How do you handle alcoholism as a character trait?

>How does Dr. Thunder not even make the grid?
Well at least SOMEONE has good taste in knockoff colas

Like I do in real life.

I come home, shower the drunk off. Then I make dinner when they lie about what they did all day followed by a night of utter silence or the saddest sex known to man.

I'll give the player some kind of bonus or benefit (like a Bennie or Fate Point) if their character trait causes them significant grief, or presents a meaningful obstacle, during a session. Generally speaking I won't bring up the trait myself, they'll have to bring it up themselves in-session. I also won't give them anything if they grief is at a different player's expense. For example, leaving a fellow PC alone so you can get drunk, and then not being there to help them when a fight breaks out, isn't worth anything. However, giving a ton of your coins to an obvious con artist because you're too drunk to think straight might be worth something. Now, if you also accidentally gave them the purse with your fiance's locket, and it's a one-of-a-kind item, that's definitely worth something.

This applies to all negative character traits, not just alcoholism. Oh, and a cool way to handle positive character traits, that aren't covered by skills/abilities on your sheet? Let players spend a bonus point from one of their 'flaws' to get some benefit. So if you're an alcoholic, but you're also pretty popular in the taverns around here, you could spend that bonus point to ask about that con artist and get some information about them, how to find them or who they work with.

What this does is two-fold. First, it lets characters have all sorts of minor positive traits, but it prevents them from being useful unless their negative traits are causing them stress or complications. Second, it creates excellent hooks for adventures and makes it easier to pull in the characters and get them invested. Third, depending on your system you can also give players some kind of XP bonus for drawing on these traits, or maybe make it so they get more than one Bennie from a negative trait giving them grief. That'll encourage them to bring them up every now and then, but because they need to be meaningful consequences, it'll prevent them from being 'spammed' for points.

Suffer penalties for not drinking, no benefits for drinking. How getting plastered affects them is up to the PC, I just wish to remind them they have an addiction

>8 dr. Pepper knock offs
You Americans have a massive market for pop, huh.

Same way as I do in real life

Badly

soda could be a fucking death god cult here in a modern magic setting

Canadafag, if you hadn't determined.

Here you get pepsi products, coke products, and in a supermarket you also get whatever generic pop they carry, typically their own brand, and never with any fancy marketing or names or labels.

There's also Jones soda, and international imports, but most people don't buy those and they're pretty uncommon to see in stores.

Only American import you see fairly regularly is vanilla coke, which for some reason they don't sell here. Any store that carries out charges you like, double the price of anything else.

I heard you don't really have root beer/it's rare, that true?

>the saddest sex known to man
I don't know about that, I've had some pretty sad sex myself

>I heard you don't really have root beer/it's rare, that true?
Unless there's some definition of "real root beer" that doesn't apply in the US it's quite common. Mug, A&W, Barq's, IBC, various knockoff brand. I'd say it's no harder to find than orange soda and more common than grape soda.

Oh. That's slightly less common than here, but still pretty common.

Here you can basically get some form of name brand cola or root beer anywhere you go.

Not that, user, but we've got root beer all over the place. We've also got birch beer, but I'm not a fan. In addition to that, we've got store brand and a bunch of other ripoffs. We've got so much soda, even small town supermarkets like the one where I live will have a shelf dedicated to soda.

But, yeah. I love good root beer, especially house made stuff. What brands do you Canucks have?

Sounds about right. If soda is available at all in some location here, there isn't necessarily root beer but if they have any selections of "exotics" at all (anything more interesting than lemon-lime soda) they'll likely have root beer.

My canadian experience is thunder bay, which is (as I understand it) barely even canada.

In New York I've never been to a restaurant that didn't have Root Beer. It is as ubiquitous as cola, definitely above Orange, but not by much.

>What brands of root beer do you have
Barq's
Dad's
Mug
A&W
Those are the main ones you see. There's a lot less variety here, I can only assume pop has less of a market than in the USA.

It IS a social lubricant/lowers inhibitions.

The thing is, an alcoholic will go well beyond having "one or two" just to loosen up. Or be at risk of doing so. By definition.

This is when they are not dead drunk in a ditch, sleeping it off somewhere, or so shit faced they can't walk, much less shoot straight.

Beat them up over it. Make them deal with their issue so they can man (or woman) up and do what needs doing.

Yes, I like John Wayne movies by the way.

>pop
i live in "pop" central and this word still triggers me

I'm not sure I've seen Dad's but we've got another one that's becoming more common: Virgil's. Have you tried Saranac root beer? It's pretty good.

If someone comes here and calls it soda, it's a clear sign they're American.

The signs in the supermarket label them as pop even.

I can't say I've ever heard of it.

Heard of virgil's, but never seen anywhere you could buy it

I can generally go to a store and find at least one of those brands, aside from Dad's which I've never seen. Nicer grocery stores, like Wegman's, will have a shelf full of nicer brands in glass bottles too.

