Good video! To me, the main problem with consumables is that it's just really hard to turn "drinking or not drinking a potion" into a character-ful moment. It's almost always purely a math problem, a cold calculation of whether or not your odds of "winning" are better if you down the juice. And because you can have a lot of potions, it ends up being a cold calculation that you have to make over, and over, and over again, and it takes up so much brain space and so much table time that could have been spent on more interesting things. Two (video) games where I like the approach to consumables (they both have TTRPGs but I haven't played their TTRPG versions): Cyberpunk & the Witcher. In Cyberpunk 2077, consumables aren't... well, consumed. Once you get a new type of consumable, you just have that consumable, for life. But, you have a global cooldown for consumables: you have 2 charges, and you're generally not going to get them back over the course of a single combat encounter. If you specialize in technique, you might get that number up to 3 or 4, and maybe get some perks that give you one charge back when you kill an enemy or something, but generally speaking, you start each fight with 2, and that's all you'll get for that fight. That removes a lot of the weight from the decision - now taking a consumable almost becomes one of the narrative beats of the fight. When you down your first one, you know you're about 33% dead. When you down your second one, you take it as a sign that the combat has been very intense and that if you don't win it soon you'll get merced. Your consumables become a pacing thing, rather than a tactics thing. In The Witcher, potions famously have a toxicity score. So if your max toxicity is 100, and your healing potion has a toxicity of 20, you can take 5 healing potions that day. Or you could mix in an elixir with a toxicity of 50, that turns your blood into poison that burns monsters when they hit you. Or you could mix in an elixir that gives your spells an extra oomph at the cost of 30 toxicity. And maybe if you want to specialize in alchemy, you can reduce the toxicity of the potions you create, or increase your max toxicity. This one definitely falls more into the type you talk about in the video, where you still track every individual potion, and it's still very much about tactics rather than character moments, but there's just so much flavor that it kind of gets to get away with it :p And the hard-coded limit on how many consumables you can use at once makes it pretty healthy as a gameplay mechanic - you don't encounter the typical skyrim issue where players hoard hundreds of potions "just in case", or have to worry about how many potions your player might have access to when balancing encounters because an encounter for someone with 5 potions and one for someone with 200 potions are going to feel very different.
In my mind, the first question should be whether to have healing consumables at all (and whether they're usable in combat). As I see it, the most natural way to integrate healing into many games is to have a character that knows the setting-appropriate first aid/medicine/surgery skill and have them heal the party up. If the characters have a meaningful relationship and/or a disagreement related to what just happened, it's also an excellent roleplaying opportunity.
That first question is absolutely astute and I wish more designers would ask that question rather than assume they need healing potions (or their equivalent) in every game! When we were working on TFE, we started out by balancing it around no healing consumables to make sure the core game worked just fine without them. That way the players don't feel obligated to carry their sack full of healing potions to play the game "properly". We then layered on top of that some fun ones that don't make or break the core flow of the game.
In my system I am working on, healing potions are used by free action (so basically no action wasted), but they are toxic, which means that every time PC drinks healing potion, it must make an immunity roll to prevent bad side effects. And this roll is harder the more potions you drink. My system is less about resource economy and more about risk/reward balance.
@@shnobz_kotik Ooh that's fun! Adds a risk/reward to them. Are all potions like that? Made with dangerous alchemical processes that only a foolhardy adventurer would dare dance with?!
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames I would always include the dangerousness in medicines that provide instant benefits or relief. Either including a risk of instant downside or include a long-term side effect on the character that they will have to compensate for later.
As much as I dislike attrition-based combat, I think your intial example really undersells how interesting the decision to drink a simple health potion can be. In games designed around attrition, like OSR games, downing a health potion can be a really impactful and interesting decision! The fact that everyone's actions are fast and simple also make drinking a potion feel like a complete turn, as opposed to games like 5.0e where drinking a potion has to stack up against the Wizard taking a 10 minute turn that clears half the encounter.
@@yshabash Ah yes, OSR is a space I have little experience with, so I refrain from giving commentaries on it; a few folks have pointed out that it feels pretty good in OSR games, that's good to hear!! 🤠
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames Thanks for the response! For the future, I think some things that make it feel better in the OSR are that: 1. Resources are scarce and important, so just deciding to use one is an interesting decision 2. Dungeons are deadly, so just having a few potions in your inventory (but never enough) creates great tension on when to use them 3. Characters have low health, so even a few points of healing feels very impactful 4. The most common action is making (just) one attack, so chugging a potion is often a better use of your action economy than taking a different action (no feeling bad cause your turn only consisted of drinking a potion) Maybe some stuff worth stealing there for potions in other games.
I think there are two problems with D&D 5e that make the healing potion a "bad item". One of them you mentioned in the video, you consume the potion during a fight and the "state" of the combat is reset, or you give a downed character the potion so they can get back into the fight (only to be downed on the next round). However the second problem is the way that D&D 5e handles "natural" healing: through the resting system. There's almost never any reason to drink a healing potion outside of combat since a short rest will bring you back up to speed and a long rest will recover your full hp. I like the way OSR games deal with this. Firstly, characters are much more fragile in OSR games, and they might die not only in combat, but also during exploration (i.e. traps); secondly, healing is much slower, so you won't be regaining your lost hp by resting inside the dungeon, and even while exploring the wilderness, recovery is very slow, even after resting for the night; and finally, a character reduced to 0 hp is usually killed, or at the very least, out of the combat (e.g. unconscious). Considering this, healing potions are much more valuable, as they will more often be used outside of combat, and to mitigate the dangers of exploration, and rarely in what you call "attrition based combat". Also, making a downed ally chug a healing potion wouldn't make them instantly stand up and rejoin the fight, they'd only be stabilized and would have to be dragged out by another character away from danger.
In my post apocalyptic game Bonezpunk, humanity became immortal and their flesh turned into an osseous matter. And here in France, there's this iconic jingle which basically goes "Diary products, are your friends for all life!" so we decided to make healing consumables different varieties of cheese! Each cheese restore some amount of damage boxes on your limb tracks, but have an additional effect. Some make you resistant to crushing damage or heat. Other make you hallucinate or have some sort of foresight. And some other make your body all sticky or bouncy! Because it's the only way to quickly heal, cheeses are a precious resource in this world. Which means it is also an edge when you barter, as there is no money. Are you willing to trade your field healing for a safe night in a campment?
"I am Arthur, king of the Britons, and we're on a quest to find the Holy Brie of Resurrection" "Silly English pig-dogs, my master says we've already got one... It's very nice!"
Im a huge fan of reskinning magical items... in the past, games I've played have concluded potions in reskinned forms as ceramic tiles you snap to activate, berries grown by druids, ales or beers, stips of paper that you tear to activate, salves. In a few campaigns its been a mix of these. As long as the mechnics to use any magical items remains the same, change their form freely
My healing potions have been pretty boring, but I did add this one thing that's really evocotive... The core ingredient is human blood, which makes it wildly unethical to make them. It says so much about the world; it's super hard to get healing potions, not because they're hard to make, but because its such a terrible practice--not to mention the obvious implication of black market trade...
Oooh spicy, I like it! 🤠 I can see how that would make them rare and valuable, so they wouldn't have such a frequent and uninteresting role in moment-to-moment scenarios.
@@thebolas000 Good question! It doesn't matter, but you need A LOT of blood (roughly one human worth; humans die when they lose 1/4 of their blood), and it needs to be fresh. In a world where vampires exist, and witches can cast spells and curses on you through your blood, its creepy at best, and more commonly people would fear for their lives. In order to create healing potions *quickly* human trafficing, and murder (especially when carried out by non-humans) come to mind faster than anything ethical.
