Mr. Heal Plane
- “What if the healer goes down in combat? There should be an easy first aid option!”
- “Cool,” says 3.5 D&D. “Let’s make it so that a character can ‘carefully administer’ a potion to an unconscious creature. We’ll call that a full-round action as our hypothetical first responder ‘trickles the liquid down the creature’s throat.'”
- “Good fix! Actually, you might be onto something. People really seem to like using potions in combat now. Is there any way we can expand that design space?”
- “Hell yeah!” says Pathfinder 1e. “Let’s give them magical beer helmets and make frat boy chugging a feat!”
- “Erm… I guess? That might be too much of good thing though.”
- “I agree,” says 5e D&D. “Away with all this rules bloat and inelegant complexity! Let’s just make it a standard action to potion yourself or your buddy.”
Cue Oracle and her pal Mr. Heal Plane. Gifs of Jakie Chan’s Drunken Master notwithstanding, I think we can agree that it doesn’t make much sense that characters can slop heal juice into their buddies’ mouths mid-sword fight. If you’ve ever missed your own mouth trying to sip-and-walk (and gods know I have), you can imagine how hard it would be holding a bottle up to your flanking partner. WHARRGARBL is all I have to say to that.
Still, people love doing this biz. There’s even a popular 5e house rule to make it easier, requiring only a bonus action to potion your pals. It adds a bit of versatility to the ol’ stand-and-swing of grindy combat, which I’m very much here for. I only wish that we could invent a different narrative device for “consumable items we use in combat.” Perhaps one with a less silly visual attached.
Therefore, for today’s discussion question, I turn to you denizens of Handbook-World for aid. If we were to rebrand “potions” thematically, what would they look like? Little ninja smoke bombs we smash on the ground? Colorful thrown powders à la Holi? Is there a system that does consumables best? Sound off with all your most magical single-serving items down in the comments!
EVENT: The Handbook is heading out for Free Comic Book Day! We’ll have our table set up at the Mini Comic Convention in Lawrenceville, GA! Both the writer & illustrator of this here Handbook of Heroes will be there on Saturday, May 7th from 10 AM – 4 PM. We’re always down to talk shop in person, and we’d love to meet any and all of you guys out in meat space.
GET YOUR SCHWAG ON! Want a piece of Handbook-World to hang on you wall? Then you’ll want to check out the “Hero” reward tier on the The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. Each monthly treasure haul will bring you prints, decals, buttons, bookmarks and more! There’s even talk of a few Handbook-themed mini-dungeons on the horizon. So hit the link, open up that treasure chest, and see what loot awaits!
My old GM when she had her turn as a player had a gnome cleric who made her potions in the form of candies, cookies, etc.
Laurel played an Abyssal Exalt named “Granny Darkness” once upon a time. Her cookies were less healthy for you.
For us right now we play a 5e game in a ww2 setting, so we reflavored our healing potions into stimpacks, adrenaline shots ect. And the GM gave a player who made a medic a custom extra feat witch allowed he could adminster a poiton to another player as a bonus action juwt to free up his action to cast other spells.
lol @ a hand-to-hand bayonet fight, combatants sliding into trenches and gouging for the eyes, while my medic diligently circles around behind, waiting to jab me in the ass with a syringe if things look dicey.
Booze, cures all ailments (especially sanity related) when consumed enough… except alcohol poisoning but that’s what we’re trying to achieve. Death cures all after all, and it’s even better if resurections are a thing.
That’s just a potion with a hangover attached!
For re-flavoring potions, one possibility I’m fond off is the small magical trinket that you smash to activate. For instance a clay coin with a magical rune/symbol/sigil engraved on it that you break with your hand to activate, or a small thin glass sphere with magical energy dancing inside it that you smash into your chest/stomach/the back of your friend to activate.
A paper talisman could also work, mentally activate them and smack them on someone, the symbols start glowing and the strip burns away in colored fire and the magic happens (or maybe they stay on as long as the magic effect does?).
