Leonine Roar

Still wrestling with consumable usage in your games?  Not sure they’re worth the trouble, time or money?  What if there was a way to keep ‘old’ ones relevant as you level?

With truckloads of consumables available, their inherent qualities and drawbacks, and plenty of options already for a PC to choose from on their character sheet, it’s not that surprising consumables might see less play in 4e than ever before.  Monetary cost, strategic use, action cost, and outleveling all factor into wanting or not wanting consumables. 

Consumable Considerations

Monetary Cost
A classic consideration for any resource, I saw first-hand how powerful a driver this was recently in my primal-themed Frostfell campaign.  As the story developed, the party earned a discount on healing potions from a merchant they had befriended and re-encountered. 

At 50% off the first and 20% off for up to two more after that, everyone bought at least two.  Even with the discount, the purchasing of consumables hadn’t typically gotten much attention in our campaigns.  However, here I was both suprised and happy to see money actually being spent on them!

Strategic Use
In general, the nature of these items has changed to a more emergency-sort of nature, especially true with healing potions.  That takes some getting use to if you’re used to previous editions and/or video games where you pop them like candy.  Now, like powers, they have occasional strategic or urgent uses at best.  You have to weigh their cost-benefit for a specific situation, whether smartly well before you’re knee deep in it, or in a sudden flash of MacGyver-like insight.

Action Cost
Consumables’ action costs are also a major detractor.  It costs a minor to grab it from your person, then a standard to drink it or administer it – that’s two-thirds of your turn, including your most valuable action. 

Factor in characters who will almost always have their hands full, and the action cost is technically even more severe: most defenders, some leaders, and two-weapon wielders will not love the idea of having to spend an action to stow their shield or off-hand weapon or drop it and then spend an action to pick it up the following turn – if they’re able to stay right next to where they dropped it.

Outleveling 
Consumable utility is compounded by the fact that once you outlevel them, a lot of them suddenly become trash.  What can you do with level 5 healing potions once you’re pushing paragon tier?  Not much.  Perhaps a way to make “old” consumables more useful by combining them into a more currently relevant consumable would make them more attractive. 

Ritual: Transmute Consumables

Want to add some value to those consumables that are collecting dust from your previous adventures?  Want to keep your consumable supply relevant?  And save some money in the process?

Consider introducing a ritual that combines two of a lower level magical consumable item and transmutes it magically into a more potent version, no higher than the ritual caster’s level.  The new version cannot be more than 10 levels higher than the original items.  Have the ritual component cost equal the difference between the combined value of the old magic items and the transmutation. 

For example, if a 15th level ritual caster takes two potions of healing and performs the transmute consumables ritual upon them, he or she will have created one potion of vitality, consuming the two healing potions and 900 gp worth of ritual components in the process. 

Not only is the basic framework of this ritual flavorful, it helps solve a real mechanical gap in consumable usage throughout all the tiers of actual play.

Like this article?  You’ll find more related reading here: The Big 3 Potions, Treasure, Wish Lists & Low-level Magic Items, and Magic Items: Surprise Me.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 10th, 2011 at 12:00 am and is filed under Design, Mechanics & Efficiencies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.