IMO healing shouldn’t be applied during combat at all, from a gritty realism point of view. In a fight, you fight and try to stay alive. Consuming drinks during such tense moments severely damages my verisimilitude of such a scene. The after-combat denouement should be there to patch up downed comrades. This has the added merit of taking everybody’s minds off of looting. On the flip side I’m all for bizarre methods of healing. Those spice up the story quite a bit. 😅
Agree! 💯 From personal experience dealing with accidents, healing is not about curing the injury but to prevent further exacerbating it or making it fatal. I had the unfortunate experience of getting a serious injury on my hand. The first time one was a clean cut but it hit an artery. I can feel my blood gushing out with the rhythm of my heartbeat. The second one last year was a terrible degloving injury that exposed the tips of my finger bone. Lots of bleeding but it doesn't squirt because it's not fatal. Both times I don't remember the pain, just the panic and focused thought of getting treatment fast. I guess it's the adrenaline that helps numb the pain. The main point is, I can still function perfectly but any action afterwards will decide between death, incapacitation or continuing the fight...or in my case getting to the hospital. Also the smell of a LOT of blood really stinks. I remember the horrified look of my taxi driver on the ride home after surgery at the hospital with me still in my bloodied clothes.
I think I've played other games that have done this, although they are not coming to mind at the moment. I think either d20Modern or Iron Kingdoms did this, having healing potions become something like pills you can pop, or bandages you can wrap around yourself. One of the things I think I would like is to make magical healing more magical rather than more mundane. In Dragonlance chronicles trilogy, healing was regarded as a miraculous thing, a blessing that came with the gods, and it was inherently unreliable. Goldmoon's prayers were always something like "if this man's destiny is not yet fulfilled, let him be healed" and I always thought that was really cool. It also came with a bright flash of light and transformed the staff into a shimmer blue crystal, revealing the presence of magic to everyone nearby. To me that was a hundred times more flavorful than a healing cigar could ever be.
@@cetiah It's been ages since I read Dragonlance (read maybe 5-6 books?), but I remember that all magic was powerful and worthy of awe - which I definitely prefer. When magic is known and mastered, it becomes mundane!
I'm tempted to try the stimpack mechanic from Mothership. Works like a healing potion but there's a cumulative risk of overdose leading to unconsciousness and a(single) death save. Looks like it would add a fair bit of tension to the relatively boring act of quickly undoing damage.
In my post-apocalyptic home-brew, healing potions are mostly irradiated energy drinks, past their expiration date (some of the stronger ones are nanite-infused with similar problems). While they do heal, they have side-effects that start pretty benign (granting back the action it took to take them, or a little bonus to hit/damage/armor), but tend to get worse, the more you use of them in a short duration. Nothing that takes you out of the fight, but something that might bother you sooner or later, such intoxication, sleeplessness, diarrhea or random mutations. This way player often get a little reward out of using them, and yet are discouraged to save them up to use them all at once.
Traveller has medical consumables but they don’t give you back HP but instead modify the roll to help you heal So when you take damage in Traveller it lowers your physical stats. The only way to get them back to normal is via a first aid check. If that doesn’t work or you still could be healed more than you must either be in bed rest at a medical ward or have surgery; both of which come with their downsides The consumables therefore don’t heal your stats back but rather can give you bonuses to the first aid roll and hopefully help enough to get you back to fight condition
The potions in my system are HoT (healing-over-time). So the character might restore 6 hit points for 1d4+1 rounds, which frees up his actions on subsequent rounds to do other things while still being healed.
I think "Vampire the Masquerade" has a very interesting "healing consumable" mechanic. The characters use up the blood stored in their bodies to heal. It is an interesting choice to make because the blood also fuels many other abilities, and if they spend too much they become hungry and are suceptible to acting irrationally or sucumbing to their inner beast.
I had issues including healing potions since my system doesn't have HP, though I think I just sourced an idea from the comments here. Potions being alchemical products of human blood justifies it being insanely rare, expensive, and illegal. It works by healing a given wound (including mortal wounds or wounds that downed a character) but there's a chance of becoming addicted, and without getting more of such potions resorting to raw human blood.
Some of my takes: 1, flavor: I played a game called Moonring that added some very interesting lore. Health potions are made with blood, adding a bit of flavor and a delightfully morbid reason for them to always be red. 2, healing tolerance: a mechanic where every time you get healed, it applies a stack of a debuff that makes you receive less healing. Meaning you can't just damage boost indefinitely. 3, homebrew: let players scavenge the resources to make their own healing items instead of just buying or finding them. If you really want to make it fun, add some bonus effects (or penalties) depending on what ingredients they use. 4, permanent damage: in my setting, we have what's called brutal damage, which basically can't be healed in combat. We also have injuries that aren't connected to health points. Makes each attack a lot more consequential.
I do agree that the question discussed in this video is yet to be solved in medieval fantasy. The sci-fi genre, on the other end, gets it right. I do like the feel that most to the "healing potions" os a space/cyberpunk game is basically a temporary pool of HP that comes from amphetamines. I think there is a lot of room here for development, from side effects, post combat shakes and even addiction. I think Mothership does deal with it with addiction risk. Awesome theme! Congrats!
That's a good point! When I (eventually) work on the medieval fantasy setting for TFE, I'll have to readdress this topic and make sure I follow my own recommendations! 🤠
I'm currently reading through "Crown and Skull" which doesn't have HP at all.... kinda. When you take damage you lose skills and equipment. Which needs story based explanation such as someone crushing your fingers so you can't cast your spell anymore. So healing also needs similar explanation.
I want to talk up Penumbra City again because it's such a small press, but deserves so much attention. It is a low hitpoints system, but there's no healing consumables. To heal you have to be out of combat, and you usually will need the services of a Patchworker. Now a Patchworker (both in world and as a playable class) starts their work by making a "mother" of fermented fungi (imagine a scoby or sourdough starter). Sounds nice, but the next thing they do is take "donor material" from recently dead corpses. Then they use the magic mushroom mother as a paste to graft the donor flesh onto the wound, where it absorbs into the body and heals the patient. Effective, but it can leave a nasty scar if done poorly. There's also the bad guy's seraphic healing that leaves scars that glow with white light, but it doesn't come up as often. I just love it, because even though it's essentially just getting back hit points after encounters it is so evocative and gross and weird! Seriously, if you can find a copy of Penumbra City the world is just so fun and well-realized.
Ease of access to healing is offset by difficulty of use... yes, a basic healing potion is relatively inexpensive in Pathfinder 2e/RM. But if you don't already have it in hand, it takes two actions... one to retrieve it and one to use it. And if you're unlucky enough to be in reach of an enemy that has Reactive Strike, both actions provoke an attack from it.
Fantastic stuff, and love your approach at it. Much more interesting than just health juggling. The best we could do in our 5e game was "BA to roll for health, or main action to get max healing", so there's certainly tons of space to make this more interesting. I love the idea of consuming one gives you a bonus for a short period after. Also the flavour of items you have added is amazing and just fits so thematically! In Ethereal we don't have the systematic detailed wound system as yours so we can't get quite as creative. What we have done though is there are 3 tiers of first aid kit and within each kit, depending how effective you are with the Medical stat, the kit becomes more effective. But generally the kits are only able to be used if you are under a certain number of wounds. Since like in real life, a first aid kit won't save you from the brink of death.
Yeah! I think Ethereal is aiming for a nice balance between traditional hit point based gameplay and the more evocative wound based play, and your consumables are fitting into that well! 🤠
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames I think what I also like about what you've done is it creates so many cool narrative and rp moments. I generally cant wait to RP taking a swig of whiskey, or a puff of a cigar
I ended up making more ways to avoid being wounded, but it's a risk of death with each wound (it's another check). Since the players have been avoiding wounds however, I've been unable to test much of the healing system. Probably will see more of it next session!
@@Velrei That's my preference, too. Make the incoming injury mean something and give players the ability to avoid/mitigate that, rather than "undoing" damage via healing.
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames Yeah, and on the flipside it's just demoralizing for players if enemies can heal easily as well. Which isn't to say an interesting scenario can't be made using that, just that it should be a rarity.
