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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 9774789" data-attributes="member: 58197">My group has been doing potions as a bonus action for a while (well before 2024), and it has been a significant improvement. Potions get used a lot more and it's fun to pull them out.Now, I should emphasize that we routinely ramp up encounter difficulty way beyond the official guidelines. Those guidelines assume adventures based on the attrition model from the earliest days of D&D; but we find 5E combat simply takes too long to pad adventures with throwaway fights.With this approach, it's super helpful for the PCs to have a supply of "break glass in emergency" options. The DM is always going to be eyeballing encounter difficulty and will sometimes overestimate what the party can handle. Single-use magic items can provide a safety valve. But that valve only works if the PCs have time to engage it mid-combat.Now that I think about it, we've sort of re-created the attrition design; the key differences being that a) the supply of the limiting resource is not tied to adventure pacing, b) the players don't know or control when they get more, and c) throttling the supply doesn't interfere with the players getting to use their own chosen toys (i.e., their character abilities).</blockquote>