Personally I do like the aesthetic of the potion and might be more inclined to make them easier to use on yourself instead of on other people, while leaving the latter for more difficult “getting the unconscious person back on their feat/stop the bleeding” style stuff.
Say a move action to drink a potion (which includes drawing it if the potion is “ready” in your belt or similar, common sense limitation on how many you can have of that) but still a full round to feed one to someone unconscious (or maybe a standard if I want more movement to be a possibility).
My favorite of the breakable talismans: https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/wondrous-items/r-z/snapleaf/
Starfinder, as well as Pathfinder Advanced Tech stuff, has a good solution to potions in the form of injectors – little guns that effortlessly administer a full dose of potion or cure. They also offer a ‘potion sponge’ which you can chew to get that sweet healing.
Other wilder ideas could be teleporting liquids into the recepient, wrist-mounted injectors that need merely a button to press, having a surgical ‘potion vent’ in your body that you just pour potions into…
I always have trouble explaining how potions get into you in Starfinder.
You jab yourself in the arm… I mean, you pierce through your space suit… Erm, its internal self-healing properties prevent you from venting your breathable atmosphere into space, sealing over instantaneously…or something… I guess.
There’s a dedicated airtight injector slot on the suit specifically designed for administering first aid.
Must be tricky for Oracle to find a chest-high wall during combat to be high enough to administer Mr. Heal Plane. Especially with her blindness. Are we sure she’s not just faking it?
For posterity, here’s the original script:
“A classic sword fight scene. Assassin is locked blade-to-blade with an enemy swordsman. Oracle stands below the swordfight, thrusting an odd “weapon” of her own into the fray. She prods a comically long spoon towards Assassin, slopping healing potion all over his face. She holds a half-empty bottle in her other hand.”
I’d initially imagined Oracle standing on the ground and thrusting the spoon in a “three way lock” between the blades. Laurel (rightly) thought it would be too hard to read visually, and so we arrived at the Sesame Street wall.
Now I’m imagining Fighter in a trashcan as Oscar. And other muppet-fied versions of the heroes.
I’d watch the ep of the Muppet Show.
Interesting! Thank you for sharing! 🙂
I’ve often seen potions that act by touch — no need to drink it, just getting splashed by it is enough. Which makes it easier to throw them at your peeps like they’re healing grenades.
Isn’t that technically an oil?
https://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicItems/potionsAndOils.htm
I imagine having a glass vial shatter against your face mitigates some of the healing the potion/oil would apply.
1d4 improvised weapon damage is a small price to pay for a schluck of the red stuff.
When it’s only 2d4+2 healing, I’d beg to differ!
A yes, the blind character is feeding people from range.
I see nothing that could go wrong here.
Bullseyeing a moving target’s mouth from 10′ away without spilling a drop from your telescoping spoon? You bet your ass that’s a magic item!
Not so much magic, but in one party each member had a small tube attached to the side of their helmet/hat/collar resting beside their mouth and leading over their shoulder to attach the other end to their back where one of their partners could shove the end of a wineskin filled with healing potion and ‘give them a squirt for the hurt’.
It has to be noted that this was a good twenty years before the ‘camelbak’ became standard military issue for carrying water, should I apply for retroactive royalties ?
This was the same group that used watered down ‘soverign glue’ on bandages to make putting them on faster and stick wounds closed in the process 😉
We got hurt a LOT…
Props for acknowledging helmets are a thing that exist. As demonstrated in this documentary, they were THE most important piece of armor:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pD-f45TbvEw
These existed at the time too, but we made our own from plastic tubing and tape.
https://www.closeup-shop.com/media/oart_0/oart_t/oart_87435/thumbs/904656_2413972.jpg
The drinking tube in the respirator had just come in as well, along with ports on the canteen cap to fit, made the much hated ‘drinking drill’ in the gas chamber a lot easier, especially if you put your favourite ‘healing potion’ in rather than plain water 🙂
Well, there’s always Sidereal Exalted who misfiled their medicine charms under Archery… heal your buddy by shooting them in the head from across the battlefield.
