Potions of poisons and player agency

 Anyone who's played old school D&D is probably familiar with the potion of poison, one of the items which might be generated by random rolls on the magic item tables. Any potion found might be poison, up to 1 in 8 if only the Basic Rules were used, or a mere 2 in 100 when using the tables from the Expert Set. According to the item description, if any amount of the potion is swallowed, even a sip, the character consuming it must make a saving throw vs. poison or die. 

I believe the potion of poison was meant to serve the purpose of risk, making players always a little bit apprehensive about any potions their characters might acquire during an adventure. I believe this in large part because no practical uses were even suggested for the potion of poison; it seemed to be included in the lists only as a "gotcha!" item. While uncertainty and risk are important parts of a good D&D session, it is always preferable to enable players to manage these for themselves, to make informed decisions. What the potion of poison represents is a blind risk, and furthermore, that risk is the only way prescribed by the rules to identify potions.

According to the Basic Set, "A potion may be sipped to discover its type and then used later." (It is also stated that all potions have a different smell and taste, even two with the same effect, so we can surmise that drinking a micro-dose of a potion produces either very small or very short-duration effects by which it can be easily identified.) No other method is given, suggested, or hinted at. Thus, the only RAW method of identifying a potion happens to be the very same means by which a character exposes himself to the effects of a potion of poison. How convenient! 

This forces an unfair choice on the players: either one of them must take the risk or they must eschew the use of the potion entirely. There is no way of obtaining further information upon which to base a more measured decision; it is essentially a game of Russian roulette, and eventually somebody is going to fall victim to it through no fault of their own, their character's life hinging on a single roll of a d20. It has been said before that if a character's fate comes down to a saving throw, it's because the player made a mistake or a foolish decision, but in this case, that "foolish" choice is literally the only way to determine a potion's usefulness. 

One possible solution, and probably the easiest one, is simply not to use or place potions of poison in your game. This is also the most uninteresting. Other measures are possible, and can maintain the element of risk while enhancing, rather than diminishing, player agency and fun.

First, there is the option of adding poisons and other hazardous concoctions with effects other than instant death. Possibilities include paralyzation, sickness (cf. giant centipede), disease (cf. mummy), other debilities (e.g. ability score reductions, blindness, deafness, dizziness), involuntary transformations (petrification, polymorph other, size change), and of course plain old points of damage. 

Secondly, other means of identification may be specified. One such is to add abilities, either built in to class descriptions or as add-on skills. These might take the form of x-in-6 or x-in-20 chances, or automatic successes. I lean toward the latter on the grounds that the former merely gives player-characters one more dice roll between themselves and death by poison, without appreciably increasing the scope or impact of player agency. An automatic success with costs, such as time (a specified interval, either flat, such as one turn, or a range, e.g. 1d6 turns, to properly identify a potion) or materials (for instance a field alchemy kit, stocked with reagents, purchased for some amount of coin, and with a finite number of uses). A combination of the two might well be optimal. Another reasonable possibility is that potions might be taken to an alchemist or apothecary between adventures and identified for a fee, or identified by a magic-user PC with an appropriate laboratory, in either case costing less than the per-potion cost of the field alchemy kit. 

With such measures in place, players have a slate of interesting and consequential choices before them. The existence of other varieties of detrimental potions mean that instant death is relatively less likely, and so they may decide to identify the potions at once by sipping them. Alternatively, they might choose to expend some time and resources, avoiding the hazard of accidental poisoning, but consuming time, with the corresponding risk of random encounters, and material resources. Finally, they might refrain from using newly found potions in the field until they can have them professionally analyzed by a specialist back in town.  

Do you have any other house rules or alternate interpretations of RAW to make poison potions or other hazardous items more fun and less of a "gotcha!"? Let me know in the comments.