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Urtica dioica

May 27, 2015 at 9:00 am
filed under Roleplaying
Tagged 5E, D&D

I was walking in the woods the other day, and happened to pass by multiple patches of stinging nettle. I’ve got D&D on the brain lately so of course I thought, “how could we interpret this through the lens of D&D?”

Growing up, I didn’t know what stinging nettle was. We didn’t have it where I lived. It stings. I don’t think it would kill your average human. It would be fairly agonizing in the meantime.

In D&D, the pain should be excruciating and too much exposure should kill you.

In terms of damage, I want to keep it in the realm where it might not kill your average commoner immediately. Commoners have a d8 for hit points, so you have some leeway if you give them the maximum. I chose 1d6. 1d8 would work approximately as well.

For the pain, I turned to conditions. Any one of these could be appropriate:

• Blinded
• Incapacitated
• Paralyzed
• Poisoned

I chose poisoned. To start with, poison is often portrayed as painful as it works. It’s also similar to the mechanism of real-world stinging nettle: hollow needles that inject histamine.

I’m pretty happy with this, and I will try to incorporate it into the next D&D game I run.