I'm curious how you guys and gals handle potion identification. It seems too easy to have every potion found in a dungeon be labeled, but I'm a little worried that having players guess what each potion is, or spend time taking them somewhere for ID, or -- yikes! -- relying on their taking a swig and seeing what happens will suck a lot of fun out of the game.
One moment, I want to just tell them what they've got so they can have fun and use the potions. The next moment I want to inject some realistic mystery by having them roll against arcana or something to see if they can figure out what they've got. And occasionally, when I'm feeling mischievous, I want them to go with the taste test. I haven't done the last one yet... Lol. And right now I tend to gravitate towards just telling them what they've got. Leaning towards "fun," I guess.
Any thoughts or advice? How do you all do it?
Thanks!
I like the taste test method the best and encourage my players to do this. It's always a fun moment when they take that first sip. When they taste it I try to give them a creative hint and a "fraction" of the effect. It is also helpful to use flavors, colors and smells to represent the more common type of potions with some consistency - like healing potions are usually red and taste like strawberries, or whatever. It depends in part on how frequently they find potions, too. Identifying potions can be fun, but it can also start to get tedious if you aren't careful.
Of course if they use an Identify or Detect Magic, they get the spell effect results.
What I do, is that I have tables of various attributes that potions have. When the PCs find a specific potion for the first time I roll on the tables and take note of the results so I can use that same description later. I lost the original draft in a move, but here's a quick reproduction of some of the entries on the tables to give the gist of the idea.
Color
- Black
- White
- Red
- Blue
- Green
- Orange
- Violet
- Brown
- Yellow
- Pink
- Silver
- Gold
- Colorless
Unusual Traits
- Contains colored flecks suspended in the liquid (roll on color table for these flecks and disregard a result that matches the color of the potion)
- Glows faintly (giving off as much light as a single candle)
- The liquid is thick, like syrup.
- None
Smell
- Smells like X flower (e.g. roses)
- Smells like X fruit (e.g. lemons)
- Smells like X awful thing (e.g. rotting eggs)
- Odorless
Taste
- Sweet
- Bitter
- Salty
- Tasteless
One of the examples from my homebrew setting is the simple healing potion. It is blue, smells like freshly cut grass, and tastes like peppermint.
Ansbach, I like your approach to taste-testing. I hadn't thought it through -- that it's possible to take just a sip of a potion and not waste it. Partial affects, etc.
Also using smell and other identifiers to start recognizing potions. Though that does assume a certain amount of consistency among recipes for a given potion, but then again... those assumptions, when proven wrong down the road, could lead to some interesting experiences for the players. "Smells like a potion of healing! Just in time!" *glug glug glug* "Wait... Why am I floating? Uh oh..." 
MechaPilot, thanks for the suggestion and demo list. That's another good approach. Getting to my comment to Ansbach, do you find having that much consistency among all potions of a given type leads to any problems? Seems like a simple enough solution, all things considered...
I don't really worry about consistency except when it comes to healing potions, because they are usually by far the most common in my campaigns. Occasionally I might use broader strokes, like all health-type potions taste like different berries - so for example maybe a Neutralize Poison potion tastes like blueberries instead of strawberries. The only other time I try to keep some consistency is when one of the players can make potions, and then I let them decide and keep track. At the start of a new campaign it may be helpful to write down ahead of time what you want healing potions to look, smell, or taste like - but you usually have it memorized pretty quickly (and so do the players).
You are also on the right track that it is good to trip up their expectations every once in a while.
I like your tables idea MechaPilot - GM's can never have too many random charts! 
I generally just label the potions in some interesting way or provide context in the scene that makes it obvious what it is. I don't want to spend time on playing guessing games on potions.
doc_atomic wrote:
Ansbach wrote:
Any of the methods would work...in game context.
Certainly it's not unreasonable that, if potions are a commodity that are fairly easily available (for sale by wizards and/or alchemists) the bottles of common potions might be clearly labled.
A mage or cleric might be able to identify a fairly common potion with just a skill check... not having to resort to a 'detect spell' of some sort. Even an experienced adventurer who's not trained in an appropriate skill might be able to do the same... if your vision of potions is that one healing potion looks, smells and tastes pretty much like every other healing potion.
It's up to you as the DM... and how you want the potion to function in the session you're running.
If the healing potion is there to be a 'heart' in the context of the adventure... then just tell them they found a healing potion.
If the potion is unusual... then make it a skill check or require a 'detect' spell.
If the potion is a 'trap' then put poison in a bottle of antiseptic.
I think the main thing is to consider if there's some reason you don't want the players to just automatically know what they found... and then design the requirement to discover the properties of the potion based on what sort of challenge you're presenting the players.
MechaPilot wrote:
I often simply label the potions in some language, otherwise an arcana check possibly with advantage if they sample it with a risk of ruining the potion if failing by 5 or more. Failing by 5 or more shouldnt really be much of a risk if the character is proficient with arcana on a roll with advantage. DC might range from 10 to 15 typically.
I always describe the shape of the container, the color of the liquid, and any labeling that the creator placed on it (though usually faded or weathered to some degree)... but that has nothing to do with identification, beyond giving the player some details they might use to guess at the function of a potion.
All it takes to figure out what a potion does is a little sip, regardless of class of character.
I have done that for a while now, because I genuinely hate what I have seen happen when players don't know what a potion does (which is that it just sits in somebody's pack and never gets used).
I make use of my playtest materials and am sure, that those will be in the DMG, too.
Sampling a potion might give a character some sense of the potion’s nature while leaving enough of the potion to be useful.
Somewhat tangentiel, but I had a small plot in a campaign several years ago about a smuggler in a pirate town starting to export 'fake' healing potions (ones that looked and smelled like the 'common formula' of healing potions... thick licorice smell in a swirling white-red potion) but the healing 'disappeared' in a few hours. The way to tell the difference was in the bottle... the pirates used cheap glass.
Players figured out the trick fairly quickly, but eventually assaulted the pirate town when they got sick of finding them everywhere as loot (the false potions had driven down the market on 'real' healing potions, which became hard to come by).
SpedGuy wrote: