Timers and Status Durations

Awesome. Thanks for the quick and thorough response.
I was searching in the wrong part of the forums for the timer-related stuff it looks like.

I went ahead and gave it a run. For the time being, I didn't edit any numbers myself but referred to existing numbers in the event scripts and created an event via Zone Editor. Ran into some funny results:

http://gyazo.com/14991fddb16dde20d1d9d261d569c7ad
http://gyazo.com/50b89f28958112a3d4cd1c33b07ed9b1
http://gyazo.com/edc3175c56932a6b523edb24872d2487
http://gyazo.com/d5fc6dbd67157a822bc94de7576e7484

So the timer itself I got to work and it would properly Game Over if the timer ran out. As for graphically, as seen in the screenshots, I'd get those funky pixels (which look like oddly colored parts of the chocobo sprite?) outside of battles. In battles, the timer would show up normally.

Also, with the way I had it set up, I could step over the event I created and restart the timer. Would the entrance event you were speaking of solve that issue? If so, how would I go about implementing that?