I know it a Simple thing to Make a Ruling on.
But, how does everyone handle their Health Potions and how much do you Charge for them?
this is what I’m thinking…
If we are talking ICRPG…its loot. not equipment.
The economy of a setting can be a very dramatic aspect. ICRPG ignores it, and that is not a terrible line.
If sticking to D&D I always went with a bigger divide, you are in essence saying 2D4 of healing is 20 coin. Perfect to go that route. But Lesser costs an action, and greater costs an action. Greater is always better coin to action at your current ratio.
I would at least do a doubling per, but in reality, I would do a harsher increase.
Your characters now have a choice. if they can afford it, their normal loadout will be normal healing potions., with the best chance of surviving an additional round.
Greater should be less efficient per coin, but really nice if in need, smaller package, higher quality, or whatever.
If these are affordable, everyone would carry 1, and the healers carry multiples of the normals to distribute as needed.
According to Core-Shabby Loot table an Alchemist can produce a random potion for one heart of effort. From Worlds Shabby Loot is worth 10-50 coins. Since you get random potions only I’d make that the higher end of 10 to 50. So probably 30 to 50 (based on availability and how much money they need to lose). And Magic Healing Potions heal MAGIC EFFORT.
That’s how I play it. Keep it simple. Focus on the action. Not on bookkeeping.
Another way to look at it is in modern context.
A reasonable first aid kit with some higher end single use items can range from 20 to a 100 dollars. (field dressing, tourniquet, etc). This would allow basic effort. A days pay?
Trauma Kit. Weapon Effort, b/c it has more tools designed to help in trauma situation, coagulating agents, defribrilator etc. Now you are talking hundreds if not thousands of dollars. A couple of weeks or a months pay.
For Magic Effort you are talking an ambulance. Or a Trauma Ward. Costs are an order of magnitude higher. You are paying for expertise as well as equipment. So a month to 3 months pay may be reasonable?
What is a Coin worth? A days simple labor. So just being able to make an attempt could provide a one use kit for 1 coin.
A trauma kit could be from 10 to 30 coins.
A Magic Potion could be 50 to a 100 coins.
The variability would be because of supply and demand type issues. (And b/c the DM wants to strip loot from the PCs 
)
Apologies because this isn’t what was actually asked, but the last response got me thinking…
A $20 first aid kit is for boo-boos. That would be not-at-all useful for 1 ICRPG HP of injury. A $100 first aid kit you’re maybe equipped for some greater than booboo situations. So maybe… maybe 1HP damage. But yeah, an actual trauma kit that’s worth carrying when serious injury is probable? Hundreds. I’d guess ours cost about $400 to $600 each to put together (I’m probably guessing low as just the scissors cost $70), and they do contain anti-coagulants, wound stuffing gauze, tourniquets, seals for sucking chest wounds, airway management, etc… Thousands is adding a defibrillator (those start around $1500) and they’re bulky and heavy. Also, remember a defibrillator doesn’t restart a stopped heart. It just (hopefully) convinces it to stop screwing around and beat in a steady rhythm. We don’t carry one. Maybe we should but…
Practically there’s booboo kits (cheap and worthless for battle) a decently stocked trauma kit for say $400 but only good for 1 or maybe 2 seriously injured people, and then ambulance/hospital which is ridiculous cost in goods alone.
Gauze takes up a stupid amount of space. I think like 80% of our bags’ space is various sizes of stuff to absorb blood.
So, yeah @hellfire6a 's numbers seem decent
For folks trying to play something a little more realistic in terms of items of first aid I’d say you need to think about the balance between size and usability. Our home first-aid kit is the size of a fat backpack. Our car one is roughly a large fat purse. Usefulness is pretty directly correlated to size. Number of people you can help with it is 100% correlated with size because of the aforementioned gauze size BS.
So, um ya… this went a bit sideways.
I guess the question I have for the original poster @MattSlaton. What are the cost of other staples? My numbers are more of a formula.
Healing potions = base+ 1.5 x per addition d4 or something like that, but not as exact. I was thinking of reverse engineering my numbers, but too lazy.
1d4= base= 10 coin
2d4= Base+ 15= 25 coin
4d4= base+ 45= 55 coin
6d4 = base+ 75 = 85 coin
Then do heavy rounding and it kind of works. Accounting for difficult acquiring and quality workmanship.
