Upgrading Healing Potions

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Skarg

A real chance or a high chance? You can have multiple battles with real chances of failure, if you manage to not fail.

I said chance of losing, not chance of failing. If you win the fight but take enough damage that you can't or shouldn't continue, that's a fail.

Originally Posted by Skarg

Yes, because they are so unlikely to have any real consequences at all. And that does tend to make players escalate what they're willing to take on, which eventually gets to a chance of consequences... which at that point is likely to be either death, or no one died and everyone was trivially healed.

Agreed.

To give a more concrete example, let's say you have four PCs, and we'll simplify and assume the opposition is equal to the PCs, just different in number. Also, we'll ignore healing entirely.

Against four NPCs, the winner is random, and heavy casualties can be expected, so you can have one fight.
Against three NPCs, the PCs are substantially favored to win, but are likely to take more than 50% injury in the process, so if you put in a second fight, the PCs are likely to lose the second fight.
Against two NPCs, expected damage is about 25%, so you can have three fights with the PCs still favored to win.
Against one NPC, expected damage is about 6%, so you can have fifteen fights with the PCs still favored.

If healing is easy, a dungeon should probably contain a mix of 2s and 3s. If healing is hard, it should probably contain a mix of 1s and 2s.