I haven't heard anything about how poisons could be hidden or harder to trace but if I had to guess I think the more complex the poison more skilled the medical professional would have to be to pin point what it is made up off.

Forensics skills just points you to a person not really help someone discover what the weapon of choice is made up off. It would take a doctor and an alchemist to find out what the poison is made off. Then an herbalist or someone with the knowledge to know where you could get that plant to make the poison. Then it you need to track use of the poison back to someone. If no one saw anyone actually poison the food that's going to be even harder. We do know senses will be a way of tracking and we can use animals for tracking. :Let's say the poison gives off a certain smell. Now you need a beast tamer to supply an animal with the skill to track the smell. Then investigate further from there.

Just thinking about all the people it would take to track back to a single person already covers your tracks up pretty well. Especially, if you are skilled and make sure you aren't seen.

I was always assuming poisons and their legality would be more based on the local laws. Meaning, I would assume Dras wouldn't really have a big problem with there being a known poison crafter around. Whereas, the Hrothi might consider it illegal completely.

It depends, SBS said, they want you to pretty much work for your results. If you can make a poison that can kill someone from just eating it. That's going to be a pretty advance poison. Advance poisons won't have common ingredients, uncommon ingredients will need to be cared for with the correct equipment. With enough skill and information that can get back to you. If you are selling to someone you are getting money from someone. If you are holding off information I'm sure that can get you in trouble somehow. But it would take a lot of work to get back to you but it can.

Not necessarily. If the poison were legal in your locality, they shouldn't legally be able to do anything to punish you. They might ask for information on people who bought or tried to buy the poison from you. At that point you would have to decide whether to cooperate or not.

Posted By Poldano at 07:27 AM - Fri Mar 29 2019

Not necessarily. If the poison were legal in your locality, they shouldn't legally be able to do anything to punish you. They might ask for information on people who bought or tried to buy the poison from you. At that point you would have to decide whether to cooperate or not.

I think the very deadly poisons of which Ricin, Heavy Metals, Batrachotoxin, Strychnine and Botulinum Toxin are probably the most likely to be synthesisable by medieval peoples (no VX for us!) will be illegal or heavily restricted in most jurisdictions.

If it can kill multiple people quickly I think most of the 'one-shotable' nobility will be adding it to the banned substances list before it's added to the soup course.

Posted By Vakshna at 10:01 PM - Fri Mar 29 2019

Well let’s be honest, whether a poison kills quickly or not is besides the point. One that comes on like a illness and lasts until the target dies (assuming its subtle and complex) can be difficult to cure namely because one would be trying modern medical remedies rather than anti-dotes.

Well, that's one of the interesting things about arsenic, it basically mimics cholera. It's why arsenic isn't really used as a poison anymore, no one catches cholera (also it's fairly easy to detect nowadays).

To be honest I expect most jurisdictions to heavily restrict all poisons (that 16x loss multiplier scares me sometimes)

A complicating factor is that many poisons have medicinal uses in non-toxic quantities. Conversely, many medicines (if not most of them) are poisonous in sufficient quantities.

Perhaps there will be a progression in regulation corresponding to what happened in RL. Both medicines and poisons were around long before anyone got around to regulating them. It could be that the difficulty of detecting them or the blatancy of their sensory appearance made regulation either unenforceable or unnecessary. It could be that so few people knew about them that either regulation or the enforcement of regulation was not cost-effective.

Also, it's fairly obvious that there will be regional differences in the regulation of toxic substances. The obvious example is Dras tribal areas, which will traditionally have had no need to be very concerned about toxic substances.

Posted By Vakshna at

I’ve heard that poisons affects will vary based on how they are applied (IE what May affect one topically wouldn’t have the same affect if ingested/vice versa.). I also am under the impression that with the forensics skill being able to discover who or what killed a person, that to counter it you can make poisons harder to detect as you level up in the skill. Any insight on this subject?

Are you interested in everything about poisons in CoE, or do you only want to know about forensics regarding poisons?

I'm not sure about stuff that has been mentioned more recently, and some of the older stuff might have changed.... but remember, you asked for it:

If you poison someone with either a weapon, or potentially in their food if that is an option, and you poison them again does the poison increase in effectiveness or does it add to the duration of the poison debuff and or apply another debuff of poison? 25 NOV 15 V-BW

One could assume it would operate much like in our world. So if you were to poison somebody to a non-toxic level then it would probably just make them sick for some period of time. If you add a sufficiently high-dose and it’s a toxic poison then it might actually incapacitate or worse. So I don’t know if that answers the question, but certainly we do scale based on the amount of poison somebody gets.