If we go with a days work…10 copper=1 silver…and a healing potion is a magical save that can fix anyone of normal injuries is seconds but require an alchemical laborious process and expensive ingredients…250 days of labor would by a lesser healing kit. 2 years and 1/3 of a year…about the same as my buying a badly equipped used ambulance…for something that can fix a traumatic injury on any typical living farmer, and make him right as rain in a few seconds.
Let’s not try to over complicate this…
ICRPG gives you a con check and recover 1+con. A magic potion can give you 1d8+magic effort…or whatever.
Your world your economy…I kind of want to run a hard core European feudal economy where serfs, yeoman, freeman, traders, merchants, gentry, nobles, and royals exist, along with magic. Specie is typically only found yeoman and above, and gold only with gentry and above.
But I fear the learning curve of negotiating a live chicken for a loaf of bread and bowel of stew and pint of ale would get real old real quick.
Not to mention you can’t exchange efficient coin with anyone unless you are at least recognized gentry, or have a writ from a ruler of the area…except the black markets.
Let’s not over complicate our games with realistic boring stuff. Let’s just kill some gobos, loot some treasure, ignore biological requirements unless story relevant.
But I always start from the complex.
I run my game for kids, so add that grain of salt in before reading but I handle my potions like this:
Potion of Healing ( heal 6) 15 gp
Great Potion of Healing (heal 10) 20 gp
Grand Potion of Healing (heal 20) 30 gp
standard weapons were 100 gp, to rent a horse for the day is 10 gp, a 4 person tent 50gp, and SUPPLIES are 10 to show how some of my prices work. Not perfect or balanced to a T but they sufficed for the kiddos. Most things of similar cost have better or longer uses. FOOD also has healing properties but they are rolled (1d4 small meal, 1d6 meal, 1d8 large meal and so on). I personally think potions should have a fixed heal value since they are specifically made for that, whereas food costs less and could heal more but is ‘riskier’ as far as healing per GP goes.
Gp in my game is just a standard unit for any money, no silver or copper to keep things simple. I structured most of the cost based on my kids needs ( and learning lessons) and they are subject to change from vendor to vendor or region if I want to show diversity or they become too dependent on them. That said they are priced, for my game, to be available but not the first thing players want to buy, I’d rather them use teamwork with their healers. It has worked for the most part since over the course of the year only a handful of potions were bought, and kids were really jazzed when one came in a chest.
With a built in emphasis on SUPPLIES and daily needs (room to stay, tolls,food, etc) I made them a secondary buy item and that really changed how they interacted with each other. Again I am using this system as a tool for kids to learn, among other things, how to wisely save and budget their money. Most saw that the benefits they gained by working together and smart planning were greater than spending precious GP on healing potions. I knew I had hit the right notes for a big bad when someone suggested coughing up some spare coin to buy a few ‘just in case’.
Check out Amazon. You can get a tourniquet and a field dressing for under 50 dollars. I was in the Army for over 21 years emergency first aid consisted of a pouch with a field dressing. That field dressing could stabilize a single gsw. You carried it around on your battle rattle and it took up less than half the space of a small paperback novel. You could spend more and get a few more items. Anti-coagulants, sulpha drugs etc. and push it to a 100 but not necessary for initial treatment for a single wound. It was expected that you would have medical back up for more serious wounds. You can get three tourniquets for 25 bucks. Truth is a pair of shoe laces, a pen, and some towels make a decent “kit” for stabilizing a wound.
Usefulness is really related to training and experience. A trained medic or trauma doc is going to get way more out of medical equipment than someone without training. Since the conceit for our game is that INT or WIS is equivalent to medical training, the size/expense/extent of your medical equipment would play the greatest role in healing someone.
Check out Amazon. You can get a tourniquet and a field dressing for under 50 dollars. I was in the Army for over 21 years emergency first aid consisted of a pouch with a field dressing. That field dressing could stabilize a single gsw.
yup. I’ve got those, but as a first responder I’ve got a lot more, and the stuff i have can handle a lot more than a single GSW. Also, stuff for handling the more subtle but still serious things. The costs add up fast. A tourniquet can be made from a stick and your jeans, and worst case scenario you can shove a t-shirt in a wound. So, to your point, yes you can get by pretty cheaply in many bleeding situations if you need to.
Not wanting to start an argument. I think we are saying pretty much the same thing just concentrating on different aspects.
The original aspect I was talking about is that you can have an “effective kit” to deal with an emergency for cheap and it take up a small amount of space. A basic kit that provides d4 Basic Effort.
