Potions Don't Suck

An Alternate Mechanic for Potions in Role Playing Games

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Background

I was doing my weekly perusal of newsletters and blogs for tomorrow’s (or Saturday’s) Weekly Geekly Rundown when I rad

Chris McDowall

’s most recent

Bastionland Presser

. The main article was great, and I’ll be including a brief comment on that in the Weekly Geekly, but another small item really stood out to me as worthy of further examination.

An Epic Experiment

You see, the subheading for Chris’s “An Epic Experiment” article was “And why potions suck.” I was immediately intrigued and had to check this controversial, to me at least, claim. I was mildly disappointed when I discovered that Chris wouldn’t be giving his own analysis of the topic, but instead merely provided a link to an article by Arnold Kemp (aka Goblin Punch) on the topic.

I write “mildly disappointed” because while I really was hoping to read Chris’s personal analysis on the provocative claim, I have enjoyed reading Goblin Punch’s “Goblin’s Laws of Gaming.” There’s a lot of good stuff in there and if you like old school gaming, I recommend checking out the Goblin Punch website.

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In the linked article Arnold argues against the proliferation of potions in OSR style games and finds that they “suck the fun out of the game.” The main reasons for this opposition are:

1. They are a potentially uncontrolled resource.

2. They are contrary to ‘the fiction’ underlying old school D&D gameplay. He says, “healing potions don’t come from fantasy fiction, they come from video games.” (He adds an update to this that I’ll comment on later.)

3. “Adventures are designed around their systems, so systems with lots of access to healing potions tend to require more healing.”

4. Intra-fight healing, aka healing during fighting encounters, makes combat more of a slog.

He also includes a number of reasons why potions should still be included in games. This demonstrates that his opposition to potions is more of a matter of how they are used rather than whether they are included in game play.

The positive aspects of potions are:

1. Potions help mitigate the effects of bad luck on the individual level.

2. Potions smooth out damage for whole party. As a shared resource, they become a kind of hit point pool that the party draws from.

3. Help gameplay balance between different numbers of players and can be used as a kind of dial to allow smaller groups to adventure for similarly long adventures. In other words, they extend the “work day” in a way that can be dialed based on availability.

4. Comebacks are exciting. They allow for narrative comebacks by PCs in combat.

He also mentions that D&D games are bursting with ancient shrines and altars, but doesn’t do much with them. This critique is followed by a series of rules alternatives that are fairly reliant on the Dark Souls video game and/or have a resource management focus that is similar to estus flasks in Dark Souls. Given the commentary on altars and shrines, I was surprised how little his proposed alternatives relied on the excessive inclusion of shrines and altars.

How I’ll Be Approaching Goblin’s Arguments

Goblin Archer © Jody Lindke/Underfut Productions 2024

In this article, I’m going to do two things. I’m going to critique his criticisms and provide a couple of other alternative rules for healing in your old school D&D games. These rules are something I’ll be considering in my Heroes of Karameikos B/X adaptation that incorporates a tad of 4th Edition game play (you can read a little about that in the linked article below).

Heroes of Karameikos First Steps (Attributes)

I’m not going to critique the Goblin’s arguments for why healing is cool, though I might in another post later as their focus is very “new school” rather than old school in processing due to their focus on hit points as a (sometimes shared) resource to be managed. Using hit points in this strict resource management way is a more recent development in mechanical analysis of roleplaying games that doesn’t quite fit with the old school mindset. Yes, the old school was about managing resources like arrows, spells, and rations, but the single encounter workday often mitigated thinking of hit points in the same way.

Let me give you two examples of why hit points weren’t thought of as a resource in the same way in old school game play. The first from the perspective of the kinds of foes being faced and the second from a typical combat strategy perspective.

Encounter 1 — The Carrion Crawler

DM: As your party delved deeper into the Caves of Terror and winds around the corner, they see a large worm shaped creature. It’s large black eyes reflect the light of your torches and a noxious chemical drips from 8 tentacles that surround its gaping maw. Roll for initiative!

DM (on its turn after initiative is rolled): The beast lashes out with it’s tentacle and connects with the uncovered skin on Sven the Not-So-Swift’s forearm. Make a saving throw vs. paralysis.

Sven: I failed.

DM: You’d better hope that Audrey the Arcane or Pietra the Pious don’t get paralyzed too. Because if they do, it’s going to take a bite.

Sven: Why? How much damage does the creature do on a bite.

DM: The damage it does is “you will be eaten.”

In the combat above, like so many combats in Basic D&D, hit points aren’t a factor at all. This is a case of “if everybody fails a saving throw, everybody dies” or “if Audrey and Pietra run away Sven is done for.” It’s a save or die situation. Those were not rare in B/X D&D and are one reason why HP weren’t considered a resource in the same way arrows and spells were.