Can poison or venom cause a Coup De Grace?, so say for example, I’m an assassin, I want to kill a king, I drop a vial of poison into his glass he drinks... and will he actually die a full death spirit walk type death or not. 11 JAN 16 V-BW

Both are possible, there are poisons and toxins that will kill, there are poisons and toxins that will not.

How in depth will the healing system be? We have to apply detailed treatment based on the wound, or will it be more simplified such as apply bandage or potion medicine? 1 JUN 16 V-BW

It's gonna be more detailed than that. A while back we started working in on how we wanted to handle the inventory system. And you know we saw a stretch goal from us on the like anything becomes a container or the berry model. And that was one of those things we really wanted to get in. It's still a stretch goal, but we anticipate that it's gonna get hit eventually. So we've actually been adapting that system to other things. We've been talking about how we're gonna use that to handle some other systems. And what I mean by that is as far as we know we're gonna be one of the first games to actually support a search system. So for example you come upon a corpse. And instead of you just kind of right-clicking on it to loot it, you can actually like search around the body. Check the pockets, check the boots, check things to see whether or not there's any objects that might be hidden there. And we're looking to use the same system for the healing mechanic as well. So I actually had one of my designers, Death, submit to me a screenshot he's been working on. And it's just a mock-up, I want to be clear this screenshot is a previous screenshot, the UI on top of that is actually what he's been working on. But it kind of gives you a little bit more information about the UI style that we're looking for. Kind of going for a minimal approach except when interacting with certain objects. But also you can see here he shows what kind of damage the person might have taken previously which can then go into like searching if there's a wound and healing it, that sort of thing. ... Some things I wanted to point out is that in this illustration, again, this is a mock-up, this is not a screenshot, it's an overlay on top of a previous screenshot. What this is showing is he is currently examining a table. You can see from the left hand side, that is not actually the table ... this is an overlay. If you're examining something, you'd see an up-close 3-D model of that. You learn more about it like the material quality was, or if it has a mark on it and you recognize the mark telling you who it was crafted by. You can see over top of your character, your health and your ~~Vitality~~ and energy. You also have at the bottom of the screen what your hands can do and if you have objects in your hands and it would change relative to that. So you'll be able to see if I have a torch in my hand and I approach another torch, then that would show that I can light the torch on the wall using the torch in my hand, that sort of thing. I've got a little bit of minimal UI up in the top right hand corner. And then what I really wanted to show with this screenshot is the right hand side. You can see that he has this character kind of visible paper doll on the screen and it shows his health and ~~Vitality~~ bar. But more than that it shows areas of injury. So you can see that he's currently suffering some kind of internal head injury as well as there's either a broken or something else on his leg. What it shows is that what we're trying to do with this is allow through combat or through other things, damage to different areas of the body. As well as poison, one of the things he doesn't have yet, but the idea is if you get poisoned or something and you actually see an image of the circulatory system there to show that you're pumping bad blood or you know something like that. So we really want to show people what the status effect is and then allow them through the healing experience through searching the body and identifying things kind of what the problems are and then do that sort of surgical mode thing. (obsolete, Vitality replaced with Fatigue according to comment in D-CCR on 1 APR 18)

29 MAR 17 V-SbS

Metabolism. Which plays into hunger, thirst, temperature, and all those and how they relate to ~~Vitality~~. The idea is is that depending on what your metabolism is you're either going to need food more often or less often. Poison will metabolize faster or slower. You'll get cold faster or slower depending on your metabolism. And all those things change as you get older. (obsolete, Vitality replaced with Fatigue according to comment in D-CCR on 1 APR 18)

29 MAR 17 V-SbS

There will be poisons that only exist in certain biomes. And so knowing how to create an antidote to a poison, or an anti-venom is going to be region specific.

29 MAR 17 V-SbS

Getting injured, needing to set a leg, broken bone, something like that. Poisons, venoms, and other things like that. Those all naturally will heal over time. ... Diseases are different in that they do not go away on their own. If you were to contract a disease in the game, then you have to find the cure for it. Otherwise the effects of the disease are permanent. That's one of the few things that are permanent. Disease in general will not kill you, it's not perma-death. But they generally will have some negative effect that are persistent until you find the cure for that.

20 DEC 17 W-SbS

Caspian and I were actually going over toxins, poisons and venoms last weekend, coincidentally. I don't have an answer for you as to "which poisons are going to be in the game," but I can say that the system will allow for a broad variety of effects and won't be easy to circumvent without knowledge of the poison involved and how to treat it.

20 DEC 17 W-SbS so does that mean that if the one trying to heal them either has to know exactly what poison was used because they know it themselves or they have the poison from the source of the attack? cause if you make a mistake with some poisons IRL and try and treat for something its not then that can make it worse and even unable to treat.

