How Do Games Play With Poison?

If your game only has room for one status effect, it’s probably going to be poison. It’s very versatile. Poison can fit into so many different places in a game’s combat design, character design, or even just the aesthetics of a game’s locations. Let’s talk about how games play with poison!

Featuring:
Slay the Spire
Most Final Fantasy entries
Monster Hunter World
Bug Fables
Spelunky 2
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
Super Mario 64
Streets of Rage 4
Left 4 Dead
Hades
Super Mario Odyssey
Sonic Mania
Pokemon
Most of Fromsoft
Elden Ring most of all

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[friendoftheoyster]

The biggest game design decision a developer has to make is whether to make poison Green or Purple

[lilliangoulston]

I really like the "badly poisoned" effect in Pokemon that you get from Toxic. It starts super small and doubles every turn... you HAVE to switch or finish the fight before it stacks too high.

On the flip side, I don't like how SMT and Persona bosses are immune to status effects like poison. It just feels like it defeats the purpose of it.

[Eternalwarpuppy]

The problem with poison in most RPGs isn't that the damage is not significant enough to justify poison attacks, but rather most bosses are going to be immune to most status ailments so you generally don't want to spend an action trying to apply one.

[indecision]

Fun fact about Galarian Weezing: despite its typing, it's something of an antithesis to poison. Its Pokédex entries state that it evolved (the real-world kind) in response to Galar's industrialization and purifies the polluted air it takes in.

[Ookamisieshin]

Sad you didn't mention how some monsters in Monster Hunter can have their abilities restricted if poisoned. The Kushala Daora summons a powerful cloak of wind that can knock your hunter down and deflect projectiles... until you poison it to remove that shield.

[Fnt]

One of my favourite use of poison is in Sekiro. You can eat a medicine that inflicts a weak poison effect on you, but it protects you from stronger poisons to build up

[hallwaerd]

One thing I like to think about with Poison is its relationship to Fire. In their common implementation, they’re both just DOTs (damage over time). Usually Fire does damage quickly but only lasts a short time, while Poison does damage slowly but lasts for a long time. However, there are more ways to differentiate them. In Monster Hunter, taking damage as a player leaves you with red health that regenerates slowly over time. Fire deals damage very quickly, making it an urgent threat, but it drains your red health first, giving you a buffer to deal with it. You can cure it by dodge rolling multiple times, which rewards you for having good reactions, but costs a short term resource: stamina. On the other hand, Poison drains your true health first, meaning you have no buffer, but it deals damage slowly so you have more time to address it. You can only heal it with an Antidote, so it rewards you for being prepared and bringing the right items, but if you didn’t, you just have to heal through it and wait it out, putting a strain on your long term resources. These distinctions even mirror their real world properties, where fire burns through your flesh from the outside in, but you can extinguish it by rolling on the ground, while poison attacks your body from the inside, and you‘ll need either an antidote or a good constitution to survive it.
I also want to mention that besides extraneous modifiers, you can differentiate DOTs by changing the properties of the damage itself. The game Hyperspace Dogfights has a DOT called Cascade. Like many DOTs, it’s applied in stacks that increase its duration, but more uniquely, its damage increases with the number of stacks, creating an exponential curve that rewards you for landing a lot of hits in a short time. And as mentioned in the video, some DOTs deal damage in percentages instead of flat numbers, making them more powerful against enemies with high health and defense.

[justinsinke]

Especially in games where you can see if an enemy will die from inflicted poison before it wears off, it can allow you to think of an enemy as a "dead man walking", AKA "I don't need to do any more damage to them because they already have lethal damage on them". This is even more true when DoTs such as poison are start of round effects rather than end of round. It creates an interesting dynamic in a game sometimes when an enemy is still a threat to attack, but they become something you tactically simply avoid to address other enemies because the DMW no longer requires your attention to remove as a threat.

[owltoe]

Cristales has an interesting take on poison. The battle system uses time travel as a mechanic. If you poison an enemy and send them into the future or bring them back from the past, they’ll take all the chip damage at once

[lightninjohn]

Don’t forget, in Hades there’s another way to clear the poison in Styx. Clearing the room. So, whenever you get poisoned you basically have to make a split second decision on if it’s faster to clear the room or go to one of the mandrake pools. Of course, if the room is covered in the poison pools you might realize that going to a pool is pointless since you’ll be poisoned again anyways

[diegoperea]

Bad design is when a RPG boss is immune to status effects. Why you give me an option to poison everything if I can't use it when it really matters?

[Epic_C]

I liked how in Final Fantasy XI the concept of poison would cause a sleep spell to immediately wake you back up. As a healer, you could intentionally poison yourself with items as it was crucial when fighting certain enemy types that caused area sleep effects.

[Hanimetion]

Poison in Fire Emblem Engage has a similar effect to Symphony of the Night in that instead of direct damage, it increases the damage you take from attacks, and it can stack

[Datarror]

One more design element in the Monster Hunter example is that the rate of buildup benefits greatly from rapid, repeated hits, making certain weapon choices inherently beneficial to status-forward builds. Since each weapon's control scheme is substantially different than the next, it adds a strategic element to the planning stage before a mission, and the game implicitly rewards players for experimenting with different weapon types if they've been stuck on one. It's a great way of making Poison feel like an active choice rather than a tacked-on benefit or lingering in a long spell list.

[Mordalon]

Pokemon also has the Guts ability which boosts a Pokemon's attack when afflicted with a Status effect. There's also the Toxic Orb item which can inflict the holder with that status, or a Toxic Orb holder can use the Fling or Switcheroo moves to inflict that status on the opponent as well.

[Beastimus]

I really like the way the game Windbound uses poison, instead of directly eating through health, poison increases your stamina usage. Whenever you try to do something that requires stamina and your stamina bar is empty, you start to lose health. It also gives you a sort of nausea effect.

[eddycabreja]

You should talk about water levels: the themes around them, why they're so infamous and how to build around that.

[eh]

16:07 funny thing is the galarian one would be the best to be around since it collects smog and air pollution in it, and not spewing it

[spectrified]

I’m fairly new to D&D, and recently in our campaign we’ve run into a few poisonous situations. Kinda funny how the first time I was poisoned I thought “okay how many HP am I going to lose at the start of every turn?” just based on how poison has worked in all the video games I’ve played. When in fact poison works differently than all that—it causes you to roll at disadvantage for all attack rolls and ability checks (kinda like your Castlevania example here—makes you worse at everything). And then a fun consequence was that because of those incidents, I understood the usefulness of the Lesser Restoration spell (can be used to cure poison), which prior to all that had seemed like an unnecessary use of one valuable learned spell spot.

[redsilversnake]

You mention poison Final Fantasy tending to be weak, but there is a notable exception; FFXIII has an unusually high damage percentage for it, to the point that it's actually recommended against the final boss - which is shockingly not immune - due to the fight being on a timer.