Rules for Drunkenness

[Marc17]

Oh wow. OP from 2002. No wonder I can get their site to see the rules.

The one time I had drinking rules was in my Magical School game where the Dwarves Bard professor took the kids ( 1st level older teenagers) on the school trip on a bar crawl while in the capital city. Most of the students on the trip were also bards and also expected to preform at said bars. PCs were not bards but two of them had a slapstick vaudeville style act they had patched together with their cantrips.

I don't have access to the rules I chose, but looked around at different sets and finalized on one set that seemed like they'd match the intent. It was pretty much based on Fort/Con saves per drink. First failure gave them +1 to their skill rolls.* Each additional failure gave them penalties to saves and skills. The professor totally meant for it to be an endurance march where students would end up dropping out as they went and they did.

*Luckily, it never came up later and no PC tried to enact that rule past the bar crawl. For that matter, I don't think they really drank enough to enact the rules at any time past that.

 

[Charlaquin]

I cannot recall the last time we used some sort of drunk rules in the game, likely 30 hears ago in high school. Now if the PCs want to get drunk and party it is just crossing some gold off and I have them tell me a 10 second story of the night and leave out details.

Having rules to describe how being drunk affected our characters sure did seem more important before we were ourselves legally allowed to drink.

 

[Sorcerers Apprentice]

The one time I remember that drunkenness mattered in 5e was when a PC was deliberately trying to get some troublesome NPCs drunk. We resolved it by having the drinkers roll CON saves vs Poison. One failed save and you get the Poisoned condition, two failures and you fall asleep.

(The PC won, he was a Dwarf with high CON, so it was hardly a fair competition )

 

[sevenbastard]

Let's see

Don't cast Message to reach out to your ex

Don't try to operate a flying carpet or Apparatus of Kwalish

Don't be alone with the bard

 

[Jahydin]

Well, since a bot necroed this thread, might as well take the time to gloat about Hackmaster!

4e Hackmaster has the most in-depth rules for fantasy intoxication I've ever seen!

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Having rules to describe how being drunk affected our characters sure did seem more important before we were ourselves legally allowed to drink.

It’s a lot easier to role play something without resorting to rules if you have personal experience to draw upon. That’s why it’s so important to have rules for hitting a dragon with a sword.

 

[Charlaquin]

It’s a lot easier to role play something without resorting to rules if you have personal experience to draw upon. That’s why it’s so important to have rules for hitting a dragon with a sword.

Also, personally, I had much more desire to roleplay getting drunk when drinking was something “cool” and “adult” that I wasn’t allowed to do in real life. Now I can drink more or less whenever I want (outside of work hours, of course), and most of the time I don’t even want to, let alone doing it to the point of being drunk. It loses its mystique after a certain point.