I totally agree that trauma kits are larger than first aid kits and can handle more serious injuries and more of them. However, in real life it is still more dependent on user training. Hopefully a first responder such as yourself has a better understanding and more training than the joe on the street.
The in-game conceit is that INT or WIS accounts for that training. Because of that larger and more expensive gear and equipment is going to account for increased EFFORT when rolling to heal someone when using that conceit. Real life says otherwise. Real life says, “you better know what you are doing”.
I didn’t intend to get in an argument about proper techniques for treating wounds. I am coming at this question from a military background and from a background of a historian. Back in the bad old days medical back up like hospitals didn’t exist. Infection was poorly understood. (More people died from shock, disease, and infections than died of wounds).
Now days we have the luxury of having sterile bandages, well trained first responders, and hospitals. The general populace has a fairly good understanding of the necessity of keeping wounds sterile. All that is beyond the purview of the game.
[As an aside, if someone is bleeding out and you don’t have a sterile environment, and no sterile tools/gear what do you do? Stop the bleeding with what you have to hand or wait around for better equipped medics to show up in time to save the victim?]
I make standard healing potions in my campaign (about 90% of what the players ever find) heal with MAGIC effort (still D8 in my game).
I charge WAY more than you do—at least 300 coin—and vendors of such potions usually like to gouge. Volume discounts are never better than 250 coin per unit. Keeping the cost of a potion over 300 coin makes it equal in value to nearly a year’s worth of work by an unskilled labored, which I think is fairly appropriate. In time of great need to save someone’s life in an effortless Instant, I am sure many people in a medieval setting would slave away for ten months to have that miraculous power—were it not for beneficent Priests who do that sort of thing on their lunch hour.
Supply of healing potions is scarce in most towns, and an adventuring party will often go from vendor to vendor and buy up whatever potions they can, even at exorbitant prices. This keeps them adventuring, where if they are lucky they will find additional portable, potable healing magic for free.
I make each dose of standard healing potion take up a separate inventory slot in a character’s allotment of twenty spaces.
I also have a house rule regarding healing potions versus the products of the Elemental mastery reward for Priests. This Master Edition mastery addition (Ha! Say THAT ten times fast!) allows Priests to encapsulate their standard Healing Touch magic into a stick or stone, which, when destroyed, releases the spell effect. In essence, a Priest can create tons of healing potion analogues that are portable, usable by non-spellcasters, and FREE. I nerf this ability by making “healing sticks” crafted using the Elemental ability have healing magic that is more perishable than your trusty, reliable standard healing potion. A sealed healing potion crafted with arcane alchemy sitting in a chest down in a dungeon remains potent for centuries, conversely, there is a much shorter duration of effective use (weeks?) for a “healing stick” after which it just becomes a “stick”; there is no way of determining whether the stick is “fresh” except to destroy it and try it out, which keeps the crafting of such magical healing products by Priests from becoming a more lucrative prospect than risking one’s life delving dungeons in search of loot—a potentially world-breaking economic niche I wish to avoid at my table. I also have a rule that says if the Priest who made the healing stick dies, their stored divine magic is dispelled at their time of death, so any healing sticks they made cease to function, further reducing their free market value compared to an arcane healing potion, which is free of such constraints.
I’m impressed you have games that last long enough to make your nerf a thing. What is it like 20 nat 20s to get a mastery? I’ve never seen it happen in any of games before we change characters or the characters get killed. Even then you have to have down time or something to make the healing stick or stone because you’re gonna miss those rolls. That’s crazy.
The way I see it, most food items in the loot table give 1d4 or more health back, and that’s just like a slab of bacon or something. There is no reason health potions need to be overly expensive - life is way too cheap in an ICRPG game (10hp rolling 1d6 or more = dead characters). Players just need to have time to acquire them. 5e sets the base potions at 50g, but that’s forgotten realmish economy. ICRPG’ purchase method sets Basic loot (Ancient/Ghost Mountain/Scifi) to like 25-75 gold/coins. I’d start there and figure out which end of the spectrum they are probably based on how potent they are. Like the awesome d10+ is probably 75, but the lowly d4+ is likely 25 or less - if you even want different strengths! Then just consider how much gold your characters acquire in a session. Even 25 is unreasonable if they get no gold. My couple thoughts - Deathbare.
I take inspiration from the Guardians of the Flame novels. Healing potions completely heal, stop poison, mend bones, heal burns, basically anything but regrow limbs/organs or restore the dead. But they cost, 50gp in my game is a fortune and that’s what they cost, if you can find someone to make them.