Poisoning in town.

[Anon Emous]

According to the Prima Origin UOSA guide pg. 31 publish date 98

Casting offensive spells in town, including Summon and Field spells and those listed below, is forbidden and subject to punishment. Any offensive spells cast in town will do no damage, but casting them will flag you a criminal. Offensive spells include the following: Clumsy, Curse, EQ, Feeblemind, Mana Drain, Mana Vamp, Mass Curse, Paralyze, Wall Of Stone?, Poison, and Weaken

. If there was a patch that changed this I would love to know when and where I can see it. I have noticed a lot of griefers relying heavily on the poison spell to kill players in town. While this does flag the person a criminal and gets them guard whacked I have notice that the poison does damage the innocent player. Like I said earlier I am not certain wether there was a patch to change this. If there wasnt I think it should be change to reflect the guidelines of the SA era.

[Hicha]

This same question was asked in 2009 here but I didn't see any specific response there to poisoning.

I did scour our threads for a good 30 minutes, and I do believe the answer relates more to magery spells doing 1 damage in town (Derrick's comment here.) Each tick should do 1 damage max.

Do not confuse this with alchemy poisons like Deadly poison (magery poison is not the same as alchemy poison, therefore is not affected by the town restriction.) It is very easy to make a new char handling a deadly poisoned dagger for townkilling.

[Kaivan]

That guide actually has it incorrect. Poisoning is not a direct damage (or AoE) spell, and is not subject to the restrictions from direct damage spells. This is confirmed in the demo, and through multiple sources during the T2A era. Also, we currently don't have things quite right either. Spells in town should do 0 damage, not 1.

[Anon Emous]

The UO demo is based primarily on a pre second age era you could even say a beta era. So many things in the demo dont reflect the later patches. Unfortunately Origin didn't feel it necessary to add patch changes to the demo considering it was meant as just that a demo. The guide that I have is a Origin product I actually purchases it off the UO website when I first started playing. If you can provide a link to confirm that the guide is inaccurate I would appreciate it.

[Kaivan]

Well, regarding the demo, it is a live image of a server from approximately May 1998, roughly the time that the Prima T2A guide was released. That being said, there are also no patch notes between 1997 and the demo that explicitly note a change to poisoning in town. Thus, we must operate under the assumption that there was no change.

As for other information, there are multiple newsgroup posts from that time that explicitly point out that poison worked in town while direct damage spells do not. Here are a few:

Ha, two guys I killed yesterday in seperate encounters were probably the
same guy. Flame strike on one, ebolt on the other. They ran into guard
areas & rather then hit esc to clear the target cursor, I just let the
spell off. They both said the same thing,

"I have GM resist!"

I told them both the same thing

"In Nox"
"Poison still works in town dummy"

>The other day I was attacked by a gang that came out of hiding and ran into
>my blades. I easily escaped and copied their names into my enemies list.
>Today I noticed one of them in the inn, macroing. So I got my second
>character out and gave him enough regs to cast a few poison fields. She got
>down to all the way red before -- she vanished. I'm not sure if she timed
>out or if she came back and noticed she was almost dead. I'm hoping she
>timed out so when she logs on she will be unprepared. Now my question is,
>was that a proper way to treat a lady? No not that question. Will poison
>field actually kill a person in town? Is there a better way?

When I kill macroers I just use the poison spell. Poison field is a
little chancy 'cause another pc or an npc could walk through it.
The poison spell can have the same effects as weak poison up to
greater poison. I don't know how it's determined what strength poison
you get; one of my accomplices regularly gets greater poison, while I
usually get normal poison or so, even though I have higher magery.

> wall disappeared and I high-tailed it back into Delucia. The now-grey
> healer chased me into town and tried to Corp Por me, but with the delay
> in spellcasting and me on a horse with a 14ms ping, I was three screens
> away before he got a chance to get it off and managed to escape death.

Unless Delucia is different or part of a current invasion quest, spells in
town don't do damage: Only thing that stings is poison spell. If it was me,
I would have just headed to the bank and counted on noto killers being
around.

These three sources frame the entire T2A era. There is also no mention of poisoning working differently on the newsgroup with respect to being cast in town.

[elhorno]

"When I kill macroers I just use the poison spell. Poison field is a
little chancy 'cause another pc or an npc could walk through it."

???????

I didn't think you could cast poison field in town.

[Faust]

I didn't think you could cast poison field in town.

Who said the poison field spell was initiated in town?

[Kaivan]

Actually, during T2A it isn't even relevant whether the spell was cast inside our outside of town, you could cast field spells in town. This wasn't changed until mid UOR with the following patch on 1/9/2001:

The following changes will be updated.

• Certain spells that were previously castable in justice regions will no longer be castable in justice regions. These spells include: Wall of Stone, Poison Field, Mass Curse, Paralyzation Field, Chain Lightning, Energy Field, Meteor Storm, Earth Quake, Blade Spirits, and Energy Vortex.