Herblore- getting plants identified in villages

[chad]

It always seems to me that herblore is missing something in this game. In the game you play as a 16 year old setting off into the wilderness after leaving their home village. So in theory, you are still young and learning skills, and most of the people you meet will be older, wiser and more knowledgeable than you. You're also trying to secure yourself food and constantly encountering potential food plants and mushrooms. And yet the only way to know which are edible and which aren't is to start with high herblore, or essentially trial and error. So if you start with low herblore, you're locked out of quite a lot of the game for the whole run.

I think it would be good if there were a mechanism to show foraged herbs and mushrooms to NPCs, to ask if they can identify them for you. Getting something identified once doesn't mean you'd be able to go out and gather more with perfect reliability (so there's still room for the HERBLORE skill), but it at least gives you more options and would be a more realistic mechanism in most cases than randomly tasting things and hoping you don't die. Perhaps villagers would only take the time out of their day to identify things if they liked you at least a little beforehand. And perhaps for getting advice from the sage (who is presumably both more important and more knowledgeable) you would need to be very well regarded in the village. Having asked a few NPCs to identify plants for you would also be a natural starting point for the 'gather herbs' quest.

[PALU]

It seems you've missed that you can train your herb lore skill by repeatedly trying to identify plants (without eating them). In fact, herb lore is the skill that's the easiest to train to its maximum level, because you can keep on trying until you get there.