Does anyone actually use/like potions and scrolls?

[J1M]

Aside from games like Diablo where you are expected to down enough red juice to become the Kool aid man, do you view potions and scrolls as an enjoyable feature?

When a scroll of cat's grace drops are you happy to see it? Or do these things clog your inventory and eventually get sold?

I tend to view these things as pointless feature bloat or akin to a way to cheat whatever meager resource management is required depending on how effective they are. Either way, I sell them to the store 99% of the time.

[Valter]

Witcher 2 drugs build was exceedingly fun. The effects would get ridiculous.
I guess it depends on the game, but generally now I'd rather just sell them

[Acrux]

Fell Seal handled consumables as per-battle items. You could "upgrade" the item to get more uses for each battle.

[rusty_shackleford]

Just use 'em, stop hoarding them.

[aimlesshealer]

If the difficulty is just right, I wind up rummaging through my inventory for any advantage I can get. Which can lead to the amusement/frustration of trying to create a tactical advantage from whatever bits and bobs are in the bottom of your pack. Those moments of perfect difficulty are magical.
Either resources must be strained, so that potions and scrolls are a welcome relief, or a fight must be hard enough that a well-placed boon makes the difference (without feeling cheap).

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I feel that healing potions are almost always worthless because your character has abilities on a short cooldown or spells (that cost MP which regens very quickly) that can heal HP much more effectively and efficiently. Potions are often unwieldy to use because you either have to bind another key to them (very difficult if you already have a lot of abilities or weapon slots keybound) for something you will probably use sparingly. Or you have to open up an inventory menu and navigate more menus to reach it, which breaks the flow of a singleplayer game and is not practical in a real time online game situation.

Potions/consumables are interesting however when you can use them offensively, ie equipping the Moebius master quartz in Trails of Cold Steel where you can throw items or food dishes at enemies and it deals a lot of damage. FF12 dousing an enemy in oil and then casting a fire spell at the enemy to immolate them for much more damage. You are creating a pseudo archer/gunner class that is not officially branded by the interface or at character creation as a class, but is effectively the same thing where your playstyle revolves around stockpiling items to use as ammo. The Moebius MQ also increased the AoE radius of using consumables, so you could theoretically turn anyone into a healer who heals the whole party by using foods or potions rather than using abilities or spells, but it usually does not look as cool to do as the latter.

[rusty_shackleford]

When playing BG3 I limited myself to resting as little as possible which meant I used a lot of consumables. If the game limited resting as a feature, consumables would be much more useful

[Acrux]

I also tend to use consumables more when they can be shared or easily passed to/used by multiple characters. They also need to be "worth" using - like restoring enough MP or HP that a spell or a short rest won't cover.

I've used them more in games like Chrono Trigger where you can actually use all of your MP in a battle or have characters go down if you don't them.

[Oyster Sauce]

I like PoE's potions as a rechargeable item. Consumables may as well not exist for me.

https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Flask

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I like PoE's potions as a rechargeable item. Consumables may as well not exist for me.

https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Flask

I remember that when PoE launched, there were I think 7 consumable items that were core to the game. A portal scroll, and I forgot the others. I think they had something to do with identifying or upgrading your gear. There was no gold. So those 7 comsumable items became the currency for the game when bartering with NPCs or other players, and since the items were consumable, that naturally meant it was difficult to amass a lot of it and remain "rich". It was a great "gold sink". Similar to how Metro's currency is bullets, but you also need to shoot the bullets to kill enemies and make it through the game rather than just stockpiling them. But I think this is only really applicable to a survival situation setting where everyone is always on the brink and there are no functioning towns or cities or industry, since people would naturally try minting or agreeing upon a currency and try to stabilize the situation.

[Tweed]

Depends on the game. Potions in the Infinity engine games were usually pretty handy and not just the healing ones.

[maidenhaver IV]

Potions? No. Scrolls? Yes. I prefer wizards over sorcerers.

[A Chinese opium den]

It makes me feel cool and smart when I use a scroll/potion I've been saving for the perfect opportunity to do something I otherwise couldn't in combat or to sneak around etc. If I ever roleplay as a magicless fighter I use scrolls and potions all the time, its a great way to have access to the utility and ranged/aoe damage options mages get without needing to minmax my party and have a utility **** tag along. Also stacking buffs with scrolls and pots to make yourself a god for important fights is one of the finest pleasures in life.

[Tinky Winky]

Zoomer trait: You don't hoard your resources in games.

[Demonic Fate]

The best consumables are extremely narrow yet effective, the type of effect you'd never pick as a character skill but you'll be thankful to have it the one time it's a lifesaver. "See invisibility", "seal door", "put an ally in stasis for three turns", "flood room with water", effects like that.

Important note: it feels 1000 times better to use these if you bought them rather than getting them as random loot, because you feel like a smart planner.

The worst kind of consumables are small buffs, especially if they don't stack. Sure, when the big boss fight is approaching you'll be chugging all those Mega Ultra Titan Strength potions. But when the **** are you going to drink the "Gain +2 strength for ten turns" potion? By the time you determine that the fight is close enough to warrant a small buff, it's probably halfway through and spending a turn to drink it becomes a worse and worse value proposition. Looking at you, 3E potion of heroism (the 5E version is a huge improvement).