Saranac makes hard drinks mostly, but their root beer is amazing. They're in upstate New York. A short drive if you live in Montreal.

Ah.

I'm on the west coast.

6 months ago when i was living on the Canada side of Niagara Falls, i might have made a short road trip to try it

Do you guys have a&w restaurants or just the root beer?

The for beer at their restaurants tags so much better than bottled, and their budgets are fucking great. The meat is closer to a diner burger than to something like McDonald's

She's a "functional" alcoholic. Let her have those couple of drinks in the morning and surreptitious sips here and there through the day to keep the buzz and you'd never know she has a problem.
She does have a problem though, and days when she's not out adventuring and everyone's depending on her, she drinks herself into a stupor and wallows in her own filth all day, only barely remembering to eat now and then. It's a good thing she's not supposed to be swinging weapons around, she's in terrible condition.

Root beer at the restaurant tastes so much better.

Sorry , posting from phone

Dr. Flave is life.

It's worth it, my man. They might have it in Washington, or Alaska, but I'm totally unsure.

You shop at shitty stores. You can get Vanilla Coke, Cherry coke and Vanilla cherry coke in 7/11's.

Wow!

That's quite the drunk .

Drunkenly. I'm an alcoholic, so

GURPS has some good rules for it.

Ive very rarely seen it in a 7-11 after like 2004.

That's... Pretty average actually. I speak from sad sad experience

Focus on why the character is an alcoholic rather than just having him be drunk all the time. What is he escaping through drink, not dealing with?

I bought a Cherry coke a few days ago. They come in 500ml bottles.

That sounds pretty realistic. Do you need help, friend?

There's a lot more alcoholics on Veeky Forums than I suspected. This thread makes me sad.

There's a lot in life to drink for one way or the other

It's probably because booze is commonly used to self-medicate for depression.

All the coke products come in 500ml bottles now. Shit makes me angry. Fucking children sized beverages for full price.

I just thought our chosen form of escapism was rpgs

Alcoholics are way more common in the USA.

You see a drunk up here in Canada? Must have a pretty good job.

Rpgs require coordination.
You can't play them every day.

Beer is like $25 for 24, and that's moderately priced beer.
Cheap wine is like $12.
Hard liquor is like $25/bottle

I know it's not the same for anyone else here, but I drink almost daily out of necessity rather than personal choice.

This tbqh, catch her when the veneer or a mask or other identity is off and you'll see someone who reeks because they haven't showered, who hasn't been eating, is barely anything more than a braindead husk on autopilot who wakes up drunk and goes to bed drunk.

Most people with mental problems(myself and a large part of my family included) takes to booze or drugs to cope with reality. Not just depressed people.

>drink or of necessity
?
More information?

That doesn't change the fact that you see way more drunk people and booze in the states, or that booze is crazy expensive in Canada

Necessity? Are you a dwarf? Can you not gain access to bread or something?

Fer shure, it's mad expensive here too but eh, you just always have money for alcohol somehow

I work in a home brew shop, mixing and tasting is a daily thing. If something tastes nice, I write down what I made. Hell, write it down if it sucks. That way I know not to make it again.

>Hard liquor is like $25/bottle
That's pretty decent hard liquor, user.

You can the cheap shit for under $10 some places.

Ah. You could do like the French wine makers. They taste it and spit it out.

In Canada?

I've never seen it that cheap.

Oh . Do you mean a pint? I'm talking about a 26er.

Dr.`Pibb?
What was that sodaStream rippoff?
Shasta has a rippoff of Dr.P.
So tons omre than that chart has.

And waste it? Bro.

Seriously though, I try to avoid that. It's harder to gauge mouth and throat feel when I do that. Some wine tasters say it makes it easier to taste, but I've never noticed a difference.

>Are you a dwarf?
I live in Australia. Does that count?

s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/bd/20/8c/bd208ca860624012d94d7a7b864ef29a.jpg

>Sampling booze all day
>Don't spit it out
Wouldn't that make you awful at judging quality like halfway through the day?

I assume he doesn't do it in large quantities.

You can attach an image directly to your post on Veeky Forums. This site is what's known as an "imageboard".

Large quantities or no, if he's spending all day experimenting with different booze mixes, he'll have a buzz by the second half of the day.

Just like a chef ends up eating a lot of food tasting everything they make.

I keep an eye on the amount I drink each day. 1/hour, while not the best solution, keeps me from getting done at the breath testing. I try not to exceed that much, and barely drink outside of work.

That and I've been drinking long enough to not have any buzz from drinking like this anyway. Sad, but true. If anything, I've become less of a drinker since this job.

So.

What are some unusual mixes you've tried that are actually really good?

I'm not entirely sure how to make it with commercial brand stuff, but I once accidentally made honey bourbon as a cream drink (think irish whiskey -> irish cream ala Baileys) and that was actually quite nice.

One of my favourite mixtures is effectively turning spiced rum into a liqueur, giving it a thicker mouth feel and letting you taste the spices a bit more as they stick to your