Brewing Potions

[Guest 6801328]

I'm working on some ideas for a sub-class that can brew potions and I'd love some feedback on ideas.

First, I'm using the rarity of potions (common, uncommon, rare, very rare, legendary) to determine the difficulty of crafting them. E.g., all uncommon potions share the same requirements. The variables are time, cost, level, difficulty, and maximum potions at a time.

So I'm thinking about giving each tier of potion a value, P, with the progression 1, 3, 6, 10, 15.

The cost of the potion is 50g * P. So 750g for a potion of Storm Giant Strength. (?!?!) All healing potions would be half price and half time. (Honestly I'm thinking that the gold cost needs to be an exponential function.)

The time to make is P days.

The minimum level to make is P.

You start knowing only Healing potion. Researching new potions takes 5 times normal costs, in gold and time. So 75 days and 2,250g to learn Storm Giant Strength.

At any one time you can only have potions existing whose P's total up to your own level.

Are there any potions in the DMG (anything listed as type 'potion', including Philter of Love) that might be too powerful?

All input/feedback welcome.

 

[aco175]

The Philter of Love and oil of Etherealness look powerful at first glance. The cost may change this to be more balanced, but it may just become a numbers game with downtime and pooling of money. I'm not sure how strong of a sub-class this would be with only making potions as his shtick. You could make it cooler by allowing potions to be made at half price, but only work for him. You could make potions that combine 2 powers in one, or mimic other spells. Misty Step or Levitate spell can make a good potion. You could also have a cheap potion that lets you cast a cantrip for a limited time, an hour may be a bit too much but 5 minutes may work.

 

[Guest 6801328]

The Philter of Love and oil of Etherealness look powerful at first glance. The cost may change this to be more balanced, but it may just become a numbers game with downtime and pooling of money. I'm not sure how strong of a sub-class this would be with only making potions as his shtick. You could make it cooler by allowing potions to be made at half price, but only work for him. You could make potions that combine 2 powers in one, or mimic other spells. Misty Step or Levitate spell can make a good potion. You could also have a cheap potion that lets you cast a cantrip for a limited time, an hour may be a bit too much but 5 minutes may work.

The sub-class would have more than potions; it's just one of the themes. (It's a "Witch" sub-class of Warlock; Patron is "The Three Sisters"). Another feature, although still potion relates, is the ability to scavenge material components from dead monsters, and in some other circumstances, which reduces the cost of future brewing.

I've thought about just defining a list of possible potions, mostly a sub-set of the official ones. I could exclude the most powerful ones that way.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

I'd suggest looking at the subclass that already has potion creation as part of its abilities: the Artificer in the Eberron UA. \http://media.wizards.com/2015/downloads/dnd/UA_Eberron_v1.1.pdf

The level of spell slot that they need to burn to create each type of potion might give you an idea as to relative power to set cost and difficulty for your class better than just rarity.

Its also worth making the point that if you're allowing potions of other spells to be created, that there can be a bit difference between a spell potion and a potion from the DMG. The DMG Potion of Invisibility for example is considerably more powerful than a spell potion of the Invisibility spell.

 

[Guest 6801328]

I'd suggest looking at the subclass that already has potion creation as part of its abilities: the Artificer in the Eberron UA. \http://media.wizards.com/2015/downloads/dnd/UA_Eberron_v1.1.pdf

The level of spell slot that they need to burn to create each type of potion might give you an idea as to relative power to set cost and difficulty for your class better than just rarity.

Its also worth making the point that if you're allowing potions of other spells to be created, that there can be a bit difference between a spell potion and a potion from the DMG. The DMG Potion of Invisibility for example is considerably more powerful than a spell potion of the Invisibility spell.

It looks like the main thing the Artificer gives you is the ability to, as a ritual, trade a memorized spell for one of a few unmemorized ones. So in effect expands your list of known spells, with some extra hoops to jump through.

The more I think about what I want my crafting to look like the more it feels like an entire sub-system, nearly as complex as spellcasting itself. What I'm going for is a class that knows how to scavenge rare ingredients while adventuring, and then during downtime is able to turn those into potions. What limits the power is that you can only make a finite number of potions, and only during downtime, so they're "worse" than Long Rest powers.

Also, I'm specifically going for the concept of a witch brewing strange and exotic ingredients, with "magic" being the lesser ingredient. In contrast with "casting a spell" on some liquid. Thus the scavenging part is integral.

