Drinking Problems: The Trouble with Booze Rules in Games

Not everything needs a rule. If a player-character is throwing back pint after pint, nine times out of ten, it is sufficient for the player to just roleplay the character as drunk, however they think such quantities of ale would affect their character. If the player says “My character is a dwarf of the Undermountain clan! It is known all around that we don’t get drunk from ale like humans!” then that is fine too. It can be a treat when players add color to the world by making decisions about their characters like that, and if there are no rigidly defined rules for the effects of drinking, the game can just go with the flow of conversation. Generally, if my players go into a tavern and order some drinks, I run it no differently than had they ordered a round of tonic waters with slices of lime. The drinking is set-dressing. Below, I present some musings on making interesting drinking rules before going into the [in-process] drinking rules for my own upcoming adventure, Barkeep on the Borderlands.

This post is brought to you by Barkeep on the Borderlands: a pubcrawl pointcrawl adventure coming to a Kickstarter near you in February for ZineMonth. The pre-launch page has just gone live, so you can follow the project to get a notification when it launches. There is a lot of neat stuff I’m looking forward to showing off during the campaign.

Drinking Problems

If you search online for rules for drinking in D&D, you’ll see that a smattering of 5th edition homebrewers have settled on a near-consensus ruleset. It is quite fiddly for my taste, but it involves a series of DC 10 Constitution checks that progress the drinker along a series of sub-conditions with various mechanical effects, most of which are relevant for combat. The presumption must be that drinking is somewhat dangerous if combat is to occur: you’ll be slower and at disadvantage for most checks (though at a certain level of drunkenness you gain damage resistance to all types of damage). These rules, in conjunction with the play culture most typically associated with 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons, is likely to incentivize certain behaviors from the players: either drinking is to be avoided at all cost and these rules serve more as prohibitions, or there is some character-build that is built around that damage resistance who is constantly drinking just enough to stay that level of inebriated at all times. This all may be fun for some, but to me it doesn’t reflect why people drink alcohol or what happens when they do (e.g., I have never met someone who drank themselves into a stupor so that they would be less likely to die if they were to come into contact with fire). The rules make themselves quite present at the table by requiring a Constitution check for each drink and having the track the effects of up to five sub-conditions, but to me it signifies nothing.

Any rule for drinking should start not with the downsides of drinking, but with why characters are likely to drink at all in the first place. Why do people drink? In Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization, Edward Slingerland makes a persuasive case that alcohol and other intoxicants are not merely a poison that humans enjoy, but that it was and is vital to creativity and socialization, despite its deleterious effects (he does completely fail to detail how it impacts combat effectiveness though, a complete oversight for Dr. Slingerland). This rings true to my own experiences with alcohol, which was usually consumed in the context of socialization and rarely ever combat. Any large networking event for work or school, any night out with friends, and most in-person gaming sessions involved drinking. As Melissa Urban said in her recent op-ed in the Washington Post, one of the biggest difficulties of not drinking is social pressure to drink. As she says, “Alcohol is the only drug we have to justify not using.” She further describes the hostility that one can face if they choose not to drink while everyone around them is:

“They can get defensive, angry or confrontational without you saying a word about your choices (or theirs) and often attempt to make themselves feel better by mocking you, pressuring you to change your mind, or embarrassing you with taunts of ‘you’re no fun.’ There are a few different ways to navigate this, and most of them don’t work very well.”

In his adventure of paranormal paranoia, Witchburner, Luka Rejec emphasizes the social pressure of drinking. Witchburner is, first and foremost, a social adventure. The players play outsiders who are in town to determine who is the witch and, more importantly, convince the powers that be in the town of the accused’s guilt. The player-characters will spend a large chunk of their town going around the village and investigating, all the while trying to gain the trust of the scared townsfolk. Witchburner makes no bones about how important alcohol is to the social functioning of the village, stating that:

“Alcohol is the glue that binds the folk together, it is drunk to welcome guests, to celebrate good fortune and bury misfortune—and often, just for fun.