This gives me an idea for a new Lesser Talent: Liquid Courage Choose one of the following: Weapon Damage, Attack Rolls, Evasion, Armor, DRs, or DR Power. Whenever you target a creature with an item consumable, you can increase the chosen value of the target by 2 for five rounds. You can choose this Talent multiple times with different values, which can stack. Also, when it comes to my system, there are no "healing positions." There are Ability consumables. Pretty much all of the 900+ Abilities can be turned into consumables. This includes Simple Heal, which is close to the classic healing potion, but how about carrying a few extra Barriers in your pocket to prevent the damage in the first place or going on the offensive with an elemental explosion? Item consumables are a separate resource economy separated from your Willpower which can be very powerful when handled correctly.
Yess! Love the idea behind that new ability! And that makes sense about your game, with such a robust and expansive ability list, healing would fit right in. Dig it! 🤠
I run a dnd campaign, but thematically i've made healing potions into wines, mechanically means the party can choose to store their common healing potions at their base, and let them age as the campaign goes on, increasing their rarity and the price they'll sell for. I don't actually see the healing potions get used too often because the player party holds onto them as a financial investment.
The one mechanic for consumables (originally ammo, if I recall correctly) that comes to mind is the one where the item has d6 or so uses and will continue to be usable until you roll a one. In that case the die changes a step down (e.g. from d6 to d4). After hitting a one on the d4 it's spent. This might tie in quite well with your other mechanics.. you might rule that a healing item heals a serious wound on a 1, a light one on a 2 and is spent on the maximum value. This would be similar to your damage die mechanic and quite easy to remember.
Usage dice! They're a very clever way to handle scarcity/durability. However, I don't want folks to remove their Injuries 🤠, gotta keep it super deadly! That'd be a good hosueful/optional rule for a more "heroic" style campaign though!
@TalesFromElsewhereGames Yeah, that was the name. (Well, if you use them as temporary boosts, the mechanic stays the same basically - though I really liked the idea of toxicity as a tradeoff and limiting factor for daily use! :) )
Hi, Peter. I'm working on a game that uses hit points as an abstract to represent a combination of combat readiness, battle fatigue, and luck -- alongside injuries, which manifest pretty realistically. Hit points don't heal, but are recovered only through a night's rest. Mechanically, the issues you mention are solved by healing resources (rare and fantastical) being fairly impractical to use in the heat of battle, and also because they don't heal hit points at all -- they heal specific injuries. Players must narrate how characters do this specifically, and there is often some unusual cost to pay, usually involving a character improvising a solution to an unexpected problem using storytelling. This is somewhat different than the "strain" system you described, but the injury idea sounds fairly similar; injuries are never really cured without consequence. When characters don't have some fantastical means of healing injuries, they must simply compensate for them with things like analgesic poultices, blood staunches/coagulants, and vulneraries to prevent infection. It's interesting to see that we both identified the same kinds of issues with this sort of thing and have different, but not terribly dissimilar approaches! 😄
I'm not sure about healing consumables specifically, but the Cypher system has a big emphasis on getting varied consumables. Wildsea has these words of power that can be used to learn something related to them or to do something related to them, but then they escape.
I have such a soft spot for Cypher! I know it's the definition of "attrition" based gameplay, but I really like the way they handled it with the three Pools.
Healing is a mechanical short cut in games to speed up play and keep the players playing instead of sitting on their butts until they heal (Pendragon healing can take months which is fine because the Saga is told over years and decades). If you want plenty of fights in a cave or castle then your players will want some ability to reset their health or have a giant pile of health making individual hits feel meaningless unless considered with the overall attrition. If you do not have a restoration mechanic then players will likely retreat and spend more time in town waiting to be back to full health. This also goes with player investment in their character. The more invested in their character and the story then the more need for 'plot armour: to keep the character from a trivial death. This is different from OSR games where death was more common (I used to have a rule of the maximum of three character deaths per player in a game session). Many games have final death only by mutual player and gamemaster agreement. This also brings up the mechanical meaning of allowing a character to go unconscious or die. It is the equivalent in a game of Monopoly of being sent to jail and missing your turn. Modern TTRPGs have moved away from their more 'simulation' roots (not that DnD or Traveller was a simulation but rules were set to think of what a person would do and experience in those environments). Modern TTRPGs focus on game and playing experience with focus on the player enjoyment. For healing to be successful in modern TTRPGs it needs to do a few things. It needs to mitigate damage to allow players to keep living their best lives. It is preferable that the player does not have to miss their turn or their turn consists of little more than healing (the cleric problem where spending a turn healing prevents the character from doing a cooler action). Players like to have some self agency. It is also important to realize that healing is only one way to mitigate damage. City of Heroes (an MMORPG) is a great example of numerous types of Defenders (buff and healing class in the game). For example, Shield defenders make it harder to hit a target which reduces overall damage received in a fight. A Sonic defender reduces the overall damage received from each attack. An Empathy defender can trade their health to heal another characters health. A Radiation defender creates passive healing spots that a player needs to stand close to achieve healing. Dark Energy defender can create a pet follow people around. A Kinetics defender increases the damage and speed of characters to cause the fight to end faster. The Weather defender reduces the opponent's ability to attack to reduce damage. Ice tankers reduce the speed of attacks of opponents to reduce damage. Fire tankers have additional passive damage to end fights faster. Do not get focused on damage equals healing. There are multiple options for that potion bottle could be doing instead of just getting lazy and saying it plus health.
Thanks for the detailed and well-reasoned response! 🤠 And agreed, folks should look to preventative or other forms of "defense" rather than the milquetoast healing potion!
@TalesFromElsewhereGames Another idea that I have had for some time is the generic problem with healing potions. DnD and most games that copy the formula present all healing potions as generic and made in the same way. This is a mixture of lazy short hand in design and was intended to allow for gamemasters room for their own worlds without having trouble interchanging details and pre-made adventurers. Given healing potions are made by clerics/priests of different faiths, it would be reasonable to expect that potions created in different faiths would be similar but different. For example, a god light's potion might glow and shed light like a candle in a 5' radius. A god of elves might use a fine wine to brew their potions and they might have increased value as collector items. Players might have to decide between healing or destroying something worth 300 or 400% more than another possible choice. A god of death that provides the potions for using in combat against the undead might make their containers in bottles designed to shatter. A god of nature potion might be extra potent if used to heal an animal. A god of an element like cold or electricity might provide an additional small buff for being in extreme cold or resistance to some damage. Think of the faith and create a small extra buff to add flavour. This is something that can be done with any problems with short hand generic items. Add a tweak of personality and players will praise you and talk of the item for years.
Healing, if you want it to be different from 5e or 5.5, needs to be done in different ways. Say you have your whiskey, with it healing you and buffing but also having a limit to the amount you can take, could also have an addictive quality making you really consider whether you want to use the fast and efficient in-combat healing or will you use the not (or less) addictive thing that heals you slowly. Maybe the cigarettes are less addictive or are made of the leaves of the healing plant instead of the distilled fruit like the whiskey so it's less addictive but you heal slowly over the minute it takes to smoke it. Maybe you haven't had time to distill the fruit or dry the leaves but you have to heal right now so you have to eat the fruit right now, which is less healing but more addictive or maybe tastes bad so you have to avoid vomiting, or it's so astringent that you can't talk for a while after. You need reasons to use worse healing options, so adding perks to them or penalties to the good ones. The other suggestion I have is make "healing" be temporary hp, showing that it's not actually doing anything except mask the pain. Painkillers would be a great addition, and they had it back in cowboy times (cocaine I think? Might be cough suppressant...) so that would be cool to see.
Potions are boring. Eat the unicorn poop, snort the diamond dust, ingest raw dragons tongue and roll con saves to not magically poison yourself. What do you mean ive caught a psychic parasite? Also you can do any of that for 15ft of movement or a bonus action if you like because consumables are more fun when you have enough time to consume them.
