Geas

As I try out recipes, play with them, and try to classify herbs by their effects... I find myself wondering, just how complicated is the current alchemy system? Is it even very systematic? It appears rather chaotic in the sense that what happens in some cases does not seem to happen others, and it is difficult to gauge exactly what is going on when you mix herbs together.

Any trends or generalizations seem to be imperfect, and one can't help but wonder whether all the known recipes are just arbitrary, hidden things that can't be rationally deduced but rather must be found by luck.

For example (I'm going to get a bit abstract, sorry if I disclose too much), the restorative potions (cure, coca, mana), the ones that take a single effect and amplify it, with the others being eliminated/reduced:

They tend to have two herbs of one type that match the amplified effect, an "other" herb, and a fourth herb that seems a little arbitrary. As for which "other" herb is used, in the coca potion, it is one whose effect match the two main herbs' key effect; in the cure potion, it is one whose effect matches the two main herbs' key effect; in the mana potion, it is one that oppose the main herbs' key effect.

What?

I know the alchemy system is being replaced, but I have to admit... I kind of liked the old one, if only because it had this mystery. I just have some questions about it: is it possible to rationally deduce new recipes, or are things so riddled with arbitrary exceptions that it is next-to-impossible?

I am never sure whether the "trends" I discover are real, or are just imaginings.

If it does indeed make sense, is rational, has laws, and it is possible to deduce new recipes simply by considering the herbs, then bravo. But is this even true? And, if so, why were the players just expected to find out the rules themselves? I know the thing was in development for ooc years, and if it is something genuinely complex and just plain awesome (like other things in Geas), I would hesitate to want to throw it out if it's just an issue of players not having direction.

The current system is a bit complex and it is very difficulty to find out the resulting effects. Therefore the atempt to replace to through an not so complex system.
Then reduced to a basic rule you can say:
A every effect as an ideal receipe. Every time a potion is brewed it is compared to all effects and a value is calculated how similar the receipe is to the ideal receipe. If the value is too low nothing happned. If the value in above a minum value the effect is added to the potion. This is very simplified, the real system is more complex with many exception and special rules.
So is very difficult to add a new effect, and not very logical to find a receipe for an effects. Is is a 'try and error' search.
So the idea to add the effects direct to the herbs, tooth, glands and so on. So it would be easier to find a receipe.
But if there other ideas to make the system a bit more logical and keep it a bit mysterious, they are welcome.

Well, here's several ideas:

Perhaps some herbs, either all the time or under certain circumstances, can "apply a filter" (to borrow a term from image-editing) changing the way the other ingredients in the potion interact. For example, Herb A, under circumstance B (which can be the presence of a certain type of herb), might always reverse the magnitudes of the strongest and weakest effects in the potion, or might half or double something, or might add new effect C.

Another example might be an herb that always represses a certain effect entirely, but that can be pacified by the presence of something else, or have its behavior modified.

Or some herbs might like to take each other as "partners" in a potion, so that when two herbs try to take some third herb as partner, conflict with an interesting result arises.

In short, I like the idea of a move to a system oriented on individual ingredients, and I think that each herb should have more properties than just its effects: it should have a personality. The way you described the current system, it seems as though the actors are the complete formulas, not the individual herbs. It should be possible to experiment with herbs and get an idea how they act, then assemble a potion from there.

This preserves the idea of the individual ingredients being the "actors" rather than the recipe, and should make trying to understand research more important. A student might meaningfully ask, "What did chodolax just do there?"

The way you make the current system sound, those sorts of questions are not very meaningful right now, other than in the sense "It made me further from the right recipe."

The alchemists, though, have manage to come up with some pretty convoluted explanations for the mechanisms behind potions!

Why did this happen? How did everything dealing with mana simply vanish?
Perhaps because, of the two references to mana, two were additive, two
were subtractive, so these enter a space of nullification and, by some
action, are transmuted to "wisdom."