D&D 5E Why are potions of healing so expensive?

[Cap'n Kobold]

I mean currently several weapons literally cost their weight in silver. That is insane.

Longswords costing 15 gp seems about right.
Remember that you're not just paying for several days work by a number of skilled artisans making blade, chasings, scabbard etc. You're also paying for the raw materials' journey from underground rocks or livestock through the hands of those who refine it.

 

[Chaosmancer]

This points out what is, in my opinion, one of the biggest stumbling blocks in D&D design: they put too much focus on money. The entire game revolves around gold or gold equivalencies. Gold value is so central to the game that you can't even cast many spells without taking money into account.

Where this becomes a problem is that they want a medieval world with a functioning cash economy for everybody except the adventurers. For adventurers, they want a fantasy world where the only way to live is to go on adventures and find treasure. What they attempted to ham-handely achieve with their crazy prices and bonkers crafting / downtime rules (especially pre-Xanathar's) is to make anything except adventuring for treasure a complete waste of time if you're a PC, and a completely viable 100% legit way of life for an NPC.

I would have preferred to leave money out of it. If you make money your goal, business is always going to be the answer. As it is, they're trying to prevent PCs from getting rich by crafting items. Without money, we could lift a lot of the weird restrictions on crafting because we could focus on the utility of crafted items rather than their value.

Been saying the same thing. They wanted their cake and to make sure no one could eat it.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Metagame mechanisms?

Anyway my point is that Healing Surges were used for almost all healing and it was a daily limit. Almost all healing made the person being healed spend a resource. You can't just chug down as many potions as you want: your body just can't handle that much without resting. That means that you could buy all the potions you wanted, but you still wouldn't have more daily HP than if you didn't use any.

It was also always 1/4 your max HP, so a potion of healing that lets you spend a Healing Surge is good at whatever level you get them.

I thought it was an elegant system that really just needed some tweaks and you could have some dangerous combat (by having lower max HP) while not having to take long rests all the time (max HP + surges being your TRUE daily HP budget).

I'm torn on it. It had some good things and some bad things. But I do think it deserved to be given serious consideration as a potential system instead of hit dice.

Or, better, I wish hit dice were made into a system that mattered for the majority of players.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Well the system you describe is elegant (and common in CRPGs). However the actual 4e approach was to have a basic healing potion cost a surge and heal a fixed 10 hp, which did not scale with level. If you wanted more hp you spent enormous amounts of gold on better potions, and IME 4e players basically never used healing potions. 5e I think does it a lot better.

True, but getting better and higher level potions was a LOT easier in 4e, from the way the system was supposed to work.

 

[Mort]

I'm torn on it. It had some good things and some bad things. But I do think it deserved to be given serious consideration as a potential system instead of hit dice.

Or, better, I wish hit dice were made into a system that mattered for the majority of players.

I liked healing surges, but I suspect that the design team determined that to overtly use them was too toxic.

If you look at 5e you see a lot of 4e influences but precious few overtly 4e mechanics.

 

[guachi]

In one 5ed campaign I ran I used a variant on slow, natural healing. Healing potions were largely a controlled item and hoarded by the state for use in war. An army that could heal all of its injured and be back fighting would be quite formidable.

As it turned out, the players never remembered any of the consumables they had and when the campaign ended after two years they still had a potion they found on their very first adventure.

 

[Emerikol]

Oh those nasty mechanisms such as hit points which allow one to run at a platoon of goblin archers because they have enough hit points. I know what you mean.

Look I have my reason for why I made my decision. Your ignorant response just makes you look like a person who can't understand something that really isn't that complicated. I wasn't wanting to debate it. I was just stating my own decision. I know your ignorant and really can't carry on a conversation about it because of your dismissiveness and trite answers.

 

[Blue]

Maybe it is just how I envision them, as either little vials of blessed water or herbal tinctures

It heals wounds anywhere on your body well before it could ever have a chance to be assimilated by the body, so it cannot be anything as mundane as something that needs to be digested and instead needs to be a supply of healing magic that is triggered by consuming it. The form is the least of it, imbuing it with magic is the important part.

, but 50 GP seems a bit much. I mean, I would imagine that in every sizeable village there is an herbalist who sells various ointments and tinctures, and I don't see why they couldn't also sell potions of healing. Consider that in your typical health food store, an herbal tincture is usually $10-15.

Or should I say, in my campaign world they are variable in price depending upon availability, but usually in the 10-20 GP range, maybe even sometimes as low as 5 GP but rarely more than 20.

Well, from another thread I have it on repeated authority that "gold is worthless", so I guess they are free.

But seriously, from a DM perspective I need it pricey enough that characters aren't going into every combat fully healed, like the old Wand of Cure Light Wounds trick from D&D 3.5. And cheap enough that a party will have a few so that non-healers can stand others up.

 

[tetrasodium]

It heals wounds anywhere on your body well before it could ever have a chance to be assimilated by the body, so it cannot be anything as mundane as something that needs to be digested and instead needs to be a supply of healing magic that is triggered by consuming it. The form is the least of it, imbuing it with magic is the important part.


Well, from another thread I have it on repeated authority that "gold is worthless", so I guess they are free.

But seriously, from a DM perspective I need it pricey enough that characters aren't going into every combat fully healed, like the old Wand of Cure Light Wounds trick from D&D 3.5. And cheap enough that a party will have a few so that non-healers can stand others up.

Too bad short rests are even cheaper than a list price CLW wand with unlimited supply & on deman availability

 

[Bedrockgames]

It is all in the packaging