Encounter 2 — The Goblin Room

DM: As you creep quietly down the tunnel, you notice a small amount of light coming from under a doorway 120 feet ahead and outside the radius of your own torches.

Sven: I’m going to walk silently for 90 feet, set the torch town, and walk silently the last 30 feet to listen at the door. What do I hear?

DM (making rolls for move silent and listen): You can hear creatures conversing in a squeaky language. You think you hear the words “Bree-Yark!” followed by laughter.

Sven: I wave for Heinrich the Huge to come over, followed by Audrey, to get ready for plan BSC.

DM: Plan BSC?

Sven: Breach, Sleep, and Clear!

DM (chuckles): Got it! I assume when you’ve completed the maneuver, you’ll head back to town?

Sven: Yeah, it’s Audrey’s only spell other than Read Magic and we’re out of scrolls.

Once again, the hit points of the PCs are the last of their concerns. Any fight at first or second level is potentially deadly and in old D&D there are no “bonus actions” to use for potions. Potions take a full action and are largely confined to emergency situations during combat and not thought of as emergency temporary hit points. They can be used in combat, but to use them is to forgo attacking. It’s a very different calculus and a properly cautious party relies more on Breach, Sleep, and Clear than on hit point management, but more on that later.

My Critique of Goblin’s Critiques

• They are a potentially uncontrolled resource.

Goblin’s point here is more for Baldur’s Gate 3 style play in 3rd edition and higher than it is for old school gaming. Essentially, it’s an argument that they are a resource that when given the chance players will always have their characters bring because free hit points are free hit points. That’s true and it’s reason 4,593 that I don’t have “magic shops” in my D&D games. As much as I love the story Bazaar of the Bizarre by Fritz Leiber, having magic items be a purchasable part of the economy has a lot of externalities that I’m not particularly comfortable with in my games.

Magic items should be rare enough that they aren’t available in random city shops. I love when there are purchasable items in video games, but I don’t like them in my Sword & Sorcery inspired home games.

They are contrary to ‘the fiction’ underlying old school D&D gameplay. He says, “healing potions don’t come from fantasy fiction, they come from video games.” (He adds an update to this that I’ll comment on later.)

Where I can understand all of Goblin’s other points in this list and think they are things that need/can be addressed by the DM when creating a “tone” for the setting, in this case Goblin is just wrong. Even when he adds his corrective update saying, he is “probably wrong about this, since potions were in '74 OD&D.  But I don't feel wrong.” He is not just wrong, he is very wrong.

I don’t know if it’s the first instance of healing potions in literature, but healing potions were used in the Shahnameh and that book is over 1,000 years old. “Christian!” you say with that irritated tone, “Are you saying that you think Gary Gygax read the Shahnameh and based healing potions on that?! That sounds pretty obscure man!”

I get it, but it’s not that obscure. Have you looked at Appendix N in the DMG? Did you notice something about the books there? While Lin Carter is only mentioned once by name, for his World’s End series, there are a lot of books that are a part of Carter’s Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series included there. Dunsany? Check. Anderson? Check. Tolkien? Check. Lovecraft? You get the picture.

Lin Carter loomed large over Fantasy fandom and his Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series was the GOLD STANDARD. In that collection is a little book called Dragons, Elves, and Heroes that was published in 1969. Within that book is a story from the Shahnameh called "Rustum Against the City of Demons." Setting aside some odd transliterations by Carter in the story from more traditional spellings of character names, it’s a very engaging story. It’s also a story that includes the following passage:

That dragon’s blood in a phial of crystal sounds like a healing potion to me and that’s from a tale that’s over 1,000 years old and it’s one that I think Gygax would be familiar with. More than that, I think that if I looked I could find many more examples in ancient literature and more modern tales of healing potions, or elixirs, or drafts, whatever, being used. They are a common trope that pre-date both video games and D&D.

That isn’t to say that the Goblin doesn’t have a point. He does, but it is the same point made earlier and that is that healing potions are EARNED. Rustum, aka Rostam, didn’t pick that vial of dragon’s blood up at the magic shop, nor did he use it during combat as a “bonus action.” It was a resource used when he had time. Had Rostam not been alone in the fight against the demon, he might have used it during combat but he was on his own.

The point for me is that while Goblin is wrong that potions feel contrary to the fiction, he is right that the ubiquitous use of them feels more video game than fiction.

Adventures are designed around their systems, so systems with lots of access to healing potions tend to require more healing.

I’m fairly willing to concede this point. So much of modern game design is concerned with the “three encounter work day” and building in means to extend that day that Goblin’s concern has been openly stated by people like Chris Perkins or Mike Mearls.

The thing is, that’s modern game design. I’m pretty sure that Gary Gygax didn’t give a moment’s thought to how much healing was available when making Keep on the Borderlands. Old school adventures like that have more in common with Darkest Dungeon style “characters as resources” play, and DCC style gauntlet play, than with potions as resources play. One of the things that has come out in the 1:1 play conversation is that it gets people to play more than one player character because there will be times when a player character is unavailable for play.

