The Most Broken D&D Item Keeps Ruining Games. Here Are 3 Ways to Fix It

This item is in every character's inventory, and it's ruining games

Magic items are an important component of the Dungeons & Dragons experience; collecting and using wondrous artifacts is a given in a role-playing game of heroic fantasy. This is why, in D&D, every character class has access to magic items, starting at the very first level. However, one of these items is so powerful that it can easily turn the game’s balance upside down.

There is a long list of legendary artifacts that could fit that description: the Staff of Power, Queen Ehlissa’s Marvelous Nightingale, and of course, the Hand and Eye of Vecna come to mind. However, none of these items of unfathomable power match the sheer annoyance caused by the humble potion of healing.

In the current version of the D&D rules, combat can be a long and grueling affair that often comes down to attrition. Even if a character is reduced to zero hit points (HP) or below, they don’t die (except in the case of Massive Damage). Instead, they become Unconscious and start rolling death saving throws. On three failures, the character dies, while on three successes (or a natural 20 roll), they stabilize. While all this is happening, there is plenty of time for the rest of the party to administer healing, which usually comes in the form of spells or, more simply, potions. Once healed, a character can simply stand back up and join the action again.

Spell slots are a precious resource, especially at low- to mid-levels. While it’s important to have a dedicated healer in every party, at one point they are bound to run out of spells. Also, enemies can target healers or separate them from their companions. On the other hand, everyone can administer a potion of healing, which counts as a Bonus Action in the 2024 rules (also known as 5.5e). A basic potion of healing costs 50 gold pieces, and it heals 2d4+2 HP. While that’s a low number, it’s enough to bring a character back from the brink of death. And the character administering the potion doesn’t even need to use one of their own: They can rush to a dying character's side, rummage through their belongings, and administer a potion from that character’s inventory — all this while never consuming their Action for the turn.

This may not look like a big issue, but if you’ve been a Dungeon Master for long enough, you know just how frustrating it is to devote strategy and resources to bring down a character (perhaps a pesky spellcaster) only to see them come back up during another player’s turn, at the mere cost of “burning” 50 gold. Of course, D&D is not a competition between the DM and the players, and your goal as the former should always be to make sure everybody is having fun. Still, healing potions tend to have too much of an impact on the game for what should be a basic item.

Luckily, like every other issue in D&D, this one can also be fixed with a little creativity and some rules adjustments. Here are three suggestions for making potions of healing more balanced.

Make it more expensive

While I cringe at the thought that making healthcare more expensive could be a fix for anything, 50 gold is way too cheap for an item that brings people back from the dead. This is made worse by the fact that, at low levels, characters usually have nothing else to spend their money on. Other options are too expensive or not as useful. For example, a weapon with a +1 enchantment costs 400 gold pieces (plus the base cost of the item), and most DMs will avoid introducing magic items of the “uncommon” tier until level 3 or 4. Weapons, armors, and similar items can usually be found during an adventure or obtained as rewards, meaning that players can spend all their gold on consumables, and there’s nothing better than potions of healing.

I would set the price of the basic healing potion at 200 gold (the price of its superior version, the potion of greater healing). I understand that many players are used to the video-game-inspired feeling of potions as something cheap that you can chug quickly and repeatedly, but that shouldn’t be the case in D&D. A potion of healing is literally a miracle in a bottle, and it should be treated as such. They should be hard to obtain, and not a default part of every vendor’s stock in any forsaken corner of this fantasy world.

Getting the potions could be part of the adventure, too. Perhaps the party needs to perform a task to gain the trust of the local temple, or the party’s cleric has to find an ancient sacred text containing the recipe for the potion, so they can brew it during downtime.

Administering a potion should consume an Action

In the 5th edition rules, drinking and administering a potion was considered an Action. However, that did not play well with D&D’s turn-based combat. Players often have to wait a long time for their turn to come, and using it entirely just to drink a potion felt frustrating. Many DMs opted for a house rule that made drinking a potion a Bonus Action, and that later became official in the 5.5e rules.

However, administering a potion to someone else should not be a Bonus Action. It makes sense: Imagine that the poor dwarven Fighter Tordak (remember him from the 3rd edition Player’s Handbook?) has just been hit by a Cone of Cold spell that dropped him to zero HP. Ember the Monk rushes to his side to administer first aid. She has to dig through layers of ice, try to pry open Tordak’s frosted mouth, then bring him back to awareness just enough to swallow the healing liquid without suffocating. All this shouldn’t be a Bonus Action! (Unless you play by Baldur’s Gate 3 rules, in which case throwing the potion would be enough).

Bringing back a downed character into the fight should come at a cost higher than a mere 50 gold. That cost could be another player essentially skipping their turn, which balances the fight's action economy between the party and the foes. Instead, going by the official rules, in the example above, Ember could have kept moving after administering the potion and attacked an enemy or cast a spell. The current rules essentially turn a basic potion into a use of Healing Word that doesn’t burn a spell slot.

It’s a potion of healing, not of resurrection

This is the harshest fix, but also the most interesting. A potion of healing is made to patch wounds, not to bring someone back from the brink of death. Once a character is downed, potions of healing should no longer be effective. This opens the way for skills like Medicine or tools like the Healer’s Kit to be more useful.

In the official rules, a difficulty 10 Medicine check can be used to stabilize a creature with zero hit points using the Help action, meaning the creature stops rolling death saving throws; a Healer’s Kit allows a character to do that without a check. A generous DM could allow a combined use of a Healer’s Kit and a successful Medicine check (perhaps with a greater difficulty) to bring back a character to 1 HP.

Another alternative is to have a potion of healing administered to a dying character have the same effect as a Healer’s Kit. The character becomes stable, but they’re still Unconscious, so another potion or healing spell will be needed to bring them back to positive HP. This would place a greater toll not only on the party's action economy, but also on their resources.

The humble potion of healing is the most powerful item in D&D. Its excessive use and great effectiveness in combat not only can make it harder for DMs to offer a meaningful challenge to their players, but also have a negative impact on immersion. If you don’t want to risk messing with the game’s basic rules, at least try making this item more expensive and harder to acquire. It will add an interesting roleplaying component to your games.