Halfway through my second play through of Avernum: Greed and Glory, I realized that I always had a ton of wands that I was carrying around. So I started using them, lavishly. And still had a half-ton of wands that I was carrying around by the end. Although I usually had way too many Ensnaring and Terror Wands, so started selling some, and not enough Crystalline Wands, which then got hoarded. Same for scrolls, I found that I usually had a big pile of ones that I found not terribly useful, and hoarded the ones I found made a real difference (examples: ton of Vulnerability that I never used, and never enough Speed Burst, so that I had to ration them by expected major battles). Potions I use, much as with scrolls; the useful ones like Healing tend to accumulate simply because they aren't needed as often on Casual, and the ones that really make a difference, like Invulnerability, I end up rationing by expected boss battles. I do play on Casual the first time or three, though. I will have to make it a point to see if my consumables use changes on a higher difficulty level.
I recall in the Dragon Age games I would often dump my consumables onto my party members so they would make sure they didn’t go to waste. Sometimes consumable build up is less a goblinoid hoarding instinct problem, and more a “I’ve got too much to do as it is!” problem. Still, “wait, the 𝙍𝙊𝘽𝙊𝙏 is going to 𝙒𝘼𝙎𝙏𝙀 all 𝙈𝙔 precious resources!?!?!?!1111” can absolutely be a worst possible answer to the issue.
Still, I will say Queen’s Wish probably leaned into the impulse to hoard resources more effectively than anything I can remember playing. Maybe not item resources, but 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘳 resources. Do it all in one go, no running back to mommy to go get healed back up to full without consequence so make every move count... Queen’s Wish looked at the weird shape of the hoarder mindset and, instead of just dumping it in a pile of packing peanuts and hucking it in a mailbox, it precision cut foam to that shape to make sure the experience was delivered safely.
I’m not sure if it’s the best possible answer, but it 𝙞𝙨 an answer, which is more than I can say other games can be bothered to give. And I’m in no way better than any of this - I too wind up with enough unused scrolls to wallpaper a small castle, and wands enough to construct a truly apocalyptic kindling pile by Avernum’s end. If potions were regulated, my adventurers would be arrested for illicit elixir trafficking.
I praise Queen’s Wish, and yet I am utterly terrible at efficient resource usage. At least an ill-timed or unoptimal use of a resource is a 𝘶𝘴𝘦 of it. If you revised Avernum’s loot tables to reflect how I play, 90% of all consumables would be better off as just more gold or static loot to sell for the same. Which would be boring, so not a great answer.
All I can think of is maybe highlighting the usefulness of consumables by giving them to enemies. The Wand of Uberpocalypse burning a hole in your back pocket becomes easier to remember when there’s some snot goblin waggling a fire stick at you. Spite can be a powerful motivation, and turning a fight into a potion drinking contest at least gets those potions drank. And, if enemies are already going to be pulling out weird abilities and powers as it is, you may as well do it in a way that prompts the player to remember and use their own external powers.
I love the reusables. Witcher 3 used those as well (I can't remember if witcher 1 did). I think they needed to do a better job explaining how easy it was to fully restore all your potions though--it wasn't intuitively obvious right at the start, if I recall.
I am obviously not every gamer, but I don't have a problem using consumables, if and only if I know i can replace them relatively easily. If I know I can run to town and buy a few health potions, or craft a potion of haste from some berries I can pick in the forest I will chug like I have a problem. If I can't easily replace something I will hoard it because the very real situation of "a fight may be unwinnable for me and my skill level if I don't have this" will almost always win against using a consumable to make a hard but possible fight easier.
Personally. I don't really like consumables in general though. I get way more dopamine from finding or crafting a reusable "consumable" than I do from just finding a potion or an elixir. Witcher 3 did this well but Cosmic Star Heroine did it the best. Finding a "consumable" was almost better than finding a piece of equipment, because you knew you weren't going to replace it, just switch it if needed.
"if and only if I know i can replace them relatively easily"
This is totally a solution. It basically makes a consumable not a consumable (since you are not actually consuming anything). Which works really well in a lot of games.
