In some games, health potions are like your fuel. You can only go so far before you have to fill up again at a local merchant. It affects how far you can get into a dungeon. It determines your range from the nearest town. You can only go so long, so far, before you need a fix.

After the jump, read about how Dragon Age handles potion addiction.

Health potions in Dragon Age aren't called potions. They're called poultices. Which is a real word. I looked it up*. It's from the Latin word for thick paste, which makes it sound kind of gross. And it is. A poultice is a wet handful of goo you apply to a wound. The characters in Dragon Age don't seem to know this. They keep drinking the poultices. The animation shows them lifting a vial to their lips, tossing their heads back, and being infused with a healthy glow, as if they were doing shots of wheat grass. I want to tell them that's not how poultices work. You don't drink stuff like that. I'm reminded of being in kindergarten and laughing at the kid who ate paste. I'm not saying I was that kid. I don't know where you'd get that idea. And it's not very funny anyway. I just wondered what it tasted like and I did it once. It's not like I ate paint chips.

Good lord, where was I? Health potions in Dragon Age. Right. My point is that Dragon Age is a potion-centric RPG, like most RPGs, but with some important differences beyond your characters eating paste.

For starters, you don't need potions between battles. The regeneration rate outside battle is so fast that health and mana/stamina will fill up almost instantly. It's only during battles that you need potions. In fact, some of the harder battles will come down to how many potions you have. (Note that my party doesn't have anyone with healing magic, but even then, mana is replenished in battle with potions.)

You can buy potions, but it's going to be more practical to make them using the herbalism skill. In case your character isn't an outdoorsy type, don't fret. You'll meet someone early on with herbalism. To make a health potion, you just need a flask (bought cheaply from any merchant) and a piece of elfroot (harvested from easy-to-spot plants while you're adventuring). These work fine for a while. "Pish," you think, watching your characters eat paste to sustain themselves, "this is trivial."

But as you level up and your characters get more hit points and get hit harder, you're going to want to graduate to the regular sized health poultice. This takes three pieces of elfroot. At which point, you're going to burn through your supply of elfroot pretty quickly. Three times as quickly, to be precise.

And here's where I realized my party has a drinking problem. I can buy an unlimited supply of flasks from the merchant at my camp. And some merchants have a few pieces of elfroot in stock. I started making a point to buy these whenever I came across them. But even then, during a really long storyline dungeon, I ran out of health potions. I had no way to heal during battles. It was touch and go for a while. I had to play very defensively. I had to pull back my characters when they were hurt (also known as "fleeing"). There were - I'm not ashamed to admit this - a few reloads involved.

So after that dungeon, I resolved to spend some time farming elfroot. Of the places I'd been, the Brecilian forest seemed the natural place to do this. After all, elfs lived there. So you'd think it would be the best place to find elfroot. It certainly seemed more likely than the dwarf areas, or the human city, or the lake by the mage tower.

However, after running around the same area for fifteen minutes, I now have only six pieces of elfroot to show for it. Good lord. There's got to be an easier way to get elfroot. I worry that maybe I'm playing Dragon Age wrong. Maybe I'm supposed to have a cleric in tow. Maybe I used my potions too soon. Maybe I've crippled my ability to get any further. What if I have to restart? What if potions are part of some insidious microtransaction shenanigans EA is trying to pull, like they did with storage space?

As I leave the Brecilian forest with my six pieces of elfroot, I have to go through a camp of Dalish elves. They have a merchant. I wonder...

Sure enough, as you'd expect at the entrance to an elven forest, the Dalish merchant has an unlimited supply of cheap elfroot. It makes perfect sense. I'm an adventurer. I shouldn't have to farm elfroot. The elves do it for me and their merchant sells me the stuff. Cheaply, to boot. Of course a human or dwarven merchant wouldn't offer it. And of course the elven merchant doesn't have the distillation agent I need for the more advanced potions. For those, I have to visit the dwarven merchant in my camp.

It takes a fair bit of slogging through loading screens and even risking random encounters to journey to and fro across the map stocking up on supplies. But it feels right. It's the price I pay for my reliance of health potions. And it's even part of Bioware's world building.

Up next: Wait, what was that thing you said about microtransaction shenanigans for storage space?

(Click here for the previous Dragon Age game diary.)

* This led me to another word: "cataplasm". That's a real word, too, for the same stuff as poultice. I like "cataplasm" better than "poultice", because "poultice" makes me think of chicken that's gone bad because I left it in the refrigerator too long. "Cataplasm" has a sci-fi feel to it. I hope they consider it for Mass Effect 2.