Hence heal potions were expensive, and there was no crafting or no farming. Then there was the mentioned crafting, but your wizard had to go sit in his rental suite for a month just to produce low level stuff. I mean, someone had to make this stuff somehow, right? Nope, not you, not the players, no farming of this stuff, no manufacturing assembly lines.
To be fair, there's always been a tricky situation with crafting... Between not wanting to make things too easy to access, but also not making things so obnoxious that a player would have to spend an entire session just making 1 potion.
There's been a lot of homebrew that has expanded on crafting in ways that feel appropriate, but WotC themselves have never put much into it and just keep it relatively passive...
Wait, this is an original D&D rule ???
Then I would have to argue that a potion recipe actually demanding fingers of a sentient race is a bloody obviously outrageously stupid idea.
Aye, it's an original D&D rule.
As far as the ingredients, the general idea was that players could acquire ingredients by doing their normal thing - Killing monsters. So the logical step was to make it so that monster parts could be used as ingredients. It's just that this didn't account for the absurity that would arise from having vendors that will supply the things being crafted and/or these crafting materials.
Like, if your campaign had you fighting a bunch of giants. Then being able to harvest part of said giants you killed to distill out a portion of their magical strength makes sense as a way for you to create consumables without having to go out of your way to harvest ingredients.
But when the ONLY way to make a specific elixir is to use body parts of giants and you have these elixirs and their materials readily available at vendors because they're a common commodity... Then you run into the issues of how illogical this implementation actually is...
