Also you need to consistently break conventions once you do it or you really screw with people and make a shitty world.

Purple: Magic??

Green: Life/death??

Red: Life/fire??

Blue: Magic/cold??

Honestly the only colour I don't feel uncertain about is orange, that's always bad.

Also on the topic of health potions, a great piece of advice I once heard was that if your players are in a foreign land, remove health potions. Give them health biscuits and watch them reconcile with God.

The pulp is from fruit, right? The pulp is from fruit, right!?

Nethack (and derivatives) is pretty much the only game I know of where the health potions may or may not be red.

And I guess Dark Souls... It's more of an orange than a red. But maybe that's just the color of the flask. Idk what the substance inside looks like. ‍️

Toss a lighted match into the growing puddle.

Match goes out.

Why should your fantasy game be limited by something like "health". Whether you die should be based on vibes.

Idk, he's a Brazilian roller-blading sports-loving DJ...

I think most likely scenario is he was green and yellow based on the Brazilian flag, green means "go", and there was only one other color left for "heal", so it's yellow.

FFXIV the stack markers are close to orange... and long time ago it had Bard having a fire circle that damaged enemies but not allies, yet the tanks thought it was bad and would drag enemies out of it. Probably why they removed that one.

My world is shattered.

I think I was thinking of Mercy. But I guess her angelic yellow beam is more God's Wrath than it is Pastor Cures Your Back Pain anyway.

Or radioactiv acid!

Oooh i think his name is Lucio.
These colours, from what i know, depend on which skin you have on

Then you are an undead

Yeah, I meant his default skin, sowwy

I love the possibility of having a red/green colorblind character and having to roll to hopefully pick the right potion when they both health potion and poison in their bag.

In Overwatch, healing is consistently represented by the color yellow. Mercy's beam, Ana's darts, Moira's piss, Soldier's healyboo, etc. Making Lucio's speed aura yellow and healing aura green would be visually confusing

the flask is green! i would know since i emptied it one too many times snd the texture is dark green

Then the entire game is wrong.

The old TSR/SSI game Unlimited Adventures had randomized potion colors. It's also how I learned that khaki is not pronounced 'kahiki' when trying to explain what was going on to someone (I knew khakis as a type of trouser not a color).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgotten_Realms%3A_Unlimited_Adventures

Edit: or maybe I'm thinking of another gold-box game if that one didn't have some random generation. Hrm.

"There are no 'rules' for fantasy"

Wrong. To write good Fantasy (of SciFi), you have to go through a process called "World Building" where you lay down the rules of your world. Properly done, the amount of World Building exceeds the actual works by far. It is absolutely necessary to create a core of inner logic to the story. You are not bound by the rules of our world, yes, but you are bound by the rule of consistency. If you violate those, you automatically write crap Fantasy (or SciFi).

Funny, though, that e.g. many literature teachers / professors don't even know about the idea of World Building.

Then the insides have to be red for it to appear orange through green glass. The health potion is red!