Itemization and consumables definitely seems like a hard puzzle to solve. Using (early, I haven't played the newer) Final Fantasy as an example, you rapidly get to the point that potions or hi-potions are basically free, which as you said turns them into not a consumable, which means the attrition that the dungeon is trying to cause is cancelled out. Then you have to ask what purpose do the trash encounters have, they likely aren't made to kill the party because that's frustrating to most people but if consumables are free then non bosses don't exist to drain resources because you can't drain infinity, so what is the purpose of non boss encounters?
I will say I do appreciate the balance in your games. There are definitely items I save because "I might need this later" but the dungeons and encounters always feel balanced enough that I want to use my MP but not *all* of my MP, and items are plentiful enough that I don't worry about a few health or energy potions. I also know I'm generally not likely to get stuck because if I do run out of resources I can always back out and resume from where I was.
Even if something is infinite and may well not be infinite in short and medium term and thus preserving is of value. For example even a Rpg with cheap or free full restores at save points, town and world map. Between one save point and the next Mp is finite and who want to save it. Likewise whilst you can get infinite items in town, you may be a long way from town so the limit is whatever you can carry.
I am reminded of secrets of mana 2 for the Snes where you could but up to 99 of anything in storage and gold easily get enough gold to do just that. So in medium term they were nearly unlimited and in long term truely so. However you don't access the storage in battle and you were limited to nine items of limited types and thus their was tension in battles, especially if they came unexpectedly and you haven't refilled your pockets.
Without disputing the reality of loss aversion, I don't think the consumables problem is JUST an artifact of our irrational monkey brains. There's also a consequences mismatch problem. If I have to refight the current battle because I didn't use my semi-trailer full of consumables, then I've lost 5 or 10 minutes. Even if I have to refight it 10 times, I'm probably spending less than an hour figuring it out. If I get to a late-game fight that's unwinnable because I used that one consumable that I needed in a trash fight three chapters earlier, then I could easily lose 30 or 40 hours of progress ... IF I even have a save that old, which I probably don't.
That actually happened to me in Marathon 2 back in the '90s. I got to a level that was physically impossible to complete because I hadn't fully topped up my oxygen at the last opportunity, six levels before. I did actually have a save I could have gone back to, but I just couldn't face redoing all those levels (one of which was really, really, REALLY annoying), so I set the game aside for a while. Thirty years later, not only have I never gone back to it, Marathon 3 sits shrinkwrapped in my closet because I don't want to play it until I finish 2 (which I never will). Obviously, that's some crap game design on Bungie's part, but it nicely illustrates the problem from a player perspective. If I screw up and underuse consumables, I lose little or nothing. If I screw up and overuse them, then I probably never finish the game. Why would I ever use any consumable unless it's so low-powered as to be clearly useless in the later stages of the game?
The thing that jumps out at me is "irrational monkey brains". I don't actually think these deep-wired instincts are irrational at all, as the peers of our ancestors who didn't have those instincts DIED OUT. :-)
I think more popular in actions games, but I've seen some solve the consumable problem by limiting how many you can hold. If you can only hold 3 potions but you'll find 10 in a dungeon, that means you have to use them or lose them. Effectively using loss aversion in your favor.
Nobody worried about loss aversion in Doom. You HAD to use the bullets and health you found to live. (But them people would save scum to maximize the amount of ammo they had going forward. There is no tricksy way to get around human psychology.)
I remember in Doom and other early FPS games making a conscious trade off between bullets and HP at times. They’re both assets for your goal of completing the game, and when one is short you can lean on the other.
That said, I prefer the more modern game design where you have shields and/or HP that recharge over time when not in combat. It’s just more fun.
Hopefully there are some indie devs out there servicing that market. It’s probably big enough for a few to make their living from it.
I think there’s a market for stressful game experiences, but maybe not in the straight FPS. Dark Souls, Dead Space, and pick your Survival Builder game can be pretty stressful, but also have big markets.
