I have never used poisons in my game play, but I am making a dhampire ninja and one of the main class abilities is the use of poisons. How do they work and which ones should I focus on.
How do they work and which ones should I focus on.
Short answer: Not very well and none of them.
Long answer: Poisons work great for NPCs, since the PCs are likely to be around long enough to feel their real effects.
However, when you use them, your target is likely to die outright from other people hitting them with swords, clubs, spells, and arrows before the poison does anything significant to them.
If you really want to use poison, your best bet is to just find the cheapest possible poison you can and hope they fail the DC for a minor debuff than invest a ton of money and effort into something you won't see a big payoff from.
This is for the Kingmaker campaign.
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I would advise against poison all together. Unfortunately, the action economy is horrible unless you can talk with your GM and have the swift poison ninja trick function as a swift action instead of a move action. In all honesty it really should be a swift action since it's worded that way and the alchemist can do it as a swift action.
Poison is just too expensive and has a high failure rate when you need it most.
That said, even though it's a feature of the ninja you won't be hurt by completely ignoring it.
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Use Drow poison, use it on secondary weapons (in Spring-loaded Wrist sheathes, or just in regular sheathes) and use them on creatures and people with low Fort saves.
Pretty interesting when the big bad spell caster falls asleep in the first round of combat.
Stay away from poisons that do ability damage (unless you find them from the campaign). While it can be nice and seem good, as other people said it generally does little in the duration of normal fights, and costs too much otherwise.