@TalesFromElsewhereGames While I appreciate most of your content. I was really hoping you were going to have more of a solution to this issue. It felt like the problem of it being boring was just sort of glossed over with add buffs and debuffs, or different flavoring to the mechanics. Not saying I have any better ideas, but I was hoping for more.
Fair constructive criticism! You're right, I probably could have pushed this video a bit further (it was under 10 minutes, and I usually like to go more toward 15 minutes). I'll try to deep dive more in the future! 🤠 Appreciate the feedback, my friend!
Honestly, having a "whiskey potion of healing" doesn't sound terribly more interesting. Having a magical flask that turns water into healing potion is probably more interesting. It seems to me that if you're just going to add effects to a potion, that's not really different from just saying "all potions add X amount of hp". Someone downs a potion of fire breathing and they restore some HP, a useful but boring effect and a more interesting effect. If you think about it, that's just taking consumables that already have an interesting effect and adding the uninteresting effect you don't like to them. But the problem, is at some point, this too just stops being interesting as people want multiple healing potions in the same way that having 20 healing cigars on you makes it inherently less interesting. Especially if you take multiples during a fight. I agree with Trekiros in the pin, you need to turn it into a "choice". Having the potion be an action was supposed to do that -- you say no one likes it, but it was supposed to make it a hard choice. Additional rules like "you can't do it near enemies without provoking attacks" was supposed to make the choice even harder and more interesting. Making it into a bonus action -- or not even that -- contributes to the problem of it not being interesting by removing the constraints on it. For the most part, good story and suspense and drama and choice comes from adding constraints, not taking them away. Adding more and more benefits to healing potions is never going to solve their issue.
@@cetiah I do agree with you overall here. I think tackling both the mechanical and narrative side is the way; every action a player takes in a scene should, ideally, feel interesting. If healing potions are just mechanical rote, what's the point of even having 'em?
if you have 10 potions, and they restore 20% of your hp, decision is not interesting. If you have 2 potions shared among the party of 4, and they heal 80% of your hitpoints, then the decision can be very inetresting
Oooh, yes! Making potions more miraculous and impactful, but also quite scarce, would definitely help spice it up! (I'm a big fan of using scarcity as a balancer)
These are really good points but Hit Points are simply a bad mechanic for a few reasons. 1. You are 100% combat effective until you reach zero HP, at which point you're dead. If your HP pool reduced your ability to act, then spending gold on healing impacts the mechanics of the fight. 2. Potions are a limited resource, but are either too pricey to buy or too cheap to care about. This is why Elden Ring's flask mechanic is fantastic. You have a limited amount not matter what so using it is part of the system mechanics but just lets you last longer in a fight. Using a potion should feel special but really need to be a buf and heal over time effect. Putting a timer on your buffed character. This way players use them in the beginning of the fight and can recover during the fight, when the timer runs out and they are getting beat up, retreating is suggested. Otherwise everyone's just suicidal all the time. 3. There should always be consequences or the action isn't interesting. If a character is drinking expensive healing potions then it's probably addictive or something. Using addiction as an example, characters not swigging these mysterious tonics regularly experience a debuff of being hostile and irritated. Now you have a narrative hook of an addiction problem that the potion maker can abuse.
I like the idea to play around with alchemical stuff (which in my head its different from magical stuff, but thats me), but I don't like immediate solutions to problem like this... I mean, we're talking about the life of ours charachters, it should be something important, and just quaffing a potion and you're done for the day it seems pretty anticlimatic to me. Plus, if you drink a potion right in front of me, while we're fighting each other, I'll stab you right away. Find a way to do stuff like this safely, and we're ok, but trying something just in front of your opponent it should be dangerous. Aside that I don't like "regular" healing potions, but I like hemostatic ointment (after the battle! or at least somewhere safe while someone cover ourselves); I like that you can absorb a limited amount of alchemical stuff (because you gain toxicity points or whatever, you cannot have more than one active effect on you at a time, or mixing effect its dangerous, ecc). If you take off your player the immediate solution and give them some (not a lot, just some) different solution to play with, it could lead to an intersting solving problem and roleplay moment too.
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames Too kind :) I try to write down my own rpg too (try is the key word, this hobby of mine is killing me ngl) and videos like yours are always inspiring... Keep it up!
Conceptually, the way that healing potions work feels utterly underwhelming to me. It makes me sad from a storytelling perspective to imbibe the purified essence of life into my very body, and scratch off six points of damage. The idea of a potion that *healed* your broken body could have world altering implications -that’s a miracle in a bottle!- but it gets implemented so carelessly in the game. It would be interesting to see a version of D&D that completely flips healing potions.Instead of being boring and cheap to both players and PCs, they could be precious and rare, but astonishingly strong. Hard to come by, but they take the name to its ultimate conclusion and *heal* you. From the brink of death, any affliction or injury no matter how calamitous, is washed away instantly and the imbiber is restored to peak health. Less Diablo, more Indiana Jones.
Can’t say I have a lot of mechanical examples, but I do have some narrative ones to add. Healing potions being quicker than an action to use is something that doesn’t make much narrative sense to me; trying to down a full flask of anything while someone is trying to wail on you is going to take some focus. On a more interesting note, the webcomic Guilded Age had healing potions being able to fully heal most injuries, even amputations - but there was a time limit, if you can’t get one within a few minutes that injury is now healing the natural way.
Agreed about how long it should take to quaff a potion. Even an Action is...strange, ya know? Like you said, it takes a while to drink something, and unless the potion is a tiny vail, that ain't happenin' fast, let alone in the heat of combat! That's an interesting take from Guilded Age, I haven't heard of it!
Agreed! To be honest, I find any form of "combat healing" to be...uninspired usually? When I think of "healing", I want to imagine magically tending to someone's wounds in a triage tent, miraculously recovering from injuries that would have otherwise been fatal. Not seeing a "+12 HP" green number pop up above a character's head, ya know? 🤠
Good video!
To me, the main problem with consumables is that it's just really hard to turn "drinking or not drinking a potion" into a character-ful moment. It's almost always purely a math problem, a cold calculation of whether or not your odds of "winning" are better if you down the juice. And because you can have a lot of potions, it ends up being a cold calculation that you have to make over, and over, and over again, and it takes up so much brain space and so much table time that could have been spent on more interesting things.
Two (video) games where I like the approach to consumables (they both have TTRPGs but I haven't played their TTRPG versions): Cyberpunk & the Witcher.
In Cyberpunk 2077, consumables aren't... well, consumed. Once you get a new type of consumable, you just have that consumable, for life. But, you have a global cooldown for consumables: you have 2 charges, and you're generally not going to get them back over the course of a single combat encounter. If you specialize in technique, you might get that number up to 3 or 4, and maybe get some perks that give you one charge back when you kill an enemy or something, but generally speaking, you start each fight with 2, and that's all you'll get for that fight.
That removes a lot of the weight from the decision - now taking a consumable almost becomes one of the narrative beats of the fight. When you down your first one, you know you're about 33% dead. When you down your second one, you take it as a sign that the combat has been very intense and that if you don't win it soon you'll get merced. Your consumables become a pacing thing, rather than a tactics thing.
In The Witcher, potions famously have a toxicity score. So if your max toxicity is 100, and your healing potion has a toxicity of 20, you can take 5 healing potions that day. Or you could mix in an elixir with a toxicity of 50, that turns your blood into poison that burns monsters when they hit you. Or you could mix in an elixir that gives your spells an extra oomph at the cost of 30 toxicity. And maybe if you want to specialize in alchemy, you can reduce the toxicity of the potions you create, or increase your max toxicity.
This one definitely falls more into the type you talk about in the video, where you still track every individual potion, and it's still very much about tactics rather than character moments, but there's just so much flavor that it kind of gets to get away with it :p
And the hard-coded limit on how many consumables you can use at once makes it pretty healthy as a gameplay mechanic - you don't encounter the typical skyrim issue where players hoard hundreds of potions "just in case", or have to worry about how many potions your player might have access to when balancing encounters because an encounter for someone with 5 potions and one for someone with 200 potions are going to feel very different.
