Now lets be realistic here. Potions have corks. There's no way around it, you don't lug around an open container, it's just not practical. Now how are potions evaporating through corks?

This has always bugged me.

Why does this ALWAYS happen just before someone attacks you? I swear it is a conspiracy to get me killed every time! (You know I'm just kidding, right?)

hehehe Murphy's Law is alive and well at CF

You ever try to take water from the dead sea home with you? My friend did. He put it in a jar and took it home with him. He put it on his shelf near a window as some sort of trophy. Anyways, the water was so salty it evaporated through the glass and all, real slow, but steadily. He didn't learn till later that you are supposed to keep it away from the sun. Anyways, as far as potions go. Their substance is partial physics, partial magic. What's to say the magic part can be contained by a physical cork. Or maybe the wizard making the magic messed up and didn't put the proper spell on the cork to contain the magic. There's a hundred different possibilities. Maybe you were running around in too much of a hurry, and accidently busted your potion open. When the game tells you, 'A potion evaporates from disuse', it's a roleplay way of saying 'Hey buddy, you can't carry a fragile glass bottle around with you forever without it breaking somehow.'

Liquid evaporates in sunlight. It doesn't re-condense if the seal on the container isn't good enough to contain it. This, however, is not the real question or answer to why those potions that evaporate on their own do so.

Clearly, if a potion evaporates after a time limit, it's not meant to be something you can keep forever. So, if you're to get a message telling you the potion is gone or no good any more, what would you rather have? Evaporating is as good a message as anything. I'd prefer that to "Your potion has lost its potency and vanished."

It may not be all that realistic, but if the potion is designed to go away, at least it tells you when it happens.

Is if there were no echo when your potion "went bad", and only people specially trained on potions (such as alchemists?) could tell if a potion was still good or not. If you quaffed a potion after it had lost its potency, depending on the potion, it could be like drinking water, just getting a lower-duration/strength of the original potion, or it could be much worse. What if a degraded potion was actually poisonous? Or the polarity of the magic flipped (invis becomes faerie fire)? Even if the potion just turned to water, you would be stuck not knowing that the potion wasn't going to work... and you would have been lugging around dead weight.

But how much fun would that be?

Hey, we could really get into some nasty realism potion stuff. For instance, what if you try to quaff during battle it has a chance of purely spilling all over you, or if someone bashes you to the floor you can shatter potions in your backpack? Or invoker spells shattering them...or other nasty, nasty things. What about going underwater with scrolls not in water-tight containers? Hell, what about rusting your armor? Half of what makes this game fun is that, on occassion, realism is kicked in the sack to make it more fun. I wish life were that good.

> Or the polarity of the magic flipped (invis becomes faerie
>fire)?

Excellent, then those power word kill potions suddenly became usefull... LOL