Immunity to Poison / Stinking Cloud

Pantalion

Behaviour: Stinking Cloud normally renders a character unconscious and adds a "poisoned" icon to their portrait. With poison immunity, such as with Ring of Gaxx, the character is immune to the poisoning, but still falls unconscious anyway.

Expected: Poison immune characters should be immune to stinking cloud as with every other poison effect.

Sylvus_Moonbow

Pretty sure Ring of Gaxx falls under this - the second response in regards to how poison is handled - as are a Cavaliers poison immunity.

From brave warrior CamDawg (March 2013)

"So, the real issue here is a pragmatic one. The game uses two ways to inflict poison.

One way is directly via the poison mechanism, used by things like the Assassin's poison weapon ability, various spiders, Asp's Nest darts, and so on. This is generally used to touch a target once and then inflict X damage over Y time (i.e. you get hit by a poisoned weapon and suffer damage over the next couple of rounds). Cavaliers are immune to this.

The second way is through the generic damage mechanism with a damage type of poison. This is the method used by Cloudkill as well as Prismatic Spray, Flail of Ages, poison mists, etc. This is a one-time effect (i.e. Flail of Ages does poison damage on hit, but won't affect you next round). Cavaliers are not immune to poison damage, as noted by the OP.

The problem is that providing immunity to poison damage effectively makes the target also immune to disease, since disease inflicts poison damage."

You can read the entire discussion on how immunity to poison works here:

https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/13141/cavaliers-not-immune-to-cloudkill/p1

Pantalion

Interesting. Well, the Ring of Gaxx grants immunity to both Poison and Disease (and Cloudkill) just fine, but since there's no damage involved with Stinking Cloud, and it renders both the wearer, and Hexxat, unconscious, it seems that perhaps its unconsciousness effect is not being classified as poison correctly?

Sylvus_Moonbow

Perhaps. That the Ring of Gaxx protects fully from Cloudkill is interesting, yet a Cavalier is not with their own poison immunity.

May very well be a bug, or simply a magical effect from Stinking Cloud that is neither poison or disease. Does the log window show what Hexxat or the wearer of the Ring of Gaxx is saving against to fail and become unconscious?

Demivrgvs

Old D&D editions never really stated if Stinking Cloud was a poison or disease effect. Nauseated condition bypassed immunity to both.

Otoh, Pathfinder and 5th edition consider Stinking Cloud a poison effect.

Cloudkill has always been a poison effect instead.

Technical stuff: vanilla's Stinking Cloud isn't a poison effect but just a sleep opcode shared by too many things like actual sleep, knock down effects (e.g. Grease), Command, etc.
Making a specific class or creature type fully immune to Cloudkill and/or Stinking Cloud is really easy but vanilla game is inconsistent when it comes to it and not as refined as it could.

Pantalion

@Sylvus_Moonbow

From the above reading, the reason why the cavalier "can't but should be" immune is because disease and "poison damage" effects are inextricably linked in the system. Being a vampire or being immune to both from the Ring of Gaxx works against Cloudkill because they're immune to disease, but being a Cavalier only resists poison, not disease.

As for what's showing up, it's saves against poison each time they're failing. I believe the initial burst did actually show up as "spell failed" or something, but remaining in the cloud after the first few rounds (this was out of combat after a wild surge, so no other contributing factors) they started saving normally.

@Demivrgvs

Yeah, that's about what I thought was happening. Stinking Cloud visually gives a poison status and a sleep/unconsciousness status, while only the unconsciousness status was appearing on the two immunes.

Interesting it bypassing such things on the former editions though. Dare I imagine what might nauseate a zombie or a pit fiend?