Jay Rampant Coyote Barnson has written a nice post responding to my earlier post about pots in CRPGs. In his post, Jay writes in defense of consumable items, although he shares a lot of the same issues–the ol’ wand of fireballs that you keep on toting around because you just know you’re going to really need it for another battle. Eventually, of course, you find it still sitting in your inventory at such a late point in the game that any monster you used it on would laugh at you.
As I was reading his post, though, I had a couple ideas. One was to make items specific for a particular boss battle. WOW does this all the time, giving you, say, a gnomish thingamajig that will shrink down an elite water giant so you can easily smite him. However, my friends and I always have to try killing one in his elite form–just to prove we got the guts to do it. Unfortunately, usually the only way you can actually complete the quest is to shrink them with the device.
