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Looking at the poisons in the Palladium fantasy book suddenly made me think: The ingestive poisons take 2-8 melees to take effect. But the injected ("blood") poisons and contact poisons don't mention a time. We have always played it as they take effect immediately after being hit with a poison arrow or whatever (presuming the victim fails to save), but it occurs to me now that maybe that isn't the case. Almost all of the injected poisons do a one-time-only bout of damage, only a rare few (like Witchbane) do damage over multiple melees. This means that "negate poison" type powers are useless against almost all injected poisons, as the damage is already done. But if there is a delay between exposure and the effect, then negate poison suddenly becomes much more useful. How do you guys play it?

I always treated them as insta-effective unless stated otherwise. You make a good point, and I can see an argument for making them take effect after 1 melee round or two. However, this introduces an additional layer of book-keeping, which I prefer to minimize.

I guess a fair compromise could be to ask a player if he/she plans on using a power/antidote. If so, give them the time. If not, make it insta-effective and move on?

I redid the poisons a bit and had the poisons still do damage, and the damage is spread over their PE in rounds (so a pe of 10 means 150 seconds for all the damage to be done, and (damage/pe) is how much damage they take per round, so a person with a high PE has a higher chance of survival, but I also added a negatives token depending on the poison that also gives negatives to actions while poisoned and negate poison will immediately stop damage and remove the negatives (soothing touch will also remove the negatives)

Its hard to fight when you are trying to not poop out your liver.

Thanks for the feedback, guys.

One has to go through the liver and be absorbed which takes longer. The other is a direct into the blood stream without filter.