Excellent examples from the one, the only, Trek! 🤠
Thanks so much for your detailed comment, buddy!
In my mind, the first question should be whether to have healing consumables at all (and whether they're usable in combat). As I see it, the most natural way to integrate healing into many games is to have a character that knows the setting-appropriate first aid/medicine/surgery skill and have them heal the party up. If the characters have a meaningful relationship and/or a disagreement related to what just happened, it's also an excellent roleplaying opportunity.
That first question is absolutely astute and I wish more designers would ask that question rather than assume they need healing potions (or their equivalent) in every game!
When we were working on TFE, we started out by balancing it around no healing consumables to make sure the core game worked just fine without them. That way the players don't feel obligated to carry their sack full of healing potions to play the game "properly".
We then layered on top of that some fun ones that don't make or break the core flow of the game.
In my system I am working on, healing potions are used by free action (so basically no action wasted), but they are toxic, which means that every time PC drinks healing potion, it must make an immunity roll to prevent bad side effects. And this roll is harder the more potions you drink.
My system is less about resource economy and more about risk/reward balance.
@@shnobz_kotik Ooh that's fun! Adds a risk/reward to them.
Are all potions like that? Made with dangerous alchemical processes that only a foolhardy adventurer would dare dance with?!
I like this idea.
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames I would always include the dangerousness in medicines that provide instant benefits or relief. Either including a risk of instant downside or include a long-term side effect on the character that they will have to compensate for later.
@seeranos I dig it!
Sounds like how potions work in The Witcher
As much as I dislike attrition-based combat, I think your intial example really undersells how interesting the decision to drink a simple health potion can be.
In games designed around attrition, like OSR games, downing a health potion can be a really impactful and interesting decision! The fact that everyone's actions are fast and simple also make drinking a potion feel like a complete turn, as opposed to games like 5.0e where drinking a potion has to stack up against the Wizard taking a 10 minute turn that clears half the encounter.
@@yshabash Ah yes, OSR is a space I have little experience with, so I refrain from giving commentaries on it; a few folks have pointed out that it feels pretty good in OSR games, that's good to hear!! 🤠
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames Thanks for the response! For the future, I think some things that make it feel better in the OSR are that:
1. Resources are scarce and important, so just deciding to use one is an interesting decision
2. Dungeons are deadly, so just having a few potions in your inventory (but never enough) creates great tension on when to use them
3. Characters have low health, so even a few points of healing feels very impactful
4. The most common action is making (just) one attack, so chugging a potion is often a better use of your action economy than taking a different action (no feeling bad cause your turn only consisted of drinking a potion)
Maybe some stuff worth stealing there for potions in other games.
@yshabash That's really helpful to read, I appreciate it!! 🤠
I think there are two problems with D&D 5e that make the healing potion a "bad item". One of them you mentioned in the video, you consume the potion during a fight and the "state" of the combat is reset, or you give a downed character the potion so they can get back into the fight (only to be downed on the next round). However the second problem is the way that D&D 5e handles "natural" healing: through the resting system. There's almost never any reason to drink a healing potion outside of combat since a short rest will bring you back up to speed and a long rest will recover your full hp.
I like the way OSR games deal with this. Firstly, characters are much more fragile in OSR games, and they might die not only in combat, but also during exploration (i.e. traps); secondly, healing is much slower, so you won't be regaining your lost hp by resting inside the dungeon, and even while exploring the wilderness, recovery is very slow, even after resting for the night; and finally, a character reduced to 0 hp is usually killed, or at the very least, out of the combat (e.g. unconscious). Considering this, healing potions are much more valuable, as they will more often be used outside of combat, and to mitigate the dangers of exploration, and rarely in what you call "attrition based combat". Also, making a downed ally chug a healing potion wouldn't make them instantly stand up and rejoin the fight, they'd only be stabilized and would have to be dragged out by another character away from danger.
All good points! I have little experience with OSR games, so I'll defer to those with more knowledge on it! (Like yourself) 🤠
In my post apocalyptic game Bonezpunk, humanity became immortal and their flesh turned into an osseous matter. And here in France, there's this iconic jingle which basically goes "Diary products, are your friends for all life!" so we decided to make healing consumables different varieties of cheese!
Each cheese restore some amount of damage boxes on your limb tracks, but have an additional effect. Some make you resistant to crushing damage or heat. Other make you hallucinate or have some sort of foresight. And some other make your body all sticky or bouncy!
Because it's the only way to quickly heal, cheeses are a precious resource in this world. Which means it is also an edge when you barter, as there is no money. Are you willing to trade your field healing for a safe night in a campment?
I absolutely LOVE THIS! Thematic, bizarre, and memorable! I'd expect nothing less from Bonezpunk!
Great video! “Pass me the red potion..” mumbles the injured warrior. “ which one is it? “ asks the color blind Mage
"I am Arthur, king of the Britons, and we're on a quest to find the Holy Brie of Resurrection"
"Silly English pig-dogs, my master says we've already got one... It's very nice!"
Im a huge fan of reskinning magical items... in the past, games I've played have concluded potions in reskinned forms as ceramic tiles you snap to activate, berries grown by druids, ales or beers, stips of paper that you tear to activate, salves. In a few campaigns its been a mix of these.
As long as the mechnics to use any magical items remains the same, change their form freely
Love the re-skinning approach! 🤠
My healing potions have been pretty boring, but I did add this one thing that's really evocotive...
The core ingredient is human blood, which makes it wildly unethical to make them. It says so much about the world; it's super hard to get healing potions, not because they're hard to make, but because its such a terrible practice--not to mention the obvious implication of black market trade...
Oooh spicy, I like it! 🤠
I can see how that would make them rare and valuable, so they wouldn't have such a frequent and uninteresting role in moment-to-moment scenarios.
Does the blood have to be taken or can it be freely given? Otherwise the implication is that a blood drive is unethical.
@@thebolas000 Good question!
It doesn't matter, but you need A LOT of blood (roughly one human worth; humans die when they lose 1/4 of their blood), and it needs to be fresh.
In a world where vampires exist, and witches can cast spells and curses on you through your blood, its creepy at best, and more commonly people would fear for their lives.
In order to create healing potions *quickly* human trafficing, and murder (especially when carried out by non-humans) come to mind faster than anything ethical.
IMO healing shouldn’t be applied during combat at all, from a gritty realism point of view. In a fight, you fight and try to stay alive. Consuming drinks during such tense moments severely damages my verisimilitude of such a scene. The after-combat denouement should be there to patch up downed comrades. This has the added merit of taking everybody’s minds off of looting. On the flip side I’m all for bizarre methods of healing. Those spice up the story quite a bit. 😅
Agreed! A fight should be a bitter fight for survival, not a chug-fest of potions 🤠
Agree! 💯
From personal experience dealing with accidents, healing is not about curing the injury but to prevent further exacerbating it or making it fatal.
I had the unfortunate experience of getting a serious injury on my hand. The first time one was a clean cut but it hit an artery. I can feel my blood gushing out with the rhythm of my heartbeat.
The second one last year was a terrible degloving injury that exposed the tips of my finger bone. Lots of bleeding but it doesn't squirt because it's not fatal.
Both times I don't remember the pain, just the panic and focused thought of getting treatment fast. I guess it's the adrenaline that helps numb the pain. The main point is, I can still function perfectly but any action afterwards will decide between death, incapacitation or continuing the fight...or in my case getting to the hospital.
Also the smell of a LOT of blood really stinks. I remember the horrified look of my taxi driver on the ride home after surgery at the hospital with me still in my bloodied clothes.
@@MrArthoz Thanks for sharing such harrowing examples. I like when tabletop games try to keep some of that visceral evocations, where possible!
THE ALCOHOLIC GUNSLINGER IS A VERY REAL BUILD
Blazing Saddles campaign?
