The LA Assignment Thread XII: the LA-bors of Heracles

[GreatWyrmGold]

Because most toxins are specced against muscles or nerves or other stuff that plants don't have. Have a spider bite a flower and tell me how well it works.

Flowers do not have stats in D&D. With few exceptions, all plants/fungi in D&D with stat blocks must have something analogous to nerves and muscles. But even ignoring that, toxins which affect all animals equally and plants not at all—the way they work in D&D 3.5—are quite uncommon.

There are plenty of toxins which target weaknesses possessed by all life-forms (or at least all macroscopic ones, for stuff like mitochondrial toxicants). Classic example: Arsenic is toxic to basically everything alive on planet Earth, because it's similar enough to phosphorus to get incorporated into a bunch of important macromolecules but different enough to screw them up. That's true for animals, plants, fungi, protists, and most bacteria/archaebacteria.

There are also toxins which only affect some species of animal, or which some species of animal are randomly immune to. Common example: Theobromine is toxic to most mammals, but rodents are resistant to it and humans basically immune. Of course, some toxins evolved to deal with specific predators and some predators evolved resistance to certain toxins. None of this is reflected in the rules.

It doesn't have to be, of course. Since D&D is a fantasy setting, most toxins come from magical creatures or substances. Even the giant spiders, arguably. The smallest monstrous spider is already the size of a cat, plenty big enough for an arthropod's respiratory system to be woefully ineffective.


You can suspend your disbelief enough to accept a spider the size of a house, and a talking tree that walks around, but not the former having venom that works on the latter??

[Tzardok]

This feels more like a failure of imagination on your part, not mine. You can't suspend your disbelief that a walking tree may not have anything like muscles?