Exalted! Where healing’s made up and the logic don’t matter.
For Sidereals, certainly. The others tend to be a bit more logical (if overly dramatic), but it’s the Sidereals for whom “punch you into the middle of next week” isn’t just a figure of speech.
We use spell sticks. They’re spell scrolls with no chance of failure when used by non-casters. You break the stick in half and wherever the two split ends point is where the spell goes. As far as potion swigging goes, we allow it as a bonus action, but you can only use it on friendlies when they’re immobile.
I like the immobile caveat. Brings us back to the sensible “trickle down an unconscious creature’s throat” visual, which makes much more sense than the mid-combat-buddy-chug.
Now I’m imagining…you know how if you run out of hearts in a Zelda game, but you have a fairy in a bottle, they’ll revive you?
Imagine that in a D&D/PF game; a flight capable homunculus (maybe a little like an expeditious messenger from Eberron), that you can store a potion in, so if anyone ever falls down it can go and pour the potion over them…or you could employ a fairy cohort to potion you.
Neat! I dig the image of a magical glass prison tied to your lifeforce. It evaporates and frees the “single serving homunculus” if you’re ever dying.
because healing potions as they exist now are essentially magical (herbalism skill to make them notwithstanding… ), I find it perfectly valid to leave the alone as they work.
And while they are meant to be an action, most tables give them a bonus action rule (for the self use only, not on another creature) because without that, people rarely use healing potions (based on ye olde action economy and having so many other things once could do besides “waste” that precious action on drinking a potion… unless maybe it is one of the big ones, but who ever has one of those!).
I think, like many things in the game, it is more about the flavor behind the act, than the act itself. I prefer to think of giving another character a potion less as opening their mouth and pouring it in, and more of actually GIVING them the potion and they take a sort of free action to take it themselves (our table rule in fact uses a Reaction to take a potion before it is your turn, otherwise you just “have the potion” for next turn without using it… also this means you can toss a potion from distance, tho every 5 feet is 5DC on a Dex check to see if you catch it 0.0).
Where potions get finicky for me is when you are using them on unconscious characters or creatures. But again, magic.
addendum to the above is size of the things. Most people tend to think of a potion as this big vial of red or green heal-o-juice that is the size of at least one of those test tubes in a typical mad science lab (or not mad, but it is more fun to think of all science labs as mad science labs). I prefer to think of them more the size of one of those 5 Hour Energy bottles (and The Witcher, staring Henry Cavill would agree with me! Not healing pots, but still potions just the same).
Or if you are not picturing one of those energy shot bottles, everyone knows what one of those mini booze bottles looks like. Something around that size.
also also like in Netflix The Witcher series, not made of glass. Some kind of cheap pottery. Easy to reproduce, and sure, you’d like to keep them to refill, but if it gets lost on the battlefield, ain’t a big loss, etc.
> Where potions get finicky for me is when you are using them on unconscious characters or creatures. But again, magic.
Now see, that’s the only place where it DOES make sense for me.
I suppose I could ready an action to take the item from you, but then we’re wasting both our actions! In summary, Blizzard should really get on this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kQzP_HNGUM&t=36s
Fruit! On Athas, potions are in fruit!
We allow feeding yourself a potion as a free action, but feeding one to a conscious companion takes your actions for the round. But feeding one to an unconscious companion results in choking and blocked airways. Gotta use a healing spell.
“He seems to be choking! Quick, we have to save him. Shove some more healing fruit down there!”
Baldur’s Gate 3 is in EA right now and you can potion allies at range by lobbing the bottle at them. The ideal technique is to have it smash the ground at their feet. That way you don’t hurt them by having the bottle smack into them and the ‘splash’ of the potion will hit them and take effect as if they drank it. Weird way to do things but it works for that game.