Every time the heroes pay a social call on a townsperson they will be offered alcohol. Every watch [a six hour period of time] the Heroes drink they get more drunk. If they refuse, they must make a Charisma save or their host is offended (and fears them).

Every watch they do not drink the heroes sober up one step.”

The reason I start with the drawbacks of not drinking is because I like for mechanics to be push and pull. If there are drawbacks to drinking and drawbacks of not drinking, the characters are between a rock and a hard place and must make choices. If there is only a drawback to drinking, like the 5th edition rules above, there isn’t really a meaningful choice to be made. With the rules in Witchburner, the adventurers have a choice. Drinking has drawbacks in steps (which aren’t too dissimilar from the 5e effects, minus the damage resistance), which eventually ends in incapacitation. The players have to balance between not spooking the townsfolk with their refusal to drink and not getting so blasted that they can no longer walk straight. This push and pull presents a set of choices for players to make about how best to overcome their challenges.

Drinking Solutions

The following reflects my current draft rules for alcohol in my upcoming Zinemonth project, Barkeep on the Borderlands. The adventure itself is a social adventure that involves the player-characters going from bar to bar—I felt it necessary to add drinking rules. But the way these drinking rules function isn’t dissimilar to rules for torches when exploring dank, dark and dangerous caves. Drinking is almost necessary to navigate the social spaces the player-characters find themselves in (in a way not dissimilar to Witchburner), but sobriety is a dwindling resource—too many drinks and it’s lights out. Each turn of pubcrawlings, the referee rolls an event die that functions very similarly to Necropraxis’ Overloaded Encounter Die but tailored to in-town social adventuring. The event die has one result that is for all the player-characters to test their sobriety. Because turns are roughly ten minutes, this happens about once an hour (Marcia B. at chiquitafajita has a post on the math of this). I’ll blog later about this pubcrawling procedure more in depth, but this is how the drinking aspect is handled:

Sobriety Die

A character’s maximum Sobriety Die based on their Constitution score. They are stone-cold sober at their maximum Sobriety Die.

A character with a Constitution score of 8 or lower has a d8 maximum Sobriety Die, a character with a Constitution of 9 to 15 starts has a d10 maximum Sobriety Die and a character with a Constitution or 16 of higher has a d12 maximum Sobriety Die.

Inebriation

When the Event Die results in “Inebriation”, each character rolls their Sobriety Die (unless they did not have anything to drink). If they drank like mad, they roll twice and take the lower result. If the roll is a 1-2 then the Sobriety Die is downgraded to the next lower die in the following chain:

d12 → d10 → d8 → d6 (Tipsy) → d4 (Drunk) → Blackout Drunk

Being Tipsy

A Tipsy character has advantage on all Charisma saving throws and tests. In addition, when they roll their Sobriety Die, consult the following table.

Being Drunk

A Drunk character has disadvantage on all saving throws and tests except those involving Charisma. In addition, each time they roll their Sobriety Die, consult the following table.

Not Drinking

Not drinking alcohol in the pubs will raise eyebrows or hackles from other patrons. They will likely assume you are hiding something.

Being Blackout Drunk

If a character becomes Blackout Drunk, they are played by the referee for the rest of the night. Unless the other characters take the drunkard to a safe place to sleep it off, they must roll on the Blackout Table. The Blackout Table is similar to many carousing tables you may have seen, except it is weighted to bad results. You have just let a gang of goblins give you a face tattoo, but you might also wake up to find that you have adopted a child or joined a cult. The results are more keyed to the environment (in this case, the Keep and its many taverns) more than the physical effects of becoming blackout drunk.

Sobering Up

If a character drinks nothing but water for two hours, their Sobriety Die increases by one step (up to the maximum for that character). When the character returns to their maximum Sobriety Die after being Drunk or Blackout, they are hungover. Being hungover imposes a level of exhaustion and migraine headaches. Some magics can cure hangovers or accomplish sobriety quicker. Certain residents of the Keep extol their own miracle cures.