A big reason for that will be the slow recovery from injury in older D&D. When you only heal 1 to 2 points a day, more with a Cleric, your characters spend a lot of time resting. That encourages what Ars Magica called Troupe play where players have multiple PCs with multiple roles. There aren’t a lot of healing potions in older D&D and they are precious, precisely because they can extend the “workday.” Once again though, the problem isn’t that potions suck. The problem is that modern games treat them like stims in Helldivers instead of as a valuable commodity.

Old dungeon crawls were places to be explored over months of in-world game play. Modern dungeons get finished in in-game days. Each of those game styles encourages a different use of potions. That’s not an argument that potions suck. That’s an argument against a style of play. I think there is room for both styles of play, but I do wish more people were encouraged to try the older Troupe style play rather than the “novel length backstory” game we see a lot today.

Intra-fight healing, aka healing during fighting encounters, makes combat more of a slog.

This is true. This is especially true in older games where combat maneuvers are less narrative. There are no “power attacks,” “trips,” or “battle masters” in the older editions. Mechanically it’s “roll to hit” and “roll for damage.” Sure, you can spice things up, and many pages of ink have been devoted to helping DMs do this better, but the more rolls that are needed to finish a combat the more it risks drifting into roll/roll land.

The only think I’ll say is that Goblin actually undermines this point with his fourth defense of healing. It can be exciting if the PCs are losing for one player to heal up in time to finish the baddies. That is made all the more exciting when potions are rare.

The Point of the Critique and Proposed Mechanics

I think I see a theme here and that’s that potions should be relatively rare if you want them to feel like anything other than a resource. If you want them to feel like literature and not insta-cure extra hit points, you have to build that into the mechanics. Mechanics may not be narrative, but they help to shape the narrative that is produced. That’s hard to see in a lot of modern gaming, especially Actual Plays, where so many mechanics are ignored for the “rule of cool.” But the fact is that over reliance on the rule of cool means that it is the primary mechanic. That’s not bad in itself, but it makes the game less of a game and more of an interactive storytelling exercise.

Whether you want stories to emerge before, during, or after play will dictate how and which mechanics you prefer. I never like playing in games where the narrative emerges before game play (though I have a theory on how that might work well that I’ll write about soon), but I do like both when it emerges in play (often as a result of the rule of cool) or after play when you contextualize what happened and tell a story then.

So…what mechanics do I propose?

First, check out Goblin’s list of alternatives. They are pretty cool. I have two more to add.

Difficult to Recharge Potions aka Potions as Quests

Make potions difficult to acquire initially. Make the players do something equivalent, Sword & Sorcery equivalent, to Rostam slaying the dragon and collecting its blood in order to get their healing potion. Give the potion a number of “in combat” uses for small hp gains and a number of “out of combat” uses that heal the character fully. But then require them to repeat the exercise to recharge the potion. If you have to track down and kill a Carrion Crawler every time you want a healing potion, it’s going to make them a valuable resource. The key here is make getting/recharging potions into adventures of their own.

In an OSR game, this works well as healing is rarer and means more. In a more modern game, or a more “we are heroes even at low level” game like I’m trying to do with Heroes of Karameikos, it’s not that great a solution.

Altars and Shrines

When I saw Goblin mention altars and shrines, I thought he was going to present a full integration of potion use with these shrines. He provided a couple of rules that incorporated them, but not in a way that leveraged their ubiquity as much as I’d have liked. He required player characters to “make a significant sacrifice at a church, temple, or shrine” to replenish healing. That’s not the line I was thinking.

If, and maybe this is a big if but it fits with my Heroes of Karameikos and Against the Clockwork Orthodoxy settings, your campaign setting has a major conflict between Law and Chaos or Life and Decay, then those ubiquitous altars and shrines become a perfect vehicle for replenishing potions. Let the PCs find potions in treasure hoards of various creatures, but not too many. Keep them rare. If you want players to have access at the start of play you can have them gifted by a local church or patron if they serve one. Make it so that when they are used up, they are used up completely unless “refreshed.”

How do they refresh them? By liberating altars and shrines. When the players venture into the Lost City and fight Zargon, not only have they dismissed a major combatant for the side of Decay they also have an opportunity to consecrate the altar to Life. When they remove the taint of decay, it replenishes their potions. They could also recharge at existing shrines to the Gods of Life, if any are there. Make this take a certain amount of time like a week to accomplish.

This lets you limit the number of “insta-heals” that the characters have access to while also allowing them to be recharged in downtime. It also makes the potions thematically more narrative, even as it includes some of the purely mechanical applications.

I think it’s the best of both worlds though.

What are your alternatives?