And then of course there’s this eternal question: what do you do with the empty vial? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjXOwUnJzA0&list=PLSMETuURtTXCzW7Q_ZIy4QzEnyUG8totf&index=100
Hey, my little ninja smoke grenade idea! Nice to see it out in the wild.
The trouble is blocking. Like, it’s really hard to imagine that cartoony thing of, “I reach in and shove a potion bottle into his mouth!” How the crap would your choreograph that in a film or play?
Like Dakkath’s GM, when I got a turn playing my own PC cleric, I wound up with a Cleric who was the teenage daughter of a baker.
Once she hit 3rd level, it was all about healing cookies, nutritious trail food, and the like. (Of course, now WotC has introduced the Chef feat and made it all moot in 5th edition.)
In a D20 Modern/Future/Urban Arcana fueled Superheroes campaign, the corporate-sponsored pro-hero team had techno-mages in R&D that churned out transdermal patches to deliver whatever potions the heroes requisitioned.
> transdermal patches
This I can picture. Give your ally the ol’ “good game” and get them back into action! Of course, I’m not sure the flavor is quite there for fantasy. We’ve got herbal poultices I guess, but that’s not exactly convenient to do:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVQaK3jDwVE&t=156s
And now I will forever hear her voice as a the high-pitched sing-song-y “Here comes the airplaine” voice.
On initial viewing I actually thought the potion splashed on his face was his blood, and the spoon was some weird torture implement.
Based on how many teeth that maneuver knocks out, it probably could be classified as a torture implement.
For a hand-wave, one could say that splashing a potion on a person (or at least directly onto their wound) is good enough to trigger the magic. Most healing potions probably have some Positive Energy stored in them (since they hurt undead), so just releasing that onto a living creature would provide healing effects. That said, I don’t think I’ve ever had a player attempt to potion a still-conscious ally, so we may have effectively house-ruled this problem out of existence.
Pathfinder DOES have the syringe spear, though I think it is more intended to be pointed at enemies: https://www.aonprd.com/EquipmentWeaponsDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Syringe%20spear
As for healing reflavors, I have mentioned him before, but I once DM’d an Alchemist who reflavored everything as him being a chef with magic ingredients. He had an archetype that made his bombs breath weapons, so that became eating super-spicy peppers. Appropriately, he spent most of his spell slots on Polypurpose Panacea to make alcohol (through which he bought the undying loyalty of the three sailor NPCs who were following the party around).
Hey, glad somebody brought up the syringe spear! I almost brought it up in the Paizo bit of the OP, but wound up being too lazy to poke around for its rules (couldn’t remember what the bloody thing was called).
The extra fun part about the healing syringe spear? Non-lethal damage. You take a -4 on the attack roll to attack non-lethally (I guess jabbing someone in the butt instead of the gut?) but since generally you aren’t trying to dodge this that often balances out. (flat-footed at least, or -5 AC from effectively 0 Dex depending on the GM) Also, magical healing removed an amount of non-lethal damage equal to the healing that it does at the same time.
lol. Pathfinder and its silliness is the fuel that powers Handbook-World.
Speaking of the syringe spear, there’s always the option of leaving it empty to inject air into people. Very deadly.
…And this is why I had to ban the syringe spear, pretty much the instant it appeared.
And now I want make a bunch of baddies based upon that. 🙂 No idea what potions they would use. Maybe poisons?
You know what else is deadly? BEING STABBED WITH A FUCKING SPEAR.
For serious though, I think this is one of those spots where “actually, the nurse told me an IV with an airbubble in it will kill a dragon instantly” might be too much real world engineering.
My android technician delivers both poisons and medicine via an injection spear, which is more or less a 10-foot long spear with the head replaced with a syringe. Sure, it might not feel terribly pleasant, but would you prefer this or for that axe to have caved your skull in?
Just gotta hope the heal dice are bigger than the harm dice.
