Taking the Sting Out of Poison

During the time when I was subscriber to Dragon, there was an article entitled "Taking the Sting Out of Poison." Written by Chris Landsea, it appeared in issue #84 (January 1984) and was itself something of a follow-up to a previous article "Poison: From AA to XX" by Charles Sagui. Sagui's article appeared in issue #32 (December 1979), which was before I was even aware of the existence of Dragon, let alone a regular reader. However, I was nevertheless familiar with it, because it had been reprinted in Best of Dragon Vol. II. As I mentioned recently, I was a huge fan of Best of Dragon and can still remember many of the articles included in these volumes, including Sagui's.

I bring this up as a bit of background to an inchoate thought I've been having lately regarding poison in Dungeons & Dragons. Now, I've never really had a problem with save or die mechanics and have, in fact, defended them in the past. I'm still not opposed to them in principle, but I've been thinking a lot about hit points and what they're supposed to represent in D&D. If we are supposed to believe, as Gary Gygax suggests in the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, that only a small portion of a character's hit point total represents his "actual ability to withstand physical punishment" with the rest being a measure of his "skill in combat ... "sixth sense" ... sheer luck, and the fantastic provisions of magical protections and/or divine protection," why does the character's ability to survive most poisons come down to a single roll of the dice? Would it not, in keeping with the Gygaxian understanding of hit points, make more sense if poison dealt damage and a saving throw, if used at all, served to mitigate the amount of the damage?

As I thought about this more, I dimly remembered that the the much-beloved D&D Rules Cyclopedia included the following optional way of dealing with poison:

Admittedly, I haven't thought much about the implications of this approach. On first blush, though, I must admit to finding it appealing. Poison is still very deadly. Consider, for example, a giant spider, whose poison under this scheme would dealing 4d6 damage on a failed saving throw and even 2d6 on a successful one. That's not nothing by any reasonable definition, but it introduces a little more variability in the result, as well as being more consonant with the what hit points seem to represent.

I don't know; I'm still pondering this. No doubt some will think I'm going soft in my old age and perhaps that's true. I can only say that I've been spending more time reading other RPGs roughly contemporaneous with D&D and AD&D, like Gamma World and RuneQuest, among others, and looking at how they handle deadly effects like poison. There's quite a range of approaches and some of them strike me as worthy of serious consideration. That's in addition to my aforementioned questions about the interface between such effects, hit points, and saving throws. As always, I appreciate hearing others' thoughts on this matter.