Fun way to disincentivize player from ingesting more unknown liquids [closed]

Question

While we rotate who is the DM, we have a player who constantly drinks and eats random garbage. He is playing the goblin race, and while having very good ingestion he is not immune to poisons. At our last session, our party finished a particularly hard quest spanning 5-6 sessions. As the reward the players were rewarded with 2 dwarven rare items and a particularly potent poison. It was not explicitly labeled as poison, but it was marked with xxx and a smog formed as a skull formed when he opened the bottle.

Then he drank it without smelling it or doing anything to check if it was poison

I even explicitly asked him if he really inteded to drink it, which he replied yes. Being flabbergasted someone would drink it, I made the player roll a constitution save which he rolled a 9. (I see this as a failure for reference). I said that he feels nothing for now. As I wanted to come up with something good.

So what should I do? I of course do not want to straight out kill the player. But something omnious should happen.

EDIT: Our party of 5 players are currently level 5, playing standard 5e.

Answer 1

Midnight Tears is a good option for delayed effect

What is a bit unclear to me is why you do not know what the Constitution DC for the poison is. Poisons in 5e have a clearly defined effect, and a set save DC, so there should be no question what they need to roll to make the save, and what happens, if they do not.

If this is a poison from the rulebook, and there is an actual defined effect of the poison, then you should have let that effect happen. Actions have consequences, and it is not as if you did not give him several extremely clear warnings that drinking it is a bad idea. Also, in 5e, poison often does not "straight out kill" a PC -- save or die is a concept that 5e moved away from for the most part. Here is the effect of one of the most deadly poisons published for 5e, Purple Worm poison:

A creature subjected to this poison must make a DC 19 Constitution saving throw, taking 42 (12d6) poison damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one.

That is, even if they fail their save, if this kills them outright depends on how many hits they have. Only if after losing all their hits the remainder is as large or larger as their hit point maximum, they will die outright from massive damage. Else they just drop to 0 and are dying, with plenty of time for their group to stabilize or heal them. And even if they die, a group of 5th level can have access to spells like revivify, so even that might not be the end of the character.

If you designed the encounter and just noted down the poison for yourself as a "potent poison" to figure out what it would do later when the players use or identify it, you have to do that now. What you make the poison do in this case is up to you. You could take a slightly less deadly poison, Midnight Tears in particular seems like a good match for your delayed effect (using the Con save you already had them pre-roll):

Midnight Tears (Ingested). A creature that ingests this poison suffers no effect until the stroke of midnight. If the poison has not been neutralized before then, the creature must succeed on a DC 17 Constitution saving throw, taking 31 (9d6) poison damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one.

You can find the list of "official" poisons on p. 257/8 of the DMG.

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P.S. As an aside, as long as it is not annoying the other players, I do not think you need to disincentivize the goblin player from eating random things -- to me it is a fun way to characterize the unwise, curious character. You only need to demonstrate that their decisions can have consequences, and that maybe, they need to be a bit more careful with this if they do not want a repeat experience.

Answer 2

You seem to be taking the position that the player has done something stupid and needs to be taught to behave better. I would argue that this is not the case: The player did exactly what they intended to do because their character is a garbage-eating goblin with no sense of self-preservation. They've decided to play a jokey-joke character, and part of the bit is occasionally doing something very stupid. No punishment is going to make the player alter their behavior because having something bad happen is the point of the bit. You can't dissuade a comedian from telling jokes by laughing at him.

Now, I think it's a valid question to ask what kinds of poison effects would justify the dire implications of the packaging without just outright killing the character*, but if you're hoping to disincentivize the player from doing this kind of thing, you're simply not going to get that result regardless of what you do. Personally, I think you should lean into the player's obvious desire and do something comically awful to them, like permanently transforming them into a llama/toad/duck/etc, which will require a sidequest to cure.

*But not for Stack Exchange, as "idea generation" is one of the things we explicitly don't handle here (because it doesn't have a "right answer").

Answer 3

Well, the player is definitely expecting something dramatic to happen!

My suggestion would be to have the character start gradually transforming into something. Preferably something that ties in to the plot, if possible. So if he's turning into a owlbear, for example, you might say that he has occasional flashes of irrational fury, that he starts sprouting first fur and then feathers in odd locations, and then gradually turns into a monster! For a twist, you can say that it doesn't increase the character's size, so he's a goblin-sized owlbear. It will be less disruptive if you pick a humanoid monster to transform into, of course, but also less impactful.

Your big choice here (and with many other effects of the poison you might think of) is whether to do it fast or slowly. It could be overnight or it could be over the course of the campaign - both would work.