I had a game where potions were instead magical crystals, that turned into energy that then healed people. Inspired by healing orbs in various video games. So basically a stored minor healing spell. In another it was a salve, rather then a potion.
Then there is of course the classic cookie healing potion. I do love the mental picture of an half orc showing a cookie down their unconscious friends throat.
Seeing that HP in D&D/Pathfinder is generally more of an abstraction of several things other then just how much you are bleeding on the floor, I do tend to think more of healing potions as stamina recovery potions, in these days. With some minor healing properties.
Why did floating li’l heal orbs never make the jump from video games back into tabletop?
Potions in modern settings should be mass-produced in either capri-sun containers or like those Little Hug fruit barrels.
But also it’s great to see others think of the beer-hats for potions. I used to play a Bariaur, back in 2014/15 that had a custom helmet that firstly fit his horns, and secondly had beer jugs nestled in the horns that he could sip from in battle. Naturally, they eventually got filled with potions, and it was a move action to move one of the straws into the mouth (for balance reasons)
I never knew they had a name. I instantly knew what you were talking about.
The full-round action is removing the foil from the top. Or move action, or whatever. Full-round action seems more realistic with those jugs.
Pressurized injections? 🙂
By the way, on which book is the heal plane? Or it other name for the positive energy plane? 🙂
Heal Planes are the fastest way to get around the Positive Energy Plane. You just board them, sit in a sort of limbo for awhile, and then disembark in a new location on the Positive Energy Plane. There’s a weird amount of little bags of salted peanuts involved with this journey for some reason.
In my one time playing D&D 5e, I played an Eldritch Knight that had a little familiar. I tied a potion to it so if I got knocked out, it could come over and use it on me.
Hey, if I can give my imp a helm of blasting, I think your hedgehog or whatever can get away with a potion.
Had to use it several times. Kept getting knocked out.
My solution actually comes from an obscure sourcebook from the days of AD&D. Characters could hire a local beekeeper to make hollow, vial-sized canisters of beeswax, decant a potion into the wax canister, and carry the canister in their mouth. It was intended to be a way to bring a potion with you in an underwater adventure – you could ‘drink’ the potion without contaminating it with seawater. This had drawbacks (mumbling out a spell with a wax ball in your mouth wasn’t easy, to say nothing of trying to use a breath weapon) but even the most stringent system couldn’t claim that biting something that’s already in your mouth took an entire action.
That’s great! Hollow poison capsule tooth full of healing juice. XD
My favorite “and then the shenanigans he tried to pull” story about Healing Potions comes from a GURPS Dungeon Fantasy game… so the Player fell of a cliff and we all knew, unless the GM rolled really, really, really low, that fall damage would be a bad (even a median roll would mean that the PC would probably bled out before anyone could get down there, and they’d definitely be unconscious the whole time, thus easy prey to anything st the bottom).
So ole Cliff Diver decided to get cute, we’d been handwaving actually having to have the victims of a mid-fight potioning need to drink the potion, with cutsey claims of “I pour it in his wounds” or “I dump it in his ear”, so going off the “poured in wounds” idea he said “Hey, if the potions break open on me, they’ll seep into my wounds right?”
Well, the whole point of allowing someone to potion someone else is to suck up some action economy. This nonsense would suck up no action economy, not a single other PC would be involved, so the GM initially kiboshed it. But the Player spent the next five minutes wheedling and pleading and trying to argue a way into saving himself, the GM finally relented with “One I’ll roll each potion to see if the break, then you only get 1/6th the regular healing amount as it’s not being applied to your wounds directly, but seeping through the //padded// potion belt…”
Player agreed. Managed to twist around to put the potion belt above him (so it would hit and seep across him instead of just into the ground), and smacked into the ground. Damage was rolled, not enough for insta death, but well and enough that he was making consciousness checks (and managed to make the first one, Still awake!
