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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8247459" data-attributes="member: 42582">Yet in real life some people, sometimes, screw up at key moments because of (say) alcoholism.So one possibility is no PC in this game will ever be an alcoholic. In my experience that's basically how classic D&D plays.Another possibility is that drinking alcohol (or consuming some other drug) confers an ingame beneift, which incentivises the player to have his/her PC consume it, and there is also an addiction mechanic of some sort. Rolemaster has a system like this, not for alcohol but for other drugs including magic-enhancing ones. In one of our games a PC ended up addicted to hugar (an intoxicant which allowed  him to rapidly regain his spell points) and ended up losing all his money (from purchasing doses) and his house (from being unable to pay the lease) and then suffering withdrawal symptoms (until he was healed with relatively high-level healing magic). During this period of hugar addiction, another player whose PC had something of a "leader" status would have his PC plan expeditions based around the cycle of intoxication and recovery of the addicted character.The possibility just described won't really work for drugs that confer no ingame benefit - while in real life pleasure can be a reason to do things, it doesn't generate much incentive for the player of a character who doesn't him-/herself get to experience the purely imaginary pleasure of the character's intoxication.A third possibility is that drinking alcohol is desirable to the player because it does bring them a benefit (eg the metagame reward that Emerikol describes) and so the player, playing the PC, is tempted to have a drink just as the character is . . .A further point that cuts across these possibilities is what does it mean to screw up in a RPG? In some approaches to RPGing, a failed check means not only that the PC doesn't get what s/he wants (ie has "screwed up" in the fiction) but that the player also doesn't get what s/he wants (ie has "screwed up" at the table). In other approaches to RPGing this isn't necessarily the case, because of how the adjudication of failure is handled. For instance, in the case of my RM game the character suffered problems due to his addiction, but the player was still able to play his PC who was continuing to have a big impact on the ongoing fiction of the game.</blockquote>

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