Dark Souls has a problem with the other consumables though. Elemental resins and humanity restorers are permanently gone when you use them, and you can't save-scum. You want consumables for boss battles, but bosses are difficult even if you use the consumable. If you try to fight a boss using a resin and humanity and still need multiple tries, you might end up eating through your entire store of the consumables without beating the boss.
Yeah, I never used consumables in a Fromsoft game for that reason. They're just too expensive. But for high end/speedrun type players, they have a purpose.
Sorry for necroing this but I was specifically searching because I just ended my (normal) playthrough of Avernum 4 with tons of potions and scrolls. One thing I realized, I was fairly good at either spending or selling most of them and using gold to buy upgrades, until I encountered the first Null bug. I think that threat of nullity pushed me a bit to obsessively hoard everything, especially things like group heal scrolls for when my healer is disabled. I guess as a player you always think there's gonna be that BBG somewhere who will null you for 20 turns, and continue to think that all the way until you finish the game.
A bit late to the party, but the consumables system in Queen's Wish is cool because you cannot overindulge in potions to win difficult fights. But since I played them on hard and extreme, I only used energy potions.
Great Article! Something I’ve noticed is that I’ve rarely seen this behavior in TTRPG players. I think it’s because of that same metric you’re applying, loss avoidance. There’s no real “Loss” in any video game cuz you just reload a save when you’re dead. If you use your consumables and then lose the battle, no issue just reload. If you use your consumables and then win… that’s when your item “loss” gets locked in. You’re actively encouraged not to use items by that logic.
Dying in a TTRPG on the other hand is permanent, truly permanent. My players use their potions as much as they can because the real Loss they’re avoiding is the loss of the character. Using the potions is meaningless to them, a fee to pay to avoid the real loss. They’re not popping potions like candy (partially due to how the game works) but saving them for critical moments and actually using them during those.
Another angle: If the consumable gives me a timed buff, I don't like using that as I have to now play fast or otherwise plan to do the difficult part within the time window the consumable lasts. The solution is to make the buff longer, but this leads to get next issue: if the buff lasts 15 minutes, I will not notice it fading off and I get stressed trying to see if I'm still buffed or not. After I die, I'm frustrated as I now have to re-apply all my buffs from consumables (which I might have to grind to get more of).
One way to deal with this is balance one permanent loss with the possibility of another.
In Sryth in the entire coarse of a permanent online characters play-through you'll get about about 12 Kepbekk elixir, these can fully restore a character health any time outside of battle, even when the start battle button is on screen and healing magic doesn't work. There is no way to get more, not even with real money, so they have hording rate that makes final fantasy elixirs look like potions. However this game also has various scenarios where if you fail you lose some access to the premium currency for which a finite amount available by adventuring in the game, for the last these you can lose enough of this premium currency to buy most of the permanent boost to mostly fixed based stats. Therefore people with use one consumable to save another consumable of far more flexible use.
Your example with potions refilling themselves at town is not so different from how Souls games use their healing potions when rested at a checkpoint. Actually, I think the Souls games are probably the ONLY series where everyone and their mother use up their entire supply of healing and mana.
Except Dark Souls 2. See, Dark Souls 2 had the Estus Flask, the healing potion of the game, and refills itself at each Bonfier, the checkpoint. However, Dark Souls 2 also had numerous consumables that would refill your spell slots. I don't think I, or most people, ever use those consumables.
And by Dark Souls 3, they added the Ashen Estus Flask, and an equivalent in Elden Ring, and they replaced their spell slots with a traditional Mana Bar. The hiccup is you only have a limited number of swigs for the flask, so you can either go all in for your Health Potion and never use magic, or the other way around.
I've also played mods for Skyrim where Potions can go stale/bad, which incentivises players to always use up their Potions, not a bad way to do it I feel.
Added on to the loss aversion is the bit where you often don't really know just how replaceable your potions or other resources ARE. Is this one of 10 you will find? 20? 30? 100? How many difficult battles remain? It is understandable if players are cautious in such a circumstance, humans are wired to be.