The GM rolled for every potion, with a 2 in 6 chance across eight heal pots… all saved. None broke.
At this point for every action he took he’d need to make a consciousness check or pass out, and it takes two actions to potion up, one to ready a potion from a potion belt, and one to drink it. Cliffy McDiverstien decided to risk unconsciousness to pull out a potion (made the consciousness check) and then drink, and passed out after quaffing one potion… which did stop most of his bleeding, but didn’t heal him anywhere near enough to regain consciousness.
So he lay there like a slug, it was only defense.
—-
My favorite healing item is a Gem of Healing in GURPS DF (which to work had to be smashed ont he target), mostly because I had a Martial Artist who used a sling and could deploy, load, spin up, and release a stone from a sling all in one action! So occasionally when someone would start to drop I’d bean them in the forehead with a Gem of Healing.
I quite like the visual of breaking something to cause a heal. Crushing a fragile whatsit for its sweet heal juice is suitably violent to fit into combat…. Or into cliff diving as the case may be.
To let a certain archer state it:
“Most magical single-use item? A bag of holding, a portable hole, and their enchanted arrow, manufactured as a set. I hear they’ve got non-disposable uses too, like if you fire the arrow by itself you can recover it.”
Heh. I know that diagram. 🙂
I always just envisioned potions used on other (conscious and moving) allies to just be splashed onto the wound. Nothing about “magical curative liquid” really demands it be ingested. In fact, that largely makes less sense than a topical treatment unless you’re fighting a monk focused on stomach disruption or something (which sounds like it’s going to be an unpleasant and oft-avoided specialization).
Personally I do favor the bonus action for consumables, at least for self application. As they’re most often *clearly* not mechanically as useful as a standard action. And of course it doesn’t make a lot of sense that someone so heroic/badass/whatever can’t swing a sword and take a drink at the same time. (Though in real life I imagine that’d be pretty difficult actually.)
> (Though in real life I imagine that’d be pretty difficult actually.)
It’s hard enough of Souls-like games. :/
I usually go liquid potions for consumables, but I’m a big fan of the ‘splash potion’ route; that a potion is basically just as effective absorbed through the skin as any other method (I mean, why not, it’s magic) so you can just splash some healing juice on your friend to heal their wounds. In fact, I’ll even let players do it at range with a ranged touch attack, though I rule that that way the target also takes 1 point of damage from being hit with a glass potion vial.
Seems like “potion slinger” ought to be a feat or something….
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/base-classes/alchemist/discoveries/paizo-alchemist-discoveries/healing-bomb/
Lots of design space there!
Maybe it’s a topical medicine
“Cure Light Wounds. Apply directly to the forehead! Cure Light Wounds. Apply directly to the forehead!”
Well it is touch range….
Ideally, the consumable magic in your world would come in a form tied to how magic in that world works.
But for a neat generic option, I’m fond of magical trinkets that need to be broken the release the magic trapped inside. Small ceramic or glass tiles on the simple end, or delicate figurines for something fancier, it works either way. Chuck it at you dying buddy’s forehead and watch as the healing magic surges through them, fixing the damage done by the item’s shards (and some more besides, if you used it before the expiration date).
How far can you chuck these breakable items? Do you have to roll to hit?
Blood vials a la Bloodborne: EpiPen-like potion syringes you just jam into your or someone else’s arm/leg/torso/pseudopod and a concentrated dose of magical healing serum is injected into their bloodstream. The needles are enchanted with a one-time ability to penetrate layers of clothing/robes/leather sneaking suits/chain mail without leaving a hole behind. However, they’re a tad too fragile to apply at long range with, say, a hand crossbow without very special training.
Also, be very careful not to mix them up with the poison darts.
> Also, be very careful not to mix them up with the poison darts.
I heard that:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/p-is-for-poison
My quick fix is to make potions work both when consumed and when applied topically instead; so instead of shoving it in their mouth, you just gotta smear them on or splash someone with them just so. It taking a Full-round action is because you need to spread it well rather than just slinging it onto someone or smashing the vial open on them (“My face! The pain! …is going away?”).
