Liquid Addiction

I have come here today to discuss one of the most unfortunate plagues upon gaming society. It has ruined the pacing of many an RPG, caused people to spend hours clicking on flowers to find the right ingredients, and rendered healing magic meaningless. Yes my friends, I come here to discuss: the potion.

The potion has been an RPG staple for many a year and I only just realized how much I hate it by playing Dragon Age: Origins and Morrowind. In both of these games your character is setting out on an epic quest to kick ass and blah blah blah, and in both games you are hindered by your character having to slam a potion down every few moments so that they can survive through the encounter. This does not make me feel like a bad ass. When I have to take a break from fighting every few moments to nurse my wounds over a bottle of red liquid I feel like I must be playing the game wrong.

The unfortunate truth is that, in all likelihood, I'm not. Many RPGs expect the player to die if they deign to never use potions, and while this would be an okay way to play a survival RPG, it doesn't make sense in epic fantasy. Take Dragon Age for instance. In Dragon Age your party will usually consist of a mage along with a smattering of warriors/rogues. Now, this mage will usually have two jobs. One is to nuke the hell out of high powered opponents, and the other is to heal the warriors/rogues. But, the way the game is scaled, a mage will run out of magic pretty early on in the fight, leaving the party high and dry. That's where potions come in. It wouldn't be so bad if it was a rare occasion that I had to use a potion, but I swear I drink potions more often than I swing my sword. This pacing makes the game feel clunky, and makes me feel cheated and annoyed (especially when I run out of potions).

To fix this problem game designers need to redo the pacing of combat such that mages can consistently heal the party. One solution is to designate a specific type of mage to healing duty (eg. Priests, clerics etc.), but another solution (that would fit in Dragon Age's class system) is an unhinged magic system. In this unhinged system damaging, buffing, and debuffing magic will reduce the mage's mana supply normally. Healing magic, however, will be relegated to another system. The mage could use the blood magic/entropy system of Dragon Age and absorb health from dead opponents or from enemies. They could even use other mages' mana supplies for healing by stealing magic, but that only shows one kind of mage.

For other (less evil) mages there could be a divine magic, or healing magic supply that is separate from their regular mana. A studio could do this simply by having two mana bars, or they could have a system where the mage's regular spells deplete the mana supply, while their healing spells only require that the mage have a certain amount of mana. This would mean that, as the fight wore on, mages would still be running out of spells, but they would be able to heal consistently. The designers would have to nerf the healing so that people couldn't get infinite super health up spells, or they could make it so that, as the magic bar went down, healing spells got more potent. Any one of these systems would make the tactics in RPGs far more interesting and keep us away from our red potion addiction.