On top of that, in the Glorious Old Days of Gaming, it was considered to give the player stuff then punish them for using it before the game designer thought they should, and thoughtlessness still keeps this practice alive and well, if only unintentionally. If you haven't broken a game or found something more difficult because you used something earlier than the game expected you to, I'm not sure you've really played computer games.
QW I think avoids this well by making them a resource you know you can get back - I was thrilled by that as a mechanic. The Diablo games had very few irreplaceable consumables, and I think that was 100% the right decision - if the player is supposed to use it, it needs to be available in an infinite quantity. It can be hard to replace, or expensive, or whatever. But it needs to be replaceable, and the method of its replacement needs to be repeatable as many times as the player will need to get enough of it. Alternately, you can tell the player explicitly 'you will get one of these,' which at least lets them make an informed decision about what to do with it.
I had left the page open for a day or two when I commented (and forgot) so had not seen the other comments, and the various stories of people experiencing the game design I describe are both hilarious and tragic).
Another example of loss and the rage that the loss might induce: disappearing party members. A staple of JRPGs, with their linear stories and limited character building, this trick becomes much harsher in western RPGs. My first experience with it was Baldur's Gate 2, but there it was a relatively short part where you get that Asian samurai dude, and then he betrays you about 30 minutes later. And then there is Pathfinder: Kingmaker, where ladies' man Tristian just up and disappears for more than a chapter. If he was a key member of your party and a necessary (and well-buffed) advisor on Kingdom Council? Well, sucks to be you. Not to mention what happens to Linzi the Bard (I'll never forgive some of my colleagues for this).
When Baldur's Gate 2 came out, I wrote at the time how infuriated I was by my characters flaking out on me. (Wow, I've been writing about games a long time.)
Halfway through my second play through of Avernum: Greed and Glory, I realized that I always had a ton of wands that I was carrying around. So I started using them, lavishly. And still had a half-ton of wands that I was carrying around by the end. Although I usually had way too many Ensnaring and Terror Wands, so started selling some, and not enough Crystalline Wands, which then got hoarded. Same for scrolls, I found that I usually had a big pile of ones that I found not terribly useful, and hoarded the ones I found made a real difference (examples: ton of Vulnerability that I never used, and never enough Speed Burst, so that I had to ration them by expected major battles). Potions I use, much as with scrolls; the useful ones like Healing tend to accumulate simply because they aren't needed as often on Casual, and the ones that really make a difference, like Invulnerability, I end up rationing by expected boss battles. I do play on Casual the first time or three, though. I will have to make it a point to see if my consumables use changes on a higher difficulty level.
I recall in the Dragon Age games I would often dump my consumables onto my party members so they would make sure they didn’t go to waste. Sometimes consumable build up is less a goblinoid hoarding instinct problem, and more a “I’ve got too much to do as it is!” problem. Still, “wait, the 𝙍𝙊𝘽𝙊𝙏 is going to 𝙒𝘼𝙎𝙏𝙀 all 𝙈𝙔 precious resources!?!?!?!1111” can absolutely be a worst possible answer to the issue.
Still, I will say Queen’s Wish probably leaned into the impulse to hoard resources more effectively than anything I can remember playing. Maybe not item resources, but 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘳 resources. Do it all in one go, no running back to mommy to go get healed back up to full without consequence so make every move count... Queen’s Wish looked at the weird shape of the hoarder mindset and, instead of just dumping it in a pile of packing peanuts and hucking it in a mailbox, it precision cut foam to that shape to make sure the experience was delivered safely.
I’m not sure if it’s the best possible answer, but it 𝙞𝙨 an answer, which is more than I can say other games can be bothered to give. And I’m in no way better than any of this - I too wind up with enough unused scrolls to wallpaper a small castle, and wands enough to construct a truly apocalyptic kindling pile by Avernum’s end. If potions were regulated, my adventurers would be arrested for illicit elixir trafficking.