@@zacharybuck4610 "I shoot with this hand..."
I think I've played other games that have done this, although they are not coming to mind at the moment. I think either d20Modern or Iron Kingdoms did this, having healing potions become something like pills you can pop, or bandages you can wrap around yourself. One of the things I think I would like is to make magical healing more magical rather than more mundane. In Dragonlance chronicles trilogy, healing was regarded as a miraculous thing, a blessing that came with the gods, and it was inherently unreliable. Goldmoon's prayers were always something like "if this man's destiny is not yet fulfilled, let him be healed" and I always thought that was really cool. It also came with a bright flash of light and transformed the staff into a shimmer blue crystal, revealing the presence of magic to everyone nearby. To me that was a hundred times more flavorful than a healing cigar could ever be.
@@cetiah It's been ages since I read Dragonlance (read maybe 5-6 books?), but I remember that all magic was powerful and worthy of awe - which I definitely prefer.
When magic is known and mastered, it becomes mundane!
+1 for using quaff.
@@jaykaye594 Quaff is such an excellent word; I relish the opportunity to use it! 🤠
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames a surprising number of s words to describe drinking, slurp,sip, sip,sink, swill,swig,slug, and snarf to name a few.
@jaykaye594 and all of them subtly different!
I'm tempted to try the stimpack mechanic from Mothership. Works like a healing potion but there's a cumulative risk of overdose leading to unconsciousness and a(single) death save.
Looks like it would add a fair bit of tension to the relatively boring act of quickly undoing damage.
Ah nice, a risk/reward system or a "potion toxicity" meter or somethin' would definitely make it more of an interesting decision!
Lovely conversation!!! Gave me a great idea for how to further theme healing concepts!
@@Yv_Seel I'm so glad! 🤠
In my post-apocalyptic home-brew, healing potions are mostly irradiated energy drinks, past their expiration date (some of the stronger ones are nanite-infused with similar problems). While they do heal, they have side-effects that start pretty benign (granting back the action it took to take them, or a little bonus to hit/damage/armor), but tend to get worse, the more you use of them in a short duration. Nothing that takes you out of the fight, but something that might bother you sooner or later, such intoxication, sleeplessness, diarrhea or random mutations. This way player often get a little reward out of using them, and yet are discouraged to save them up to use them all at once.
That's super fun! Now I'm imagining some glowing Mountain Dew drinks 🤠
Traveller has medical consumables but they don’t give you back HP but instead modify the roll to help you heal
So when you take damage in Traveller it lowers your physical stats. The only way to get them back to normal is via a first aid check. If that doesn’t work or you still could be healed more than you must either be in bed rest at a medical ward or have surgery; both of which come with their downsides
The consumables therefore don’t heal your stats back but rather can give you bonuses to the first aid roll and hopefully help enough to get you back to fight condition
Oooh, I like that design! I've sadly never read Traveller (I've just heard you talk about it on WIT!)
We are running a campaign right now and once we get a few more sessions into it we will do a more in-depth review
@@FrankJosephHall Sounds good, look forward to the video breakdown!
The potions in my system are HoT (healing-over-time). So the character might restore 6 hit points for 1d4+1 rounds, which frees up his actions on subsequent rounds to do other things while still being healed.
@@austindavid7155 That's a nice way to free up the action economy 🤠
I think "Vampire the Masquerade" has a very interesting "healing consumable" mechanic. The characters use up the blood stored in their bodies to heal. It is an interesting choice to make because the blood also fuels many other abilities, and if they spend too much they become hungry and are suceptible to acting irrationally or sucumbing to their inner beast.
That's super fun!
I had issues including healing potions since my system doesn't have HP, though I think I just sourced an idea from the comments here. Potions being alchemical products of human blood justifies it being insanely rare, expensive, and illegal. It works by healing a given wound (including mortal wounds or wounds that downed a character) but there's a chance of becoming addicted, and without getting more of such potions resorting to raw human blood.
Love it!
Some of my takes:
1, flavor: I played a game called Moonring that added some very interesting lore. Health potions are made with blood, adding a bit of flavor and a delightfully morbid reason for them to always be red.
2, healing tolerance: a mechanic where every time you get healed, it applies a stack of a debuff that makes you receive less healing. Meaning you can't just damage boost indefinitely.
3, homebrew: let players scavenge the resources to make their own healing items instead of just buying or finding them. If you really want to make it fun, add some bonus effects (or penalties) depending on what ingredients they use.
4, permanent damage: in my setting, we have what's called brutal damage, which basically can't be healed in combat. We also have injuries that aren't connected to health points. Makes each attack a lot more consequential.
Good stuff! Love the idea of "brutal damage" and including more permanent injuries!
I do agree that the question discussed in this video is yet to be solved in medieval fantasy.
The sci-fi genre, on the other end, gets it right. I do like the feel that most to the "healing potions" os a space/cyberpunk game is basically a temporary pool of HP that comes from amphetamines. I think there is a lot of room here for development, from side effects, post combat shakes and even addiction. I think Mothership does deal with it with addiction risk.
Awesome theme! Congrats!
That's a good point! When I (eventually) work on the medieval fantasy setting for TFE, I'll have to readdress this topic and make sure I follow my own recommendations! 🤠
I'm currently reading through "Crown and Skull" which doesn't have HP at all.... kinda. When you take damage you lose skills and equipment. Which needs story based explanation such as someone crushing your fingers so you can't cast your spell anymore. So healing also needs similar explanation.
That's super cool! 🤠
I want to talk up Penumbra City again because it's such a small press, but deserves so much attention. It is a low hitpoints system, but there's no healing consumables. To heal you have to be out of combat, and you usually will need the services of a Patchworker. Now a Patchworker (both in world and as a playable class) starts their work by making a "mother" of fermented fungi (imagine a scoby or sourdough starter). Sounds nice, but the next thing they do is take "donor material" from recently dead corpses. Then they use the magic mushroom mother as a paste to graft the donor flesh onto the wound, where it absorbs into the body and heals the patient. Effective, but it can leave a nasty scar if done poorly. There's also the bad guy's seraphic healing that leaves scars that glow with white light, but it doesn't come up as often.
I just love it, because even though it's essentially just getting back hit points after encounters it is so evocative and gross and weird! Seriously, if you can find a copy of Penumbra City the world is just so fun and well-realized.
That sounds super cool!
Ease of access to healing is offset by difficulty of use... yes, a basic healing potion is relatively inexpensive in Pathfinder 2e/RM.
But if you don't already have it in hand, it takes two actions... one to retrieve it and one to use it. And if you're unlucky enough to be in reach of an enemy that has Reactive Strike, both actions provoke an attack from it.
That makes sense!
Much more interesting! Thanks Peter 🙂
and thank YOU for checking out my video 🤠
Fantastic stuff, and love your approach at it. Much more interesting than just health juggling. The best we could do in our 5e game was "BA to roll for health, or main action to get max healing", so there's certainly tons of space to make this more interesting. I love the idea of consuming one gives you a bonus for a short period after. Also the flavour of items you have added is amazing and just fits so thematically!
In Ethereal we don't have the systematic detailed wound system as yours so we can't get quite as creative. What we have done though is there are 3 tiers of first aid kit and within each kit, depending how effective you are with the Medical stat, the kit becomes more effective. But generally the kits are only able to be used if you are under a certain number of wounds. Since like in real life, a first aid kit won't save you from the brink of death.
Yeah! I think Ethereal is aiming for a nice balance between traditional hit point based gameplay and the more evocative wound based play, and your consumables are fitting into that well! 🤠
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames I think what I also like about what you've done is it creates so many cool narrative and rp moments. I generally cant wait to RP taking a swig of whiskey, or a puff of a cigar
@@FineGroundCryptids Haha yessss! 🤠
I ended up making more ways to avoid being wounded, but it's a risk of death with each wound (it's another check). Since the players have been avoiding wounds however, I've been unable to test much of the healing system. Probably will see more of it next session!
