Does the Poisoned aspect stack?

Question

The "Venomous" effect (a [-2] optional addon for the Claw power) lets the character maneuver to place the "Poisoned" aspect on a target.

In each subsequent exchange, the target must roll Endurance to defend against an attack from the poison equal to your Fists score. Once the target concedes or is taken out (falling unconscious), the attacks stop [...]. (YS163)

A) What happens if a venomous garden gnome uses this maneuver against the same player twice, without the player shedding the first aspect before the second maneuver?

B) Is the answer to A different if the two attacks are made by two different venomous garden gnomes?

Bonus Question: Does the gnome get a free invoke (tag) on the Poisoned aspect he placed, as per the normal rules for maneuvers?

I am particularly wondering if there is any kind of precedent or ruling in DFRPG or other FATE products.

Answer 1

A: My interpretation of Venomous is that a character only ever gets 1 Poisoned aspect, but the difficulty of the Endurance check can be increased if a new attack is stronger.

B: If there are extra effects from the poison, change the Poisoned aspect to Poisoned With x Venom or an effect-related aspect like Slow And Lethargic and track them separately.

These two approaches keeps book keeping low, while allowing a variety of poisons into the game.

Bonus Question: Yes, each successful application of the Poisoned aspect gives opponents a free tag of that aspect. This counts even if the difficulty is not changed.

There is a lack of precedent on this issue. There is nothing in the FateRPG Yahoo! group related to Poisoned stacking. The Spirit of the Century poison rules are similar to DF's but don't go into this point either.

Answer 2

I would say that the effects of different venoms will stack but that the same venom will not. However, for each additional attack that succeeds, the difficulty to resist will increase -- you have more venom in your system.

What are different venoms? I would say that different species will have different venoms. So, venomous garden gnomes will have a different venom to venomous leprechauns. But a fishing venomous garden gnome will have the same venom as an exposing himself venomous garden gnome... Of course, if the gnomes were created with different magic (with different venoms) then they would be different.

Increase difficulty: -1 on each roll per X dose where X is a how much do I want to make this horrible for my players factor. The closer X is to 1, the nastier the venom.

Answer 3

The way my GM does it is that for more potent poisons, you buy extra poison maneuvers for the weapon and they apply with one hit at a time. That is, each hit can stack an extra poisoned aspect that counts as a subsection such as "Poisoned by Jack [1]" and "Poisoned by Jack [2]".

So when we faced some fae hornets it got nasty because it was multiple aspects from the same supercharged poison. Conversely, someone did this with a Red Court that had curiously strong saliva.