Comment on “Druids & Alchemy”

Your reasoning is sound. Another point in its favor: it's doing part of the "heavy lifting" for you. The player has now learned the recipe for making portable holes? I bet a fair few would drop everything and start working on it immediately, and more reserved players would still suddenly have a new strategic goal, something to commit resources toward. One more moving part making the game rich and complex, and all you have to do is state that they now DEFINITELY could have access to it ... if they were willing to sweat. Then you sit back and watch them run all over creation, a perfectly self-motivated group (something that is hard to come by in this day of spoon-fed "quests" and such. But that's another topic.)

It's more direct than the cliche hedging tools employed by many a DM: "there MAY be lizard-men in the Blue Mountain Forest. There are RUMORS of a vorpal sword in the Aztec temple. An OLD MAN warns you about some nasty guys he saw once." That gets stale and annoying after a while; it's a sign that the DM is loath to reveal anything about their precious world, lest the "surprise" and "shock" of the latest monster/dungeon-of-the-week be ruined. I suspect it goes along with module-based play.

Ideally it should be possible to reveal more than the players could ever make use of at once, and still have stuff in reserve (which of course requires a complicated world, but that's the point of all the stuff you work on!)