@@Velrei That's my preference, too. Make the incoming injury mean something and give players the ability to avoid/mitigate that, rather than "undoing" damage via healing.
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames Yeah, and on the flipside it's just demoralizing for players if enemies can heal easily as well.
Which isn't to say an interesting scenario can't be made using that, just that it should be a rarity.
@Velrei Yep, totally agreed!
This gives me an idea for a new Lesser Talent:
Liquid Courage
Choose one of the following: Weapon Damage, Attack Rolls, Evasion, Armor, DRs, or DR Power. Whenever you target a creature with an item consumable, you can increase the chosen value of the target by 2 for five rounds. You can choose this Talent multiple times with different values, which can stack.
Also, when it comes to my system, there are no "healing positions." There are Ability consumables. Pretty much all of the 900+ Abilities can be turned into consumables. This includes Simple Heal, which is close to the classic healing potion, but how about carrying a few extra Barriers in your pocket to prevent the damage in the first place or going on the offensive with an elemental explosion?
Item consumables are a separate resource economy separated from your Willpower which can be very powerful when handled correctly.
Yess! Love the idea behind that new ability! And that makes sense about your game, with such a robust and expansive ability list, healing would fit right in. Dig it! 🤠
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames Thank you for giving me that idea. 😁
I run a dnd campaign, but thematically i've made healing potions into wines, mechanically means the party can choose to store their common healing potions at their base, and let them age as the campaign goes on, increasing their rarity and the price they'll sell for.
I don't actually see the healing potions get used too often because the player party holds onto them as a financial investment.
That is such a fun take on it! Love that they age in the party's base, I've never heard of someone doing that! 🤠
The one mechanic for consumables (originally ammo, if I recall correctly) that comes to mind is the one where the item has d6 or so uses and will continue to be usable until you roll a one. In that case the die changes a step down (e.g. from d6 to d4). After hitting a one on the d4 it's spent. This might tie in quite well with your other mechanics.. you might rule that a healing item heals a serious wound on a 1, a light one on a 2 and is spent on the maximum value. This would be similar to your damage die mechanic and quite easy to remember.
Usage dice! They're a very clever way to handle scarcity/durability.
However, I don't want folks to remove their Injuries 🤠, gotta keep it super deadly! That'd be a good hosueful/optional rule for a more "heroic" style campaign though!
@TalesFromElsewhereGames Yeah, that was the name. (Well, if you use them as temporary boosts, the mechanic stays the same basically - though I really liked the idea of toxicity as a tradeoff and limiting factor for daily use! :) )
I've always done "potions are alchemical magic" and mixing them in your stomach can have unintended effects (WILD MAGIC SURGE + Poisoned condition!)
Love it! 🤠
Hi, Peter. I'm working on a game that uses hit points as an abstract to represent a combination of combat readiness, battle fatigue, and luck -- alongside injuries, which manifest pretty realistically. Hit points don't heal, but are recovered only through a night's rest. Mechanically, the issues you mention are solved by healing resources (rare and fantastical) being fairly impractical to use in the heat of battle, and also because they don't heal hit points at all -- they heal specific injuries. Players must narrate how characters do this specifically, and there is often some unusual cost to pay, usually involving a character improvising a solution to an unexpected problem using storytelling.
This is somewhat different than the "strain" system you described, but the injury idea sounds fairly similar; injuries are never really cured without consequence. When characters don't have some fantastical means of healing injuries, they must simply compensate for them with things like analgesic poultices, blood staunches/coagulants, and vulneraries to prevent infection. It's interesting to see that we both identified the same kinds of issues with this sort of thing and have different, but not terribly dissimilar approaches! 😄
Oh hey Rusk! (We'll pick up this convo in the TFE Discord!)
I'm not sure about healing consumables specifically, but the Cypher system has a big emphasis on getting varied consumables. Wildsea has these words of power that can be used to learn something related to them or to do something related to them, but then they escape.
I have such a soft spot for Cypher! I know it's the definition of "attrition" based gameplay, but I really like the way they handled it with the three Pools.
My preferred remedy is to make combat more impactful, wounds more deadly, and healing more difficult.
We are of one mind, my friend!
Healing is a mechanical short cut in games to speed up play and keep the players playing instead of sitting on their butts until they heal (Pendragon healing can take months which is fine because the Saga is told over years and decades). If you want plenty of fights in a cave or castle then your players will want some ability to reset their health or have a giant pile of health making individual hits feel meaningless unless considered with the overall attrition.
If you do not have a restoration mechanic then players will likely retreat and spend more time in town waiting to be back to full health.
This also goes with player investment in their character. The more invested in their character and the story then the more need for 'plot armour: to keep the character from a trivial death. This is different from OSR games where death was more common (I used to have a rule of the maximum of three character deaths per player in a game session). Many games have final death only by mutual player and gamemaster agreement.
This also brings up the mechanical meaning of allowing a character to go unconscious or die. It is the equivalent in a game of Monopoly of being sent to jail and missing your turn.
Modern TTRPGs have moved away from their more 'simulation' roots (not that DnD or Traveller was a simulation but rules were set to think of what a person would do and experience in those environments). Modern TTRPGs focus on game and playing experience with focus on the player enjoyment.
For healing to be successful in modern TTRPGs it needs to do a few things. It needs to mitigate damage to allow players to keep living their best lives. It is preferable that the player does not have to miss their turn or their turn consists of little more than healing (the cleric problem where spending a turn healing prevents the character from doing a cooler action). Players like to have some self agency.
It is also important to realize that healing is only one way to mitigate damage. City of Heroes (an MMORPG) is a great example of numerous types of Defenders (buff and healing class in the game). For example, Shield defenders make it harder to hit a target which reduces overall damage received in a fight. A Sonic defender reduces the overall damage received from each attack. An Empathy defender can trade their health to heal another characters health. A Radiation defender creates passive healing spots that a player needs to stand close to achieve healing. Dark Energy defender can create a pet follow people around. A Kinetics defender increases the damage and speed of characters to cause the fight to end faster. The Weather defender reduces the opponent's ability to attack to reduce damage. Ice tankers reduce the speed of attacks of opponents to reduce damage. Fire tankers have additional passive damage to end fights faster.
Do not get focused on damage equals healing. There are multiple options for that potion bottle could be doing instead of just getting lazy and saying it plus health.
Thanks for the detailed and well-reasoned response! 🤠
And agreed, folks should look to preventative or other forms of "defense" rather than the milquetoast healing potion!
@TalesFromElsewhereGames Another idea that I have had for some time is the generic problem with healing potions.
DnD and most games that copy the formula present all healing potions as generic and made in the same way.
This is a mixture of lazy short hand in design and was intended to allow for gamemasters room for their own worlds without having trouble interchanging details and pre-made adventurers.
Given healing potions are made by clerics/priests of different faiths, it would be reasonable to expect that potions created in different faiths would be similar but different.
For example, a god light's potion might glow and shed light like a candle in a 5' radius.
A god of elves might use a fine wine to brew their potions and they might have increased value as collector items. Players might have to decide between healing or destroying something worth 300 or 400% more than another possible choice.
A god of death that provides the potions for using in combat against the undead might make their containers in bottles designed to shatter.
A god of nature potion might be extra potent if used to heal an animal.
A god of an element like cold or electricity might provide an additional small buff for being in extreme cold or resistance to some damage.
Think of the faith and create a small extra buff to add flavour.
This is something that can be done with any problems with short hand generic items. Add a tweak of personality and players will praise you and talk of the item for years.
@davidrowe1557 That's a really fun idea! Gives some personality and additional considerations for healing potions!
Yes to this, also check The Witcher TTRPG.
Healing, if you want it to be different from 5e or 5.5, needs to be done in different ways.
Say you have your whiskey, with it healing you and buffing but also having a limit to the amount you can take, could also have an addictive quality making you really consider whether you want to use the fast and efficient in-combat healing or will you use the not (or less) addictive thing that heals you slowly.
