Whats the difference between counters and indicators in metazoo?

[lochside]

Everyone is talking about the new changes to the confusion status effect, but i am still so confused about status effects in general lol can someone explain counters and indicators? idk why theyre different and im not sure if im even using them properly honestly

[Alex]

Whoa, took me a while to reply to this, but there is a bit of a difference!

So pretty much all status effects (that is, poison, burn, confusion, sleep, frozen, and paralyze) use indicators to indicate that these status effects are active. An indicator is placed by putting one of the Spellbook tokens onto a Page/card.

A counter is a little number that goes on the indicator to say how long that status effect is active for, or how much damage that status effect does. For example, a burn indicator says that you have been burned, but its counters dictate how long you will be burned for.

Not all status effects have counters; paralyze, sleep and confusion, for example, do not. Poison, burn and frozen do, and these counters all function a bit differently. For poison, counters indicate how much damage you take, and for burn and frozen, these counters decide how long those status effects remain active.