Seeing the snapleaf mention above (always liked that one, alongside the Feather Tokens) reminded that D&D 3.5e had a neat variant where they were one-use tiles used by snapping them in half, though not sure how you make it apply to a target other than yourself; maybe you gotta press it to them first?
I remember the latter from a section suggesting you can refluff magic items for different setting flavor, specifically because it gave the Truenamer class (amazing fluff, almost non-functional mechanics that require heavy optimizing and min-maxing to get it working as intended and it’s mediocre even then) something unique it could do that was nifty (it had an ability that was basically Make Whole that could fix magic stuff with a Standard Action cast time, but had to be used the round after the thing broke- using it with tiles got you a lot of mileage out of a lot of utility effects).
> o make potions work both when consumed and when applied topically instead;
In 3.5 terms, that’s an oil rather than a potion. Kind of makes me wonder what the rationale was for differentiating between the two….
I imagine the thought process was they wanted potions to be drank for the classic portrayal, then someone brought up spells that target items and they made oils to cover that, then ‘people chugging potions in combat’ didn’t really come up a lot in testing until after the fact, so they didn’t think to just combine the two methods and call it a day.
That makes sense to me.
Weird that so much of this is inductive sleuthing. I wonder where you can read the 3.5 dev notes? Those have to be preserved in a thousand different random spots around the internet.
it’s the gamification of dnd isn’t it, as others have mentioned I favour smashable tokens, you could put all kinds of things in them, not just healing mind, but I guess at that point they’re just a little bit too similar to scrolls, except I guess the wizard can’t just copy a curse tablet into their spellbook
I just remembered the “riffle scroll” as an odd example:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic-items/wondrous-items/r-z/scroll-riffle/
Not really a “magic item in a can that anyone can use” like a classic potion, but it’s intriguing to see all these different shapes and concepts.
I think that potions are fine as they are.
Aesteticlly they work very well for the “Drink this magic thing and it will cure you of all your ills!” works fantastically for plot devices and in combat.
Mechanically, a move to draw and standard to drink imposes enough of a penalty to the action and enables people to be responsible for their own health (Heh, when has that ever happened? 🙂
Designwise they fit the niche of consumable healing item very well.
The thing that works against health potions is how utterly relatable they are. Drink this and feel better – most people experience that with their morning coffee. In a world of dragons, fae, demons and devils, a potion just feels so utterly mundane it’s out of place.
For me dialing back how fantastical the world is how powerful the players are has greatly helped me improve my storytelling and enabled me to setup emotional relatable situations that tug at my players hearts. Potions just ended up being very important as a collateral effect of that design decision.
I dunno, man. They work fine on paper and in the Imagination Sphere, but I think they’re a bit silly in practice:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0Gx8hYi0hQ
It’s similar to a bard playing a little jig in a swordfight. To this day, the only non-cartoony example I can come up with is Boromir blowing on the Horn of Gondor:
https://c.tenor.com/Luu1Yika0BcAAAAC/horn-gondor.gif
When you try and stage that mess with potions, it’s pretty awkward in terms of blocking:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vv8S2x-ZcMY&t=235s
If you’re a filmmaker, you’ve got to invent a reason for the character to get clear of the fighting for a few seconds. This is the reason potions provoke over in 3.X. When an enemy swordsman is menacing your downed buddy and coming for you next, that all-important six seconds of time to dig in your messenger bag and pull out a vial is missing. And I just can’t picture an enemy letting you trickle a potion down your gullet in the interim (let alone your unconscious barbarian buddy’s).
TLDR: Potions are great for out-of-combat. Less so in the middle of melee.
🙂 Fair points and well articulated.
Im just gonna leave this here.
https://aonprd.com/FeatDisplay.aspx?ItemName=Vaporous%20Potion