Gathering Herbs & Plants

Searching
During rests or when walking around you can spend some extra time looking for plant components to use in potion brewing or enchantments.

Rolling the Dice
First you must check your proficiencies. If you are proficient in Nature, Medicine, or A Herbalism Kit, you can search for plants. If you are not proficient in these skills, you will roll with disadvantage.

Select a skill and roll 1d20 adding your modifiers in that skill to the roll. If you are not searching for a particular ingredient, this number will represent the rarity of the ingredients you are searching for, 1 being common, 20 being super rare. If you are looking for a particular ingredient, this number will modify how much of that ingredient you find. The rarity will also affect how much you find.

The usual DC to find 1 of any component is DC10. Rolling below this, you will usually fail the check and not find any components. This is usually the amount of material you find depending on your check

Places
Searching in different types of environments will change the materials gathered. Some materials can be found in multiple environments, but others will be environment specific. Ask your DM about what can be found where, or if you are after anything in particular to obtain a certain effect.

Combining Random Herbs
You can brew all sorts of potions by simple experimentation. Doing this creates random potion effects that can be utility based, or damage based. To learn the properties of a herb you can find an NPC that knows about it, or run it through a herbalism kit.

To learn the properties you must take a rest and expend an amount of gold, this is to cover the small costs of experimentation and resources. You don't need to know the properties of a herb to add it to an existing potion or create a new potion. However, it helps. After learning the properties, it will help to create homebrew potions

Creating Existing Potions
Some materials can be used to create potions that already exist within the D&D 5e universe. For example, a lesser healing potion can be created using a particular type of mushroom. When creating a potion, you need proficiency in a herbalism kit. Take the full cost of the potion and divide it by your proficiency bonus rounded up. Follow the cost table for determining the time (convert hours to days) it takes to create a potion of that rarity.