I don't like "lotions and potions galore" in D&D, or CRPGs in general. I don't really enjoy finding potions in every third chest, or a potion merchant in every tiny burg and hamlet. Collecting and rationing potions isn't an entertaining mini-game for me. Crafting potions (or meals that do similar things) from ingredients scattered around the game just isn't very fun. I find quests where I'm suddenly poisoned or diseased and then have to find an antidote in the form of a specific potion fairly annoying, but at least there it's part of the story. If they can make it part of the story, like with the wyvern's poison, then sure I can get into it a bit, but it's never really like that in the main.
Invariably I end every game like this with way more potions than I'd ever know what to do with. The idea of rage throwing them against on the floor has a certain appeal, but only because I wish they just didn't exist to drag everything else down to their level in a big messy puddle. I think they should strip all common potions from the game entirely, and then see if their gameplay and their difficult curve and their in-game economy even still works without them? If it doesn't, then they should go back to the drawing board on how potions are implemented. Why do RPGs always require hundreds of potions or stims or need a magical pharmacopeia to rival Walgreens every time anyway?
If things like potions were sufficiently rare, then they would be more interesting, but they never are. Healing potions are the worst offenders, since you know they're practically stacked to the ceiling everywhere.
The idea of a potion-based class archetype seems equally silly to me, since that was supposed to be built-in to the wizard's repertoire. I guess if that was the whole deal for potions, like they could only be produced by that one class role with some drama to it, then at least we'd have that niche in the party dynamic for people who are super into the idea, without them spilling all over the place. I like the apothecary as a narrative device, since that goes way back and feels classic, but when you get to the practical ins and outs, potions just seem to diminish the mystique of everything else.
One potentially interesting approach would be to take every common potion (eg healing), make it a rare potion and then treat it that way, perhaps by turning it into something with more of a double edge. Like the ancient pharmakon, that meant both "medicine" and "poison," so that there could be a potential malus and some intrigue there. Perhaps, like real drugs, they lose their potency over time, or become addictive, or have some kind of hidden cost that compounds over time, making them less of a freebie. Or at least for the uninitiated something like that might happen. You know, instead of potions just dynamiting the difficulty level and the challenge rating with a form of magic whose rules are way murkier and less settled than the normal spellcasting stuff. Or I don't know, perhaps if they really do want to make potions the beating heart of the game, then maybe the story, the UI, and general combat flow could have a more established place for them. But the idea of everyone just swigging and bouncing here and there and everywhere, like Gummy Bears, I mean it's ridiculous. Reinventing the bomb potion from Gauntlet in the form of void bulbs or whatever, also seems kinda lame. They've struggled to do something worthwhile with the idea forever.