Healing potions are meh. If they're regular consumables to be drunk in combat, they're basically "insert coin to continue". Just make the enemies deal a little less damage and remove healing potions.

Out-of-combat or rechargeable healing potions have the potential to be much better if they integrate and support whatever your rest/resource management is. Though IMO 90% of RPG designers are **** at balance and shouldn't bother with it. First design your game by letting the player be at full strength at the start of each battle, and make a balanced and reasonably challenging game under those simplified rules. Then, once you can reliably hit that target, you can add resource management on top which massively complicates the game balance.

[rusty_shackleford]

Important note: it feels 1000 times better to use these if you bought them rather than getting them as random loot, because you feel like a smart planner

This goes for most utility
Giving someone a utility before it's used. BG3 making sure everyone has speak with the dead, etc.,

[Manny V]

On the one hand, having potions and scrolls that do **** you wouldn't normally be able to is nice and can be really handy. But on the other, it's a bit lame if you're playing an archetype like a magic hating warrior or an edgelord thief, and you either use these items enough that it kinda ruins your desired playstyle(thief throwin fireballs and gettin giga magic shields and **** instead of sneakin n stabbin), or you avoid using them entirely but feel gimped because of it.

As a result i end up doing the ol classic 'saving em for the right moment' schtick, which never happens, hence the hoarding. But when it does happen, kino.

[Tangerine]

I hoard potions like I'm playing a JRPG.

[maidenhaver IV]

Zoomer trait: You don't hoard your resources in games.

I never did, even with dedicated potion inventories. Clutter is for autists who can't part with anything, or they have mental breakdowns.

[Tadeusz]

It depends on the actual utility of potions and scrolls. Do I have spells or abilities with the same effects? Are potion effects significant?
Gothic handles potions and scrolls pretty well as they are a finite resource with a good utility. In most other games though they're not that useful most of the time so I just sell them.

[DDC]

I usually don't use them.

Category A: because the item usually doesn't scale, it is much weaker than a comparable ability one of my characters can use. This is most games and most items. I am accumulating them but it's not hoarding because I don't plan to use them. They are vendor trash.

Category B: standard Healing/MP restoration items. I will usually use these.

Category C: the item is too good to use. This would be megalixers, etc. Normally I am hoarding them for an insurmountable fight that never comes. If I found 10 over the course of the game, typically 0 - 1 get used. In soulslikes, the "too good to use" category gets vastly expanded because items used during failed boss attempts are lost forever and some things can be tedious or impossible to farm. You could easily blow through your entire stash of a particular item on one boss and be completely out for a later one where you need it even more.

Category D: The game is hard and I am ****** during a battle. I absolutely need to do something that a certain party member is incapable of, like dealing decent damage with a healer to peel off the rest of a dangerous enemy's HP. Now I am rummaging through all my items trying to figure out how to do it. This will almost always be a CRPG or SRPG where range/character location is a factor, because it's pretty rare in a JRPG to have to do something with a certain character. And usually it's in the early or maybe midgame, before you have real builds online with a rounded loadout.

[TKVNC]

Most games make them worthless is the problem.

Morrowind, like many other things, did it properly.

[Spacekiddo]

Depends really on the game.
In POE for example I fingerfuck my keyboard all the time with all the chugging I´m doing but its because using items is a huge part of the game itself.

BG3 or DOS2 for example offer scrolls and the like as "hey use this, instead of the skill you might or might not have" but this is rarely useful. Usually this boils down to "USE HEAL SCROLL" or "USE X SCROLLS THAT MAKES TRAVERSAL EASIER" and the like.

You rarely use them, nor are you encourged to.

EDIT: In Warcraft 3 you use items all the time tho. They are both useful and feel rewarding to be used imo.

[rusty_shackleford]

I'd like to see some data collected on if reminding players they have consumables improves consumable usage

Unsure how to implement this in the UI in a good way, but I'm sure it could be done easily enough in turn-based

[DecadeRiptide]

Only game I remember using scrolls in is Skyrim, and they were kind of a pain in the *** because they took so long to actually use. I like the idea of seeing my character use a scroll as its more immersive, just prefer it to be convinient to use is all.

[logincrash]

I'm fine with using potions, but I never ever use scrolls. Something about them being a one-use finite resource makes me dislike them.
I'd rather sell them all because I know I will never use them anyway.

[Shillitron]

I hoard potions like I'm playing a JRPG.

JRPG's were infamous for "Point of No Return" sections of a game where there's a really hard boss gate keeping progression. They also didn't always signal when that was gonna happen and in the older games they didn't always provide ways of leveling up or regenerating health either.

In those cases - all my hoarded consumables were the difference between being stuck or not. In less extreme cases, you weren't stuck-stuck but would be forced to back track a really long dungeon that was ******* annoying.

TL;DR -
I think early day JRPG's have conditioned me into "save-for-later" syndrome.

[Lich]

Potions are nice in games with "consequence persistence" as Rusty put it.

[Jordy]

I'd like to see some data collected on if reminding players they have consumables improves consumable usage

Unsure how to implement this in the UI in a good way, but I'm sure it could be done easily enough in turn-based

Remind me all you want, I'm not going to use it just in case I need it later.

[HereForTheFood]

If I get to the point I need to start using the scrolls I find, something has gone really wrong, and my party is likely to die soon.