I praise Queen’s Wish, and yet I am utterly terrible at efficient resource usage. At least an ill-timed or unoptimal use of a resource is a 𝘶𝘴𝘦 of it. If you revised Avernum’s loot tables to reflect how I play, 90% of all consumables would be better off as just more gold or static loot to sell for the same. Which would be boring, so not a great answer.
All I can think of is maybe highlighting the usefulness of consumables by giving them to enemies. The Wand of Uberpocalypse burning a hole in your back pocket becomes easier to remember when there’s some snot goblin waggling a fire stick at you. Spite can be a powerful motivation, and turning a fight into a potion drinking contest at least gets those potions drank. And, if enemies are already going to be pulling out weird abilities and powers as it is, you may as well do it in a way that prompts the player to remember and use their own external powers.
I love the reusables. Witcher 3 used those as well (I can't remember if witcher 1 did). I think they needed to do a better job explaining how easy it was to fully restore all your potions though--it wasn't intuitively obvious right at the start, if I recall.
I am obviously not every gamer, but I don't have a problem using consumables, if and only if I know i can replace them relatively easily. If I know I can run to town and buy a few health potions, or craft a potion of haste from some berries I can pick in the forest I will chug like I have a problem. If I can't easily replace something I will hoard it because the very real situation of "a fight may be unwinnable for me and my skill level if I don't have this" will almost always win against using a consumable to make a hard but possible fight easier.
Personally. I don't really like consumables in general though. I get way more dopamine from finding or crafting a reusable "consumable" than I do from just finding a potion or an elixir. Witcher 3 did this well but Cosmic Star Heroine did it the best. Finding a "consumable" was almost better than finding a piece of equipment, because you knew you weren't going to replace it, just switch it if needed.
"if and only if I know i can replace them relatively easily"
This is totally a solution. It basically makes a consumable not a consumable (since you are not actually consuming anything). Which works really well in a lot of games.
Itemization and consumables definitely seems like a hard puzzle to solve. Using (early, I haven't played the newer) Final Fantasy as an example, you rapidly get to the point that potions or hi-potions are basically free, which as you said turns them into not a consumable, which means the attrition that the dungeon is trying to cause is cancelled out. Then you have to ask what purpose do the trash encounters have, they likely aren't made to kill the party because that's frustrating to most people but if consumables are free then non bosses don't exist to drain resources because you can't drain infinity, so what is the purpose of non boss encounters?
I will say I do appreciate the balance in your games. There are definitely items I save because "I might need this later" but the dungeons and encounters always feel balanced enough that I want to use my MP but not *all* of my MP, and items are plentiful enough that I don't worry about a few health or energy potions. I also know I'm generally not likely to get stuck because if I do run out of resources I can always back out and resume from where I was.
Even if something is infinite and may well not be infinite in short and medium term and thus preserving is of value. For example even a Rpg with cheap or free full restores at save points, town and world map. Between one save point and the next Mp is finite and who want to save it. Likewise whilst you can get infinite items in town, you may be a long way from town so the limit is whatever you can carry.
I am reminded of secrets of mana 2 for the Snes where you could but up to 99 of anything in storage and gold easily get enough gold to do just that. So in medium term they were nearly unlimited and in long term truely so. However you don't access the storage in battle and you were limited to nine items of limited types and thus their was tension in battles, especially if they came unexpectedly and you haven't refilled your pockets.
Without disputing the reality of loss aversion, I don't think the consumables problem is JUST an artifact of our irrational monkey brains. There's also a consequences mismatch problem. If I have to refight the current battle because I didn't use my semi-trailer full of consumables, then I've lost 5 or 10 minutes. Even if I have to refight it 10 times, I'm probably spending less than an hour figuring it out. If I get to a late-game fight that's unwinnable because I used that one consumable that I needed in a trash fight three chapters earlier, then I could easily lose 30 or 40 hours of progress ... IF I even have a save that old, which I probably don't.
