Should that be allowed? I know I prefer to encourage clever gameplay. But once you figure out this trick it's pretty much a gamebreaker .

Is it okay to make it so that poison is done with a hazardous chemical that kills anything slowly but keeps them awake at the same time. Just make up anything for gameplay sake?

Woah, status effects work? Which mythical game is this? Just about all games I know of, the status effects only work on enemies you could easily kill anyway!

But yeah, it's something to think about. You could possibly even wonder if you need to have "Sleep" status effect in the first place! Having an enemy naturally wake up, perhaps having sleep be successful once per enemy in battle but less effective each casting or something could do as well. How will enemies being afflicted with a status effect compare to the party? Will the party be screwed over but the enemies be just slightly bothered? Will it be so effective that the player can win the game without effort? (See: Vanish/Doom in FF6). These are things you can think of. What if a player doesn't go with Poison, but a similar damage over time spell/effect? What wakes up an enemy?

There's a lot more to status effects than just tossing in the same popular ones in a game just because they have them.

You could always let them cancel each other out. It's logical that you can't sleep when you're poisoned. You could also just make sure this strategy can rarely be used, and when it can it's for a good reason. Simply make it so most enemies who can be poisoned are immune to sleep and vice versa, and if not immune than really strong to.

Good gameplay also lies in understanding the benefits of sleep and poison. It could also be very valuable to give poison a defense reducing effect, make it wake up sleeping enemies after the turn, and make sleeping enemies have a higher chance to be criticaled. That way your faster hero poisons, and a slower but more powerful hero attacks for high critical damage.

Be creative with this. But it's good you mentioned it because I hadn't realized the combo.

A mythical game by the crazy self praising genius Psychofreak of course . I really don't know why Status effects are so neglected though, which just gave me an idea to start a New Thread.

Anyway to answer your other questions, how effective is it for the player to win the game without effort? As I said it's a gamebreaker. If the poison and sleep combination were to work in a boss fight, there would be a one in five chance of the player winning with one blow after the boss wakes up.

Now to Titanhex. Well I'm glad that sounds logical enough for me to play it so that poison condition automatically wakes up sleeping targets.

I also realized this could also be great idea to add yet more strategy to my game . A super boss where you have to use toxic on yourself to stay awake. Crazy yes, but it works. The players will never see that one coming .

depends on how powerful said strategy is compared to OTHER strats. i.e. in a game where poison does 1 damage each round, and the sleep puts the enemy to sleep for about 4 rounds (and the sleep condition is undone if you hit them), you'll effectively have dealt 4 damage over the entire course of the tactic. However, said tactic probably takes 2 rounds to set up, or 2 actions from two separate characters. That's 2 rounds for 4 points of damage. Now what if in those two rounds, they could have said, each landed a 2 damage hit. that means they could have dealt 8 total damage in the time it took to set up the attack. Right there, the poison + sleep combo might not be all that great.

it depends entirely on the exact numbers and conditions of the status.

In any case though, it seems that depowering the sleepxpoison combination will inevitably make either poison or sleep too underpowered and vice verse and etc. It seems better to just close off that combination altogether.

that or you can go another route, which is build in ways to break this combo.

for example, make poison and sleep something that the victim can resist every round, but bench the chance of success tied to the actual strength of caster. so, the spell comes from a powerful foe will be harder to resist. Now, make the damage potent, but not supremely so. 5%-10% is a good benchmark, I think. Then, institute a hard limit on the time limit of both spells. This way, the spell will end, but it still can be very potent in the short duration.

and of course, if you REALLY want to make sure it's now too powerful, you can always build in a spell that heals status effects, and give it to certain enemy lackeys. This means that the lackey still needs to actually waste a round casting it (which is a much bigger price than you think. In games like this, action is one of the greatest costs), but it can decisively end this combo.

Also, don't forget every enemy/character will have their own level of resistance towards these things. some enemies will just outright be immune to either poison or sleep. Some enemies might take no poison damage at all, while others might just not sleep at all.

The key to making this combo not game breaking, is to make it effective in an optimal setting, but then give plenty of routes for the enemy undo it. (at a cost, of course)

One thing to keep in mind as well, to not cheap out an enemy AI by exploiting its healing its own status effects. I mean, except for FF5 and probably one other game, I don't think I've really seen this much. But otherwise, you can do
>Float
>Enemy takes its turn to dispel it
So while you have one person constantly wasting the enemies turns, the others doing damage/healing and all. Sometimes an enemy is fast enough to get in more attacks, but just something to be aware of as well.

Flavor-wise, if an enemy is asleep and it's in pain, the pain should wake it up. So poison damage should wake-up the enemy.