Maybe the cigarettes are less addictive or are made of the leaves of the healing plant instead of the distilled fruit like the whiskey so it's less addictive but you heal slowly over the minute it takes to smoke it.
Maybe you haven't had time to distill the fruit or dry the leaves but you have to heal right now so you have to eat the fruit right now, which is less healing but more addictive or maybe tastes bad so you have to avoid vomiting, or it's so astringent that you can't talk for a while after.
You need reasons to use worse healing options, so adding perks to them or penalties to the good ones.
The other suggestion I have is make "healing" be temporary hp, showing that it's not actually doing anything except mask the pain. Painkillers would be a great addition, and they had it back in cowboy times (cocaine I think? Might be cough suppressant...) so that would be cool to see.
All good feedback and ideas! 🤠
In my game there is a kind of healing potion it also makes you have a chance to get addicted to the potion I think they also have it in cyberpunk？
@@lieidos3345 That's a fun risk/reward system! 🤠
What about curing disease by using a leech and sacrificing some health?
@@KelvinShadewing Sounds very flavorful to me! 🤠
Potions are boring. Eat the unicorn poop, snort the diamond dust, ingest raw dragons tongue and roll con saves to not magically poison yourself. What do you mean ive caught a psychic parasite? Also you can do any of that for 15ft of movement or a bonus action if you like because consumables are more fun when you have enough time to consume them.
Haha yes, preach! 🤠
@TalesFromElsewhereGames While I appreciate most of your content. I was really hoping you were going to have more of a solution to this issue. It felt like the problem of it being boring was just sort of glossed over with add buffs and debuffs, or different flavoring to the mechanics. Not saying I have any better ideas, but I was hoping for more.
Fair constructive criticism! You're right, I probably could have pushed this video a bit further (it was under 10 minutes, and I usually like to go more toward 15 minutes).
I'll try to deep dive more in the future! 🤠
Appreciate the feedback, my friend!
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames I look forward to hearing your ideas on other improvements in the future!
What are your favorite uses of Healing Consumables? 🤠
Great video!
Thank you, my friend! 🤠
Honestly, having a "whiskey potion of healing" doesn't sound terribly more interesting. Having a magical flask that turns water into healing potion is probably more interesting. It seems to me that if you're just going to add effects to a potion, that's not really different from just saying "all potions add X amount of hp". Someone downs a potion of fire breathing and they restore some HP, a useful but boring effect and a more interesting effect. If you think about it, that's just taking consumables that already have an interesting effect and adding the uninteresting effect you don't like to them. But the problem, is at some point, this too just stops being interesting as people want multiple healing potions in the same way that having 20 healing cigars on you makes it inherently less interesting. Especially if you take multiples during a fight. I agree with Trekiros in the pin, you need to turn it into a "choice". Having the potion be an action was supposed to do that -- you say no one likes it, but it was supposed to make it a hard choice. Additional rules like "you can't do it near enemies without provoking attacks" was supposed to make the choice even harder and more interesting. Making it into a bonus action -- or not even that -- contributes to the problem of it not being interesting by removing the constraints on it. For the most part, good story and suspense and drama and choice comes from adding constraints, not taking them away. Adding more and more benefits to healing potions is never going to solve their issue.
@@cetiah I do agree with you overall here.
I think tackling both the mechanical and narrative side is the way; every action a player takes in a scene should, ideally, feel interesting. If healing potions are just mechanical rote, what's the point of even having 'em?
if you have 10 potions, and they restore 20% of your hp, decision is not interesting. If you have 2 potions shared among the party of 4, and they heal 80% of your hitpoints, then the decision can be very inetresting
Oooh, yes! Making potions more miraculous and impactful, but also quite scarce, would definitely help spice it up!
(I'm a big fan of using scarcity as a balancer)
These are really good points but Hit Points are simply a bad mechanic for a few reasons.
1. You are 100% combat effective until you reach zero HP, at which point you're dead. If your HP pool reduced your ability to act, then spending gold on healing impacts the mechanics of the fight.
2. Potions are a limited resource, but are either too pricey to buy or too cheap to care about. This is why Elden Ring's flask mechanic is fantastic. You have a limited amount not matter what so using it is part of the system mechanics but just lets you last longer in a fight. Using a potion should feel special but really need to be a buf and heal over time effect. Putting a timer on your buffed character. This way players use them in the beginning of the fight and can recover during the fight, when the timer runs out and they are getting beat up, retreating is suggested. Otherwise everyone's just suicidal all the time.
3. There should always be consequences or the action isn't interesting. If a character is drinking expensive healing potions then it's probably addictive or something. Using addiction as an example, characters not swigging these mysterious tonics regularly experience a debuff of being hostile and irritated. Now you have a narrative hook of an addiction problem that the potion maker can abuse.
I'm with you on all this 🤠!
2:00 worse! Makes potions even more crucial.
I like the idea to play around with alchemical stuff (which in my head its different from magical stuff, but thats me), but I don't like immediate solutions to problem like this... I mean, we're talking about the life of ours charachters, it should be something important, and just quaffing a potion and you're done for the day it seems pretty anticlimatic to me.
Plus, if you drink a potion right in front of me, while we're fighting each other, I'll stab you right away. Find a way to do stuff like this safely, and we're ok, but trying something just in front of your opponent it should be dangerous.
Aside that I don't like "regular" healing potions, but I like hemostatic ointment (after the battle! or at least somewhere safe while someone cover ourselves);
I like that you can absorb a limited amount of alchemical stuff (because you gain toxicity points or whatever, you cannot have more than one active effect on you at a time, or mixing effect its dangerous, ecc).
If you take off your player the immediate solution and give them some (not a lot, just some) different solution to play with, it could lead to an intersting solving problem and roleplay moment too.
All I can really say in response to your comment is, "Yes, this person gets it!" 🤠
Thanks for the well-reasoned comment!
@@TalesFromElsewhereGames Too kind :)
I try to write down my own rpg too (try is the key word, this hobby of mine is killing me ngl) and videos like yours are always inspiring...
Keep it up!
@@Greyawk89 Will do!
Conceptually, the way that healing potions work feels utterly underwhelming to me. It makes me sad from a storytelling perspective to imbibe the purified essence of life into my very body, and scratch off six points of damage. The idea of a potion that *healed* your broken body could have world altering implications -that’s a miracle in a bottle!- but it gets implemented so carelessly in the game. It would be interesting to see a version of D&D that completely flips healing potions.Instead of being boring and cheap to both players and PCs, they could be precious and rare, but astonishingly strong. Hard to come by, but they take the name to its ultimate conclusion and *heal* you. From the brink of death, any affliction or injury no matter how calamitous, is washed away instantly and the imbiber is restored to peak health. Less Diablo, more Indiana Jones.
So glad to see that there are folks out there who GET IT! 🤠
Can’t say I have a lot of mechanical examples, but I do have some narrative ones to add.
Healing potions being quicker than an action to use is something that doesn’t make much narrative sense to me; trying to down a full flask of anything while someone is trying to wail on you is going to take some focus.
On a more interesting note, the webcomic Guilded Age had healing potions being able to fully heal most injuries, even amputations - but there was a time limit, if you can’t get one within a few minutes that injury is now healing the natural way.
Agreed about how long it should take to quaff a potion. Even an Action is...strange, ya know? Like you said, it takes a while to drink something, and unless the potion is a tiny vail, that ain't happenin' fast, let alone in the heat of combat!
That's an interesting take from Guilded Age, I haven't heard of it!
Healing in general is handled very poorly in ttrpg's.
Agreed! To be honest, I find any form of "combat healing" to be...uninspired usually? When I think of "healing", I want to imagine magically tending to someone's wounds in a triage tent, miraculously recovering from injuries that would have otherwise been fatal.
Not seeing a "+12 HP" green number pop up above a character's head, ya know? 🤠