That actually happened to me in Marathon 2 back in the '90s. I got to a level that was physically impossible to complete because I hadn't fully topped up my oxygen at the last opportunity, six levels before. I did actually have a save I could have gone back to, but I just couldn't face redoing all those levels (one of which was really, really, REALLY annoying), so I set the game aside for a while. Thirty years later, not only have I never gone back to it, Marathon 3 sits shrinkwrapped in my closet because I don't want to play it until I finish 2 (which I never will). Obviously, that's some crap game design on Bungie's part, but it nicely illustrates the problem from a player perspective. If I screw up and underuse consumables, I lose little or nothing. If I screw up and overuse them, then I probably never finish the game. Why would I ever use any consumable unless it's so low-powered as to be clearly useless in the later stages of the game?
The thing that jumps out at me is "irrational monkey brains". I don't actually think these deep-wired instincts are irrational at all, as the peers of our ancestors who didn't have those instincts DIED OUT. :-)
I think more popular in actions games, but I've seen some solve the consumable problem by limiting how many you can hold. If you can only hold 3 potions but you'll find 10 in a dungeon, that means you have to use them or lose them. Effectively using loss aversion in your favor.
Nobody worried about loss aversion in Doom. You HAD to use the bullets and health you found to live. (But them people would save scum to maximize the amount of ammo they had going forward. There is no tricksy way to get around human psychology.)
I remember in Doom and other early FPS games making a conscious trade off between bullets and HP at times. They’re both assets for your goal of completing the game, and when one is short you can lean on the other.
That said, I prefer the more modern game design where you have shields and/or HP that recharge over time when not in combat. It’s just more fun.
It's interesting how that old Doom way of handling ammo, etc has pretty much disappeared. Probably too stressful for a wide audience.
Hopefully there are some indie devs out there servicing that market. It’s probably big enough for a few to make their living from it.
I think there’s a market for stressful game experiences, but maybe not in the straight FPS. Dark Souls, Dead Space, and pick your Survival Builder game can be pretty stressful, but also have big markets.
Dark souls and the witcher 3 avoided this to an extent with refillable potions: it's a solid solution.
I should have mentioned Dark Souls, which handles this very well. (Fromsoft games DO have proper consumables, BTW. Necessary for speedrunning.)
They do of course, and they run into the exact problem you identify, in effect dark souls just has more complicated health and mana bars
Dark Souls has a problem with the other consumables though. Elemental resins and humanity restorers are permanently gone when you use them, and you can't save-scum. You want consumables for boss battles, but bosses are difficult even if you use the consumable. If you try to fight a boss using a resin and humanity and still need multiple tries, you might end up eating through your entire store of the consumables without beating the boss.
Yeah, I never used consumables in a Fromsoft game for that reason. They're just too expensive. But for high end/speedrun type players, they have a purpose.
Sorry for necroing this but I was specifically searching because I just ended my (normal) playthrough of Avernum 4 with tons of potions and scrolls. One thing I realized, I was fairly good at either spending or selling most of them and using gold to buy upgrades, until I encountered the first Null bug. I think that threat of nullity pushed me a bit to obsessively hoard everything, especially things like group heal scrolls for when my healer is disabled. I guess as a player you always think there's gonna be that BBG somewhere who will null you for 20 turns, and continue to think that all the way until you finish the game.
A bit late to the party, but the consumables system in Queen's Wish is cool because you cannot overindulge in potions to win difficult fights. But since I played them on hard and extreme, I only used energy potions.
Great Article! Something I’ve noticed is that I’ve rarely seen this behavior in TTRPG players. I think it’s because of that same metric you’re applying, loss avoidance. There’s no real “Loss” in any video game cuz you just reload a save when you’re dead. If you use your consumables and then lose the battle, no issue just reload. If you use your consumables and then win… that’s when your item “loss” gets locked in. You’re actively encouraged not to use items by that logic.
Dying in a TTRPG on the other hand is permanent, truly permanent. My players use their potions as much as they can because the real Loss they’re avoiding is the loss of the character. Using the potions is meaningless to them, a fee to pay to avoid the real loss. They’re not popping potions like candy (partially due to how the game works) but saving them for critical moments and actually using them during those.
