Crafting Potion of Healing

Quote from Xerberon >>

Hello everyone!

In this thread, I want to share with you my concerns and thoughts about crafting potions of healing in my party.

The "issue" came up when one of my players announced that he would like to craft potions of healing in the future. I like that he wants to use his ability to do so but I am dissatisfied with the information given in the rulebooks when it comes to crafting potions of healing. To fix the issues I have with the description given I came up with my own recipe to craft a potion of healing.

At the moment my current idea is as follows:

To craft a potion of healing you need a flask of any quality and material which can at least hold 200mL of liquid. Then you need distilled and therefore pure water, a gemstone with a value of 25 GP which has been ground down to a fine powder. Distilling the water and grinding the gemstone both take quite some time. Afterward, you mix the two components and cast "Cure Wounds" on them. If you do as described you will gain a potion of healing. The whole process sums up to one day of work.

With a recipe like that, I hope to make crafting potions of healing a viable and balanced way to prepare for adventures and regaining HP next to the options provided by the general game, many spells and abilities and simply buying them. I want to make crafting potions of healing a thing to do in preparation for adventures or when downtime during an adventure would allow for it. I am aware that this recipe has nothing to do with herbs which is why I would claim you would need alchemist tools to brew such a potion and not a herbalism kit.

What are your thoughts about this? Do you think this is a reasonable and balanced way to craft potions of healing? Or do you see some major issues with this approach?

~Xerberon

 The only reason I don't like this is because it requires the maker to have cure wounds as a spell, so it implies anyone who makes or sells healing potions either knows the spell cure wounds or has someone on stand by who can cast it. As alchemy has become a plot thread in my campaign, I'm having to make a whole recipe book for potions, so what i've decided on is that common potions are made with largely mundane items, but what makes it a potion is that all potions require a certain amount of Residuum. Now this does hinge on the fact that you even use Residuum in your setting, and if you do it is semi-regularly available, but as an example, I've decided that common potions of healing require Spring water or Holy Water, any kind of plants with healing properties, pure alcohol, and a few grains of Residuum. It allows anyone to make potions, but still requires some unique, but not entirely difficult, items to obtain. Now if they want to make a stronger potion then it requires more unique items, such as the very rare Potion of Vitality requiring a token of divine favor, which is obviously open to interpretation. Hope any of this rambling gives you any thoughts! Anyone else is also welcome to respond, I'm a very new DM so I'm trying a lot of new stuff out.

I mean you could Skyrim rules, experimentation to find the right ingredients. A weaker potion would have more common ingredients vs. a stronger one that might have stuff like Daedra Heart and Eye of Sabre Cat to put in it 

Existing XGtE rules work for the most part and DM fiat can fill in the blanks if there's any.

Example: XGtE suggests "1 day " is spent creating brewing a common healing potion. DM gets to interpret what that means:

• 24 hours or a planet's full rotation (if it's more than 24 hours)
• 8 hours from based off of DMG's overland travel (8 hours for long rest, 8 hours of travel and 8 hours of downtime)
• Or simply create 1 potion after a long rest

Different ways to approach making potions:

• Requires an uninterrupted period from start to finish
• Break down each step so that party member can do a little bit of prep when there's time such as short rest, idle time etc.
  • sort, clean, weigh, prep, concoct/brew, distil and finally bottle

As for the ingredients again - falls to DM fiat and player flavour
If healing potions are reasonably obtainable in the setting then simply have players keep track of "potion supplies" using GP value. Once they have enough (25GP worth) of supplies, they can then brew a potion.

Players can put their own spin on healing potions. For example Artificer, Wizard, Druid and Barbarian has their own spin re: ingredients but the fundamental steps are the same. DM in this case rules that you need 8 hours split into as many smaller chunks of time for prep but the final brewing/distilling and bottling finishes within an hour.
Barbarian: finds insects, pond scum/algae/moss
Artificer: minerals with healing properties
Wizard: find any ingredients susceptible to enchantment
Druid: animal or plant

Each spend their time throughout the day prepping their respective ingredients and as part of their long rest and as part of their morning routine they brew a potion.
Taste and appearance differs (again flavour is key) and it's fun to see the party interaction to see who's the better healing potion.

I'd like to share here a reply I left in another thread about an article I found very interesting on DnD Beyond: The Horticulturist's Guide to Plants in D&D.

There is a table with different plants and their effects, suggested checks to find them, and ideas on how to use the Herbalism Kit, with references to rules in the DMG, XGtE, and Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos.

I believe that you need either an herbalism kit or an alchemist's kit to brew the potion. that at least suggests that you need to know which plants to gather. The problem is that which plants depends on the latitude, the terrain type and possibly the season. so I hope that guide covers more than eastern North America and that it focuses on wild plants not domesticated ones,

RAW is Herbalism Kit as of XGtE. Though I wouldn't die on the hill that it is the only acceptable tool.

Quote from HarbingerX >>

Quote from Unclevertitle >>

Quote from HarbingerX >>

The materials for a potion of healing should be hard to obtain and not just hand-waved. As with any materials for magic item crafting. Make it an adventure to obtain.

 
Are we talking about the bog standard potion of healing?  You know a common and consumable magic item?
Seems to me a common magic item ought to be made of common ingredients.

Going on a grand adventure to make a single use consumable item seems like a ridiculous amount of effort for very little reward. It's the kind of thing that seems likely needed to be used perhaps multiple times on the adventure to obtain it.

Now an adventure to learn how to make potions of healing on a regular basis? That seems fair. Maybe an adventure to acquire a reusable catalyst for the creation of healing potions could also be fair. But requiring an adventure for each potion made seems ludicrous to me.

 

Yes, I'm talking about what to do if you have a player who wants their PC to be able to craft healing potions on a regular basis. It should require an investment of actual game time and effort to make it more "expensive" than buying it from a DM-controlled source. If you make it too easy and cheap to have healing potions, then your players will simply say they are spending 2 months to make 60 potions of healing and going on their adventures with bandoliers stuffed with cheap heals. The DM should try to remain in control of either a seller of healing potions, or the special ingredients required to craft them to prevent misuse. 

 Misuse? The only purpose of healing potions is to keep players playing. When players need to invest in herbalist kits and the survival skill (or nature skill) to identify the necessary ingredients, it seems, I don't know, mean-spirited to not allow the benefit of that feat.

If you want to limit players from taking months of downtime, introduce time constraints to the things they care about. But when short rests heal about 60-80% of a character's health each day, and a long rest heals 100%, there's little justification, in normal environments, to telling players they can't produce healing potions routinely, as long as they are willing to accept moving at a foraging pace through the wilderness (as opposed to marching pace).