentioned recently, I was a huge fan of Best of Dragon and can still remember many of the articles included in these volumes, including Sagui's.

I bring this up as a bit of background to an inchoate thought I've been having lately regarding poison in Dungeons & Dragons. Now, I've never really had a problem with save or die mechanics and have, in fact, defended them in the past. I'm still not opposed to them in principle, but I've been thinking a lot about hit points and what they're supposed to represent in D&D. If we are supposed to believe, as Gary Gygax suggests in the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, that only a small portion of a character's hit point total represents his "actual ability to withstand physical punishment" with the rest being a measure of his "skill in combat ... "sixth sense" ... sheer luck, and the fantastic provisions of magical protections and/or divine protection," why does the character's ability to survive most poisons come down to a single roll of the dice? Would it not, in keeping with the Gygaxian understanding of hit points, make more sense if poison dealt damage and a saving throw, if used at all, served to mitigate the amount of the damage?

As I thought about this more, I dimly remembered that the the much-beloved D&D Rules Cyclopedia included the following optional way of dealing with poison:

Admittedly, I haven't thought much about the implications of this approach. On first blush, though, I must admit to finding it appealing. Poison is still very deadly. Consider, for example, a giant spider, whose poison under this scheme would dealing 4d6 damage on a failed saving throw and even 2d6 on a successful one. That's not nothing by any reasonable definition, but it introduces a little more variability in the result, as well as being more consonant with the what hit points seem to represent.

I don't know; I'm still pondering this. No doubt some will think I'm going soft in my old age and perhaps that's true. I can only say that I've been spending more time reading other RPGs roughly contemporaneous with D&D and AD&D, like Gamma World and RuneQuest, among others, and looking at how they handle deadly effects like poison. There's quite a range of approaches and some of them strike me as worthy of serious consideration. That's in addition to my aforementioned questions about the interface between such effects, hit points, and saving throws. As always, I appreciate hearing others' thoughts on this matter.

Random Roll: DMG, pp. 80–81

I'm going to cheat this week and take a random look at two pages in the Dungeon Masters Guide. In my defense, the section I'll discuss in this post – about saving throws – isn't limited to a single page. Gygax begins it by briefly touching on the origin of saving throws: "The term saving throw is common enough, coming to us from miniatures wargames and D&D." I find this interesting, because I believe this is a rare example of where an Advanced D&D book explicitly references Dungeons & Dragons (please correct me if I am mistaken). Given that it's commonly asserted that AD&D's very existence owes to an attempt to distance the game from D&D, thereby stiffing Dave Arneson of royalties on it, one must wonder why Gygax mentions D&D at all. As is often the case, I suspect the truth is much more complicated than the caricature everyone knows.

Gygax continues, discussing just what saving throws mean within the context of the game world:

It represents the chance for the figure concerned to avoid (or at least partially avoid) the cruel results of fate. In AD&D it is the same. By means of skill, luck, magical protections, quirks of fate and the aid of supernatural powers, the character making his or her saving throw takes none or only part of the indicated results – fireball damage, poisoning, being turned to stone, or whatever. 

That's very straightforward and uncontroversial. His next paragraph, which I am going to reproduce in full, is quite remarkable.

I don't recall ever reading this section before, though I probably have done so. I call it remarkable because, in it, Gygax advanced his vision of what D&D and RPGs are all about. I was particularly struck by his statement that "the continuing epic is the most meaningful portion," by which he is clearly referencing the importance of the ongoing campaign. I likewise found his offhanded comment on the significance on dead characters – "characters who have shorter spans of existence," in Gygax's parlance – to be a much-needed tonic to the widely held belief, especially nowadays, that player characters ought not to die.

That said, Gygax states in his next paragraph that

because the player character is all-important, he or she must always – or nearly always – have a chance, no matter how small, a chance at somehow escaping what otherwise would be inevitable destruction. Many will not be able to do so, but the escapes of those who are what the fabric of the game is created upon.

I assume that, by "all-important," Gygax means only that player characters are the focus of the campaign. Given that he also alludes to the fact that characters may die – due to failed saving throws, no less – this seems a fair assumption. 

Gygax spends the rest of the section addressing criticisms of the very notion of saving throws.

Someone once criticized the concept of the saving throw as ridiculous. Could a man chained to a rock, they asked, save himself from the blast of a red dragon's breath? Why not?, I replied. If you accept fire breathing dragons, why doubt the chance to reduce the damage sustained from such a creature's attack? 

While I have no problem with the idea of saving throws, this seems like a lazy defense on Gygax's part. In fact, I've seen this line of "thinking" employed many times as a way to avoid thinking about whether this or that thing belongs in a RPG. "If you can accept magic, then why can't you accept X?" and so on. I have no use for this approach and am frankly surprised that Gygax made use of a version of it here. That said, he nevertheless provides a good example of how to interpret a successful saving throw in the case he described above:

Imagine that the figure, at the last moment, of course, manages to drop beneath the licking flames, or finds a crevice in which to shield his or her body, or succeeds in finding a way to be free of the fetters. Why not?

I think Gygax is right about this. A common misunderstanding about older RPGs is the abstraction of many of its rules, particularly around combat, damage, and the like. The rules of Dungeons & Dragons are not "unrealistic" so much as abstract and demand a certain degree of interpretation and presentation on the part of the referee to make sense of them. Far from being a flaw, I see this as a strength. 

After a lengthy digression in which he offers alternative in-setting explanations for saving throws, Gygax concludes with a passage in which he, again, talks about character death due to failed saving throws and how those deaths support the building of a campaign.

Of course, some saves result in the death of a character anyway, as partial damage causes him or her to meet death. But at least the character had some hope, and he or she fought until the very end. Stories will be told of it at the inn, and songs sung of the battle when warriors gather around the campfire. Almost, almost he managed to reach the bend in the passage where the fell breath of the blue dragon Razisz could not reach, but at the last moment his toe struck a protrusion, and as he stumbled the dragon slew him!

That's good stuff and true in my experience. Character death can in fact serve good ends, in terms of providing depth and texture to a campaign. It's why I continue to favor game mechanics, like save or die, that make it possible for player characters to die.