Poison

There are a few issues with poison which have gained some visibility with the rune lock:

• often not very relevant. At low levels it doesn't do much damage.
• adds a lot of annoying resting.
• has a lot of variance, both in time and damage.

I propose to change the effect of the poisoned status and try to address all 3 issues at once. The idea is to make poison status shorter, stronger and less random. By applying a logarithm (stepdown) function to duration and an exponential function to damage, stacking poison levels gives more damage over a much shorter time. More specifically:

Give it a standard duration in aut which expires with game time, not player action. Each poison level gives an average of 40 aut (random_range(30, 50)), but the duration is stepdowned(40). Each turn, the duration is decreased and damage is scaled to the total duration (which is the “poison level”). I've experimented with a “stepup” function for scaling the damage (2^(dur/40)/1.5). Of course, it's also scaled linearly with time_taken. But for simplicity, the example spreadsheet assumes 10 aut turns.

I think it should achieve the goals of eliminating the annoying resting, make it more threatening and less random. And there are a few knobs to balance it.

Poison vulnerability should probably also be looked at, (especially since we have Formicids). Currently, it seems much worse than fire or cold vulnerability. Maybe reduce the damage increase to 50% (like fire and ice). Damage per turn shouldn't be affected since you already get higher level of poisoning (maybe this needs to be tone down too?) — galehar 2013-12-11 15:20

Poison resistance (for players) now only allows avoiding poisoning 90% of the time.

Poison Arrow (partially reduces poisoning), chunks, meph and poisonous clouds (immunity), and monster resistances are unchanged. Curare gives full effect if the player gets poisoned.

Poison vulnerability was implemented as a Spider Form downside, but not as a mutation. It simply doubles the amount (duration) of poison status when poisoned, but doesn't affect damage (from any poisonous source). More importantly, one source of rP brings the resistance back to zero, but two don't make it positive, so Spider Form is never resistant to poison.

Earlier discussion here.

90% rPois didn't change much in gameplay (mostly because poison is wimpy anyway, I only thought otherwise when I was an awful player) but it seems to be confusing a lot of people - they come into IRC and ask why they're still getting poisoned with poison resistance. So this needs to be documented a bit better.
The Spider Form nerf works very well, however.
Also, can we get rid of rPois+ undead/demons and rPois++ entirely? This resistance doesn't need SIX different verisons! Monsters that can't get the poison status (undead, nonliving, demons with rPois+) should just go to rPois+++. Venom Bolt should get physical damage to make up for this, of course, otherwise it would suck even more - alternatively, demons with rPois+ could be made able to get the status instead of going to +++. — minmay 2011-12-17 20:44