General RPGs' Poison Status Ailment

The most common status ailment in RPGs, besides KO/Unconscious/Dead (which sort of doesn’t count anyway), is probably Poison.  Silence, Petrify, Paralyze, Bleed, Confuse, Sleep, they’re all popular and common enough, but when all is said and done, if your RPG has status ailments, the only 1 that you’re pretty much guaranteed to see within their ranks every time, is Poison.  Hell, the Poison status ailment will even show up to RPGs where it’s completely redundant--Mass Effect 3, for example, already has a Burning status ailment which gradually lowers HP, but it still has Poison, too, to do the same thing.  Poison is as much a bedrock of the RPG formula as swords, menus, and lazily using "The Legend of" as a way of getting out of creating a real title for the game.

Too bad it doesn’t really make much sense most of the time.

See, here’s the thing.  99% of the time, the Poison status effect causes a character’s HP to deplete by a set amount each turn.  Sometimes it can kill a character, but more often, it’ll bring them to 1 HP but never take them below it.*  Either way, though, Poison’s main thing, and almost always its only thing, is a gradual lowering of HP.  Which...really doesn’t have much to do with real, actual poison.

I mean, yeah, you can look at a process of gradually lowering HP as a case of having a poison gradually killing you.  And to be sure, gradually worsening your physical condition is definitely what poisons generally do.  But you could more effectively simulate that through a condition like Final Fantasy’s Countdown status ailment, wherein your character just straight up dies after a set number of turns.  Because, honestly, the symptoms that poisons generally induce really just don’t connect to the idea of constant HP loss.

Here are the most common effects of poisoning upon the human body in real life, according to familydoctor.org: Nausea and/or Vomiting, Diarrhea, Rash, Redness or Sores around the Mouth, Dry Mouth, Drooling or Foaming at the Mouth, Trouble Breathing, Dilated Pupils or Constricted Pupils, Confusion, Fainting, and Shaking or Seizures.  Quite a nasty little list, isn’t it?  And I think it’s only fair to add Paralysis to that list, because I believe that list is more about ingested poisons, and not toxins that have been introduced into your system by venomous creatures, which is actually the more common cause of Poison status in games.**  And from what I understand, paralysis is a common and very dangerous part of a LOT of venom.

But really, when you look at that list, not a lot of it really seems like it lines up with constant HP loss.  I mean, when you get right down to it, HP loss is pretty easy to define, in terms of its representation in RPG combat: it represents standard, traditional harm upon one’s person.  When an enemy punches, stabs, slices, burns, freezes, melts, electrocutes, crushes, or does some other form of basic, wounding damage to a character, HP is lost to show that damage.  So a status ailment like Bleeding, or Burn, those make a lot of sense as ones defined by a continuous loss of HP, because bleeding represents an ongoing harm that continues to lessen the body’s ability to function and stay alive, and when you’re burning, well, the fire causing the pain and damage is ongoing until it’s put out.

But Poison’s symptoms?  They don’t really seem to add up to the same sort of basic harm that HP loss implies.  Even if it’s a debilitating internal matter, that sort of thing still seems more akin to other status ailments that affect characters’ abilities to act, rather than outright ongoing damage.  I guess nausea and vomiting work for HP loss in a couple of special cases like the Loathing and South Park games, where Disgust is an actual elemental force as much as Fire and Ice, but that’s as far as it goes, really.

What they ought to do is fully commit to the relative newcomer, Bleed, to be the constant HP-draining status ailment for RPGs, going forward,*** and rework Poison into an entirely new thing.  Like, they could make Poison into something really cool as status ailments go, transform it from the mild annoyance it’s been into 1 of the nastier, more powerful inflictions to suffer from.  What they could do is, each turn a character has Poison, they suffer a varying status effect associated with real-world poisons and venoms.  They might be paralyzed this round, or be silenced to simulate their throat closing up, or have a 40% penalty on physical attack damage as they suffer from seizures making it impossible to swing a sword correctly, and so on.  And then the next round, a new symptom of poisoning hits the character...but there’s only a 30% chance that the previous round’s symptom disappears, so as time goes on, these ailment symptoms continue to stack and make the character more and more incapable of fighting.  And you could even have the element of a descent in condition toward death, the way the original HP loss was presumably intended to imply, by having a rule that once a character’s accumulated 4 or 5 symptoms, they die.

That’d be kind of interesting, right?  And it’d certainly give Poison a bit more bite as an ailment, which seems more realistic to me.  Ingested or injected toxins ain’t generally something you can solve or temporarily delay by gritting your teeth and slapping a bandage on yourself.  Poison should be a status ailment with enough gravity that you want to make a priority of curing it.  I say leave the inconvenience of HP drain to Bleed, and make Poison the serious threat that it realistically should be.



















* Which is itself something that makes no sense.  Why in the world does Poison in RPGs so frequently refuse to be the factor that kills you?  If someone in real life is brought to the brink of death by poison, and that poison isn’t done running through their system, then it sure as hell isn’t gonna just sit back and wait for them to recover a bit before continuing about its business; it’ll just keep going and finish you off.  But apparently whoever designs the poisons in RPG Land is a downright gentleman about their debilitating toxins.  Of all methods of attack, you wouldn’t think that poison would be the one that insists on giving you a fighting chance.


** And since we’re on the subject, this makes Poison unrealistic in yet another way, since most enemies induce the effect in ways that make it venom, not poison.  I mean, mushroom enemies that release spores in the air that you breathe, sure, poison.  Mages that cast a spell that inflicts the status ailment, alright, poison.  But bites from snakes, spiders, and demons?  Stings from bees, scorpions, and jellyfish?  Wounds from assassins’ daggers, darts, and arrows?  That should called Venom, not Poison, if we want to be technically accurate.

I guess there ARE a few games that distinguish the 2 (Aldorlea Games titles, with their insatiable lust for collecting and inventing status ailments, frequently have both Poison and Venom).  But even they usually just seem to use the distinction as a way of making a more powerful version of the Poison status ailment, rather than distinguishing Venom by its origins and delivery.


*** And if they really want multiple HP-loss status ailments, they can always take a page out of South Park: The Fractured but Whole’s book and have Bleed and Hemorrhage be separate status ailments to accomplish this.  Not to mention that Burn still does the trick, too.