Alch Fire for Flaming Arrows

[Egon the Monkey]

I've been thinking about how it can be a pain to get hold of a reliable supply of improved arrows, bullets or bolts, as a lot of the good ones drop on either rather low or rather high level quests, uncommonly and in small quantities. You can go through your carefully saved Silver arrows, stack of fire arrows or Holy Water Bullets in a single combat, and unlike other consumables you can't rely on player crafters for an inexhaustible market.

It's possible to poison arrows and bolts with weapon poison, and use Bless on crossbow bolts to give them OnHit: Slay Rakasha  (obscure, yes, but relevant :P). This got me thinking about other temporary upgrades for ammunition, so you don't hoard strong ammo "for when you need it" and thus end up never using it. The idea is to allow Alchemist's fire to be used to ignite ammo, giving it the 4 rounds of +1d4 fire damage a melee weapon can get. Alchemist's Fire's craftable, but heavy with regards to its weight:duration ratio. You could carry enough to remain useful throughout a Nightriser invasion or something if you didn't mind the weight and having to keep spending rounds re-applying it.

Poison's the same weight and similar duration, so I can't see this being OP when there's ways of finding and crafting some very nasty poisons. In the Underdark, I did a lot of questing where our group couldn't get a wizard or cleric, so my bard would brew up and hand out stacks of Alch Fire beforehand as "Hillbilly Darkfire". It'd be nice to see more obvious usage of the alchemy system like that. I've found a lot of use out of herbalism, but less for alchemy.

[FleetingHeart]

Something along these lines is already available.

[Egon the Monkey]

Do you mean, there's a way to craft +dmg ammo, a crafted consumable I don't know about, or something else entirely?

[Drakill Tannan]

Fire arrows. Acid arrows. Holy arrows.

I say implement it.