Another angle: If the consumable gives me a timed buff, I don't like using that as I have to now play fast or otherwise plan to do the difficult part within the time window the consumable lasts. The solution is to make the buff longer, but this leads to get next issue: if the buff lasts 15 minutes, I will not notice it fading off and I get stressed trying to see if I'm still buffed or not. After I die, I'm frustrated as I now have to re-apply all my buffs from consumables (which I might have to grind to get more of).
Is there winning with consumables, then?
Oh, this is why I'm struggling with Geneforge....
One way to deal with this is balance one permanent loss with the possibility of another.
In Sryth in the entire coarse of a permanent online characters play-through you'll get about about 12 Kepbekk elixir, these can fully restore a character health any time outside of battle, even when the start battle button is on screen and healing magic doesn't work. There is no way to get more, not even with real money, so they have hording rate that makes final fantasy elixirs look like potions. However this game also has various scenarios where if you fail you lose some access to the premium currency for which a finite amount available by adventuring in the game, for the last these you can lose enough of this premium currency to buy most of the permanent boost to mostly fixed based stats. Therefore people with use one consumable to save another consumable of far more flexible use.
Your example with potions refilling themselves at town is not so different from how Souls games use their healing potions when rested at a checkpoint. Actually, I think the Souls games are probably the ONLY series where everyone and their mother use up their entire supply of healing and mana.
Except Dark Souls 2. See, Dark Souls 2 had the Estus Flask, the healing potion of the game, and refills itself at each Bonfier, the checkpoint. However, Dark Souls 2 also had numerous consumables that would refill your spell slots. I don't think I, or most people, ever use those consumables.
And by Dark Souls 3, they added the Ashen Estus Flask, and an equivalent in Elden Ring, and they replaced their spell slots with a traditional Mana Bar. The hiccup is you only have a limited number of swigs for the flask, so you can either go all in for your Health Potion and never use magic, or the other way around.
I've also played mods for Skyrim where Potions can go stale/bad, which incentivises players to always use up their Potions, not a bad way to do it I feel.
Added on to the loss aversion is the bit where you often don't really know just how replaceable your potions or other resources ARE. Is this one of 10 you will find? 20? 30? 100? How many difficult battles remain? It is understandable if players are cautious in such a circumstance, humans are wired to be.
On top of that, in the Glorious Old Days of Gaming, it was considered to give the player stuff then punish them for using it before the game designer thought they should, and thoughtlessness still keeps this practice alive and well, if only unintentionally. If you haven't broken a game or found something more difficult because you used something earlier than the game expected you to, I'm not sure you've really played computer games.
QW I think avoids this well by making them a resource you know you can get back - I was thrilled by that as a mechanic. The Diablo games had very few irreplaceable consumables, and I think that was 100% the right decision - if the player is supposed to use it, it needs to be available in an infinite quantity. It can be hard to replace, or expensive, or whatever. But it needs to be replaceable, and the method of its replacement needs to be repeatable as many times as the player will need to get enough of it. Alternately, you can tell the player explicitly 'you will get one of these,' which at least lets them make an informed decision about what to do with it.
I had left the page open for a day or two when I commented (and forgot) so had not seen the other comments, and the various stories of people experiencing the game design I describe are both hilarious and tragic).
Another example of loss and the rage that the loss might induce: disappearing party members. A staple of JRPGs, with their linear stories and limited character building, this trick becomes much harsher in western RPGs. My first experience with it was Baldur's Gate 2, but there it was a relatively short part where you get that Asian samurai dude, and then he betrays you about 30 minutes later. And then there is Pathfinder: Kingmaker, where ladies' man Tristian just up and disappears for more than a chapter. If he was a key member of your party and a necessary (and well-buffed) advisor on Kingdom Council? Well, sucks to be you. Not to mention what happens to Linzi the Bard (I'll never forgive some of my colleagues for this).
When Baldur's Gate 2 came out, I wrote at the time how infuriated I was by my characters flaking out on me. (Wow, I've been writing about games a long time.)