The current iteration of my scavenging rules, which are a bit more complicated than I want, work this way:
1) When you have access to a fresh corpse of type Aberration, Celestial, Dragon, Elemental, Fey, Fiend, Giant, Monstrositie, Ooze, or Plant you may spend 10 minutes and make a Nature roll vs. 10 + the Challenge Rating of the monster.
2) On a success you extract 1d10 * Challenge Rating "gold" worth of parts.
3) You may only make one attempt per specific monster type (meaning "Fire Giant" not Giants in general) until the next Down Time
4) The value of the parts may only be applied to the cost of making potions during Down Time; they have no value on the open market. The price in gold is only really relevant if you want to buy the ingredients because you couldn't scavenge them.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

It looks like the main thing the Artificer gives you is the ability to, as a ritual, trade a memorized spell for one of a few unmemorized ones. So in effect expands your list of known spells, with some extra hoops to jump through.

Then you've kinda missed the point of not just the ability, but what I was suggesting about it.

I was suggesting that you use the spell slot cost in the Artificer writeup as a basis for judging how powerful each potion is. This could give you an idea of the difficulty and/or cost of potions for your class.

The artificer ability isn't just trading spells. As I pointed out, the DMG potions aren't just spells that you can give to other party members to cast. For example many require no concentration, even though the base spell does.

The more I think about what I want my crafting to look like the more it feels like an entire sub-system, nearly as complex as spellcasting itself. What I'm going for is a class that knows how to scavenge rare ingredients while adventuring, and then during downtime is able to turn those into potions. What limits the power is that you can only make a finite number of potions, and only during downtime, so they're "worse" than Long Rest powers.

Also, I'm specifically going for the concept of a witch brewing strange and exotic ingredients, with "magic" being the lesser ingredient. In contrast with "casting a spell" on some liquid. Thus the scavenging part is integral.

You probably don't want to make it a significant part of the class then, if it can only be performed during downtime. In many adventures, downtime can be quite rare if it exists at all, and so the character may not have any opportunity to use that class ability.

The current iteration of my scavenging rules, which are a bit more complicated than I want, work this way:
1) When you have access to a fresh corpse of type Aberration, Celestial, Dragon, Elemental, Fey, Fiend, Giant, Monstrositie, Ooze, or Plant you may spend 10 minutes and make a Nature roll vs. 10 + the Challenge Rating of the monster.
2) On a success you extract 1d10 * Challenge Rating "gold" worth of parts.
3) You may only make one attempt per specific monster type (meaning "Fire Giant" not Giants in general) until the next Down Time
4) The value of the parts may only be applied to the cost of making potions during Down Time; they have no value on the open market. The price in gold is only really relevant if you want to buy the ingredients because you couldn't scavenge them.

These look workable. Just be careful of the player going out of their way to attack these types of creature in order to harvest them.

 

[Guest 6801328]

I was suggesting that you use the spell slot cost in the Artificer writeup as a basis for judging how powerful each potion is. This could give you an idea of the difficulty and/or cost of potions for your class.

The artificer ability isn't just trading spells. As I pointed out, the DMG potions aren't just spells that you can give to other party members to cast. For example many require no concentration, even though the base spell does.

Ah....got it. Ok, good observation.

You probably don't want to make it a significant part of the class then, if it can only be performed during downtime. In many adventures, downtime can be quite rare if it exists at all, and so the character may not have any opportunity to use that class ability.

Yeah, I struggle with how to resolve that. The problem is that if it's a significant part of the class and you don't get downtime it's worthless, and if it's a ribbon (or just above a ribbon) and you DO get a lot of downtime then it's OP. Maybe the problem is that downtime just isn't meant to be used for anything significant.

I'm going to keep noodling on this. I love the idea of scavenging dead monsters for ingredients, though....

Thanks for input.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

On the whole, as an independent subclass, its a bit too adventure-dependent. If there is no downtime, you lose out. If you don't encounter any of the correct creature types, you also lose out. The downtime might be able to be shortened to long-rest-based, but without the right creatures on the adventure, you're not going to be scavenging anything.

 

[Guest 6801328]

On the whole, as an independent subclass, its a bit too adventure-dependent. If there is no downtime, you lose out. If you don't encounter any of the correct creature types, you also lose out. The downtime might be able to be shortened to long-rest-based, but without the right creatures on the adventure, you're not going to be scavenging anything.

Well you could also just spend the gold, if you don't scavenge anything. That doesn't fix all the problems, but mitigates them.

 

[Dragongrief]

How married are you to the idea that you can craft/stockpile unlimited potions given enough time and resources? You could have a "potions mainable" number and have level equivalencies as Cap'n K suggested checking the Artificer for. That would give you a controlable mechanic to base power on. You could then have special recipies that require component X to create (or multiple components if it's really powerful).

The components can either create adventure opportunities (finding a basilisk eye), or be a resource drain if you decide it's for sale somewhere.