Healing Potions Are Dumb (and how I fix them)

I don’t like healing potions in most tabletop role-playing games because they feel too random and inefficient. Picture this: you're playing a first-level fighter in D&D, let's say you have the max 10 hit points, and if you get hit badly you might lose 8 of those hit points and be down to 2. You say "I take my healing potion!" and the DM says "Roll a D6." and then you roll a 1. Fuck that.

 

In every edition of D&D you’ll have rules about natural healing, in Basic D&D it was only 1d3 hp healed with a full day's rest, but a lot of people house rule that. In the first game I played the DM had a houserule that your character recovered their level plus their Constitution bonus back in hit points every time you slept. However, resting for 8 hours in 5th edition D&D will heal you back to full hit points! That means that a healing potion is garbage.

 

These supposedly magical, life-saving elixirs are less effective than taking a nap. That's not magic, that's homeopathy.

The randomness is insulting at every level. Sure, you might roll well and get 6-8 HP back from a standard potion (2d4+2 in 5th Edition). Or you might get 4. Or 3. For something you paid good gold for, something that takes your entire action in combat to use, this variability is maddening. It's like ordering a pizza and having the restaurant roll a d8 to decide how many slices you should get.

Earlier editions of D&D are stingier. 1st edition only allows you to heal 1 hit point per day (modified by your Constitution bonus). 2nd edition increases this to 3 hit points per day. 3rd edition finally caught up to my first DM's houserule though without a Con bonus, but also added the Heal skill which allowed characters to double this rate of healing or even recover lost ability points. Still better than a potion!

The Video Game Problem: Death By A Thousand Potions

 Now let's talk about video game RPGs, where the problem somehow gets worse.

In games like Baldur's Gate 3, you don't have a scarcity problem but a hoarding problem. Your inventory becomes a graveyard of healing consumables: Lesser Potions, Standard Potions, Greater Potions, Superior Potions, Supreme Potions, Healing Tinctures, Elixirs of Health, and probably seventeen varieties I'm forgetting because I never use them.

Why? Because once you have a healer with Healing Word (a bonus action spell), potions become redundant. But you keep looting them. You keep buying them "just in case." You keep sorting through your inventory trying to remember which color bottle is which tier. Meanwhile, you're hauling around 43 Superior Potions "for the final boss" that you'll never actually use because you'll be too busy hoarding them for an even more final boss.

It's the hoarder's dilemma meets inventory management hell. Video games shower you with so many healing items that they become meaningless clutter rather than precious resources. If you've played Skyrim then I wonder how many cheese wheels you have in your home.

 To be fair, some games have figured this out:

Dark Souls and Elden Ring nailed it with the Estus Flask and Flask of Crimson Tears, respectively. You have a fixed number of charges that heals a specific amount of health which will automatically refill whenever you rest. No inventory clutter. No decision paralysis. Just a reliable healing resource that you will run out of if you're not careful. It's elegant, it's clean, it works.

Modern Final Fantasy made healing items weak in combat but great for post-battle recovery, encouraging you to actually use them instead of hoarding them forever.

The Witcher series said "screw healing potions" and made preparation-based elixirs that give you combat buffs instead. Not a healing solution, but at least it's interesting, if only useful once you've died to the monsters a few times while trying to figure out what works best.

Baldur's Gate 3 tries to help by making potions a bonus action and allowing you to throw them for AoE healing (which is genuinely funny to me), but you still end up with inventory bloat.

Make Potions Powerful But Scarce

Here's my proposal, and it's beautifully simple:

A healing potion should restore you to full HP. And it should cost a fortune.

Think about it. If a potion gives you a complete, guaranteed recovery from near-death suddenly:

• It feels magical. No more "I drank liquid starlight and got 3 HP back." This is a miracle in a bottle.
• It's worth using your action. Trading your turn to go from 2 HP to full? That's a legitimate tactical decision, not a desperate gamble.
• Scarcity becomes a balancing mechanism. Price it at 500 gold or more. Make merchants stock one per month. Suddenly players aren't carrying a dozen potions each; they're carrying one, maybe two for the whole party. And the decision of when to use it becomes genuinely tense. In games that I run I never even have magic items for sale, you need to quest for something like this or spend weeks crafting it.
  
• It creates memorable moments. "Remember when Sarah used the last potion to save Marcus from the dragon?" is a better story than "Remember when I rolled another 2 on a healing potion?"

This is the same philosophy Magic: The Gathering uses with powerful cards. Don't make them weak and common; make them strong and rare. Let the scarcity be the balance.

The Ripple Effects Are All Good

This approach creates better gameplay across the board (no pun intended). 

• There's no inventory bloat. You're not managing seventeen tiers of healing items since you have the healing potion.
• There's strategic depth as the party has to decide collectively who carries the precious potion and when it gets used. 
• Narrative weight is added to treasure. Finding or earning a healing potion feels like an event, not routine loot drop #72.

Healing potions should be the nuclear option. Rare, powerful, and respected. Not a slot machine you carry forty of. Not a worse alternative to sleeping. Not something you forget about in your inventory until you're cleaning up before the final boss.

Make them magical. Make them matter. Make them good.