It definitely can mean that. It depends on the toxin, poison, or venom. You could also, for example, find such things that can't be cured at all, but are survivable if you can endure them running their course. Or potentially come across others that are incapacitating quickly, unless you can manage to expend no energy before being treated. That sort of thing.

16 JAN 18 W-SbS So will they leave behind footprints or a track you can follow, similar to what a Hunter would follow when tracking a wild beast?

That is one way you might leave behind evidence, but the sort of evidence left behind comes from a pool of potentials that goes beyond footprints, too. It won't always be a golden trail. you might end up having to follow a different sort of trail of breadcrumbs as an investigator. It's contextually dependent on the type of crime, the ability of the criminal to hide their tracks, and other such markers.

You could find yourself with no info other than the type of poison being used, for example, and might have to track down who could make such a poison and run it down from there. Hunting and investigating differ in that sense, though there should be some amount of mechanical crossover when it comes to things like blood trails, footprints, reading signs of a struggle, and a few other such areas. We haven't finalized the entirety of the investigation mechanics yet though, so I don't want to say too much here yet.

17 JAN 18 W-SbS

I'd imagine that for most folks, the legwork required to track something like that down isn't worth their time, but in most cases that won't really be the scenario, either. The more work required to pull off the crime, the more evidence you'll leave behind, making the "trail" back to you shorter. And, as you folks are thinking, something like poisoning a well is definitely going to take more work than just dropping a small vial of poison in.

24 MAR 18 D-CCR

Survival in CoE is all about maintaining consciousness. There's a series of survival values, each one starting at 0 and getting progressively more positive (or negative) as your survival becomes more difficult. As those traits go up, it makes it harder for you retain consciousness. The faster those others go up, the more often you must remedy those traits or sleep.

As an example.... the primary survival trait is Fatigue. When your fatigue hits 100%... you pass out. You'll be unconscious for 3 minutes during which time you're vulnerable to theft, coup de gras, etc. There's also hunger. Depending on your current homeostasis and exposure values, you get hungrier over time. At intervals above 0 an increase in hunger causes your fatigue to increase faster. As well, prolonged starvation can lead to "wounds" and also increases the rate at which poisons, venoms, and toxins increase your fatigue.

7 APR 18 D-CCR Since Vitality is now Fatigue, what is used for one's natural resistance to damage/poisons/etc.?

That's a genetic marker. Vitality and Fatigue are the same thing, we just changed it from being a good thing, to a bad thing. ie. higher levels of Fatigue are bad. A character will still respond to damage, poison, etc. as Fatigue, bringing you closer to unconsciousness. The resistance a person has is a genetic marker that's factored in as part of the Fatigue gain. "Rate of Gain". A "good marker" would mean you would gain fatigue slower as a result of poison, toxin, etc. While a bad one would cause it to gain faster.

15 APR 18 D-CCR

There are specific poisons, etc. that can allow you to CDG from long-distance with archery.

So you can’t just arrow them to the face? You gotta have some sort of extra skill to it?
No. CDG is always an intentional step beyond incap.

19 APR 18 D-CCR

You'll never die suddenly from a disease; that's what poison is for.

26 APR 18 D-CCR

Rabbit starvation is sort of a thing that could happen to you in CoE though, in extreme cases. I say "sort of" in that we haven't explicitly coded protein poisoning, but because of the way the food system works, you will kind of experience if you aren't at least a little careful about your diet. Well when out in the wilds. or starving, but then you're just regular starving, which is its own set of problems.

18 MAY 18 V-TfC

As you do things just going through the course of the day, fatigue builds up. Some things can reduce it. Sleeping can get rid of it completely. But your fatigue builds up when you take damage, or when you are poisoned and suffer some of its effects one of the things that's going to happen is it's going to spike your fatigue. And if your fatigue maxes out, you'll fall unconscious. If nothing changes from that point forward and you're okay, you're like static, you're not suffering any more damage or anything like that at all, you'll basically sleep off the fatigue and you'll be able to stand back up, and everything will be fine. But on the other hand, if there are ongoing problems, that fatigue may turn into incapacitation which is effectively death.

25 JUL 18 V-SbS

We're not tracking the state of your brain, the state of your heart, the state of your lungs... that said, the effect of these organ specific toxins, or diseases, or other infections, we absolutely are simulating. ... So we're not gonna track the state of your lungs, but we are absolutely going to have diseases and toxins that can rob you of your energy. So that you lose your breath more quickly. We are absolutely going to have poisons and diseases that can cause things like hallucinations or cause you to be delirious. These are all actually going to happen and you will even say that there are diseases and afflictions of the brain and the lung, but the reality is that there isn't a brain or a lung actually being affected.