Dungeons & Delvers Deep Dive Review: Alchemical Items & Poisons

Been a few months (not that I'm complaining), but you can head on over here if you want to see an in-depth rundown of every single alchemical item and potion, and poison in Dungeons & Delvers. Seriously, if you wanted to get it for free just watch Bruce's videos and take screenshots: so far the only parts that he's skipped are the sorcerer and warlock classes!

First off, around the 16-minute mark someone (jokingly) asked if this is Shadowdark:

You wound me, sir: the wife and I put something resembling actual effort into this! :-P Also it didn't take 3-5 years to get this out (only two), we didn't just shoehorn a couple of godawful houserules into 5th Edition and pretend it's something new or innovative, and we didn't bribe Bruce/he wasn't a long-term buddy of ours before all these in-depth reviews.

The reason for the five tiers of alchemical items is because in Dungeons & Dragons they're either worthless right out of the gate, or become obsolete after a few levels.

For example, a flask of alchemist's fire only inflicts up to 2d6 damage, and that's assuming that the target doesn't bother attempting a DC 15 Reflex save to extinguish the flames. Situationally useful at lower levels, but chump change at 5th-level when a rogue can deal +2d6 damage from a Sneak Attack, and a wizard can begin dropping 5d6 fireballs without having to spend 20 gold pieces each time.

Dungeons & Delvers solves this issue by allowing players to create and potentially purchase higher quality items. A standard quality fireflask inflicts 2d6 fire damage to a 5-foot radius, with a DC 11 Dexterity save for half. Not good enough? Go for an enhanced fireflask, which inflicts 4d6 damage and requires a DC 13 save. Still not good enough? If you can find or make one, an exceptional fireflask inflicts 6d6 fire damage and requires a DC 15 save.

Granted it costs a whopping 150 sp (this game uses a silver standard so that's quite a bit), but you can always invest in the Alchemy craft skill to reduce costs (and help increase your skill since craft skills are improved by using them).

Ya see? This is an actual innovation. We could have just lifted alchemical items out of 3rd and/or 5th Edition (same mechanics and all) and called it a day. We could have just used a partial list, like how so many vapidware hacks don't even give you a complete list of equipment. No, we identified an issue and went the extra mile addressing it, so now you've got alchemical items with teeth.

Another actual innovation are poisons. 

I've never liked how Dungeons & Dragons handles poisons (or diseases): I forget what most did in 2nd Edition (type F I think caused instant death far too quickly), but in 3rd Edition typically you had to make an immediate save (which doesn't make sense), and then always 1 minute later had to make another save (which also didn't make any sense).

If you failed either time, you might take some ability score damage or fall unconscious. Otherwise the poison or venom didn't impose any other drawbacks or penalties.

To be fair 5th Edition is even worse, because it's basically just "you take some poison damage and suffer disadvantage to some stuff for a short period of time". What makes this especially absurd is that since disadvantage doesn't stack for some reason, you can get poisoned or envenomed multiple times without affecting you beyond more poison damage: at least in 3rd Edition the ability score damage can take days to recover from.

While researching the apothecary class for Dungeon World, we learned that poisons and venoms don't operate like that. They typically take a while to kick in, cause a variety of problems, and if you survive the symptoms can persist for days. Yeah, it's just a game, but we wanted to see if we could create mechanics that at least better-reflected reality, would make poisons and venoms pretty scary, but also wouldn't bog down the game too much.

We're pretty happy with the end result: you make a save, there's a persistent penalty involved (reflecting a variety of symptoms that we describe), and you take some damage over time (which reduces your maximum WP for awhile), generally for minutes or even hours. It also gets worse if you're poisoned or envenomed multiple times.

The only thing I would change is to make different qualities of poisons like we did with alchemical items. So enhanced arsenic would be harder to resist, inflict more damage, and last longer. This would make them more useful at higher levels. Also it looks like standard quality antitoxin will keep you completely safe damage-wise from everything except basilisk's breath and basilisk's blood.

Ah, well, yet another innovation to add in 2nd Edition.