Critical Success potions

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by hcobb

2.78% per week. So a 25 week potion batch had to either somehow avoid rolling a 16 roll 25 times in a row or have some sort of charmed existence.

Yes, 2.78% per week. Most potions are not so many weeks, even one week. Many-week potions are clearly intentionally supposed to be challenging to get right. Deciding every competent alchemist has DX 15 and a +2 Charm greatly undermines that.

Which, if you want a chock-full-of-powerful-magic campaign, more power to you (literally), but back to my original point, I wouldn't tend to characterize the rules as implying the difficulties of making powerful magic are all routinely overcome by flocks of high-attribute NPCs with expensive magic items readily available for the purpose of abundantly stocking the shelves of magic convenience shops.

Even for a 25-week potion, the odds of not rolling a 16 in 25 rolls is 49.4%.

But wait . . . there are no 25-week potions. The longest are Revival and Youth, both 20 weeks. That's a 56.9% of not being fishy.

Lab explosions are of course also a big problem, which in theory a +2 Charm would eliminate. Without that, 20 weeks of alchemy has a 37.3% chance of blowing up at some point.

Personally, though that does seem like a high chance (and I dislike that the chance of ordinary failure vanishes entirely at DX 15), and I could see tweaking the rules a bit, in general I like that it is very risky in terms of wasting time/money/hard-to-get-ingredients and dangerous to try to create Youth or Revival potions, or to crank out batches of practically any of the other potions. I don't want Revival or Youth potions (or large quantities of other potions) to be a regularly available item for consumers or even kings.

There is of course the issue that given the risks and requirements, the actual costs would probably usually be rather higher and/or potions would be quite rare, but that's ok with me too - I just wonder what more appropriate costs should be, and wish I had more time to work them out.


To correct myself on my previous post, though, I realized that actually DX does affect the chance of a fishy potion, because the fishy chance is actually the ratio of fishy batches to successful batches, and the fishy chance is constant per week but not per successful potion, so the lower-DX crafter will have a higher fishy rate.

Originally Posted by hcobb

Only the risk, not the ingredients are multiplied by the duration:

Page 145: "The quantity of ingredients listed for each potion will make one dose. Note that this is a total quantity . . . the amount needed for the whole process, not the amount per week."

Yes, I wasn't saying ingredients were multiplied by cooking duration. It's just that ONE dose of Revival potion requires 25 doses of other potions as ingredients! (And all of those have their own ingredients and rolls not to be fishy, and/or to notice whether they are fishy or not...)

Originally Posted by hcobb

But you are clearly playing Dragon Safari correctly if you have huge doubts about the costs of ingredients. Four Dragon hearts? Sure, be back in a week. Anything else you need?

Yeah, I think your prediction that Youth potion means dragons would be extinct is actually the reverse: people who go out ingredient hunting have a very low life expectancy, at least if they go out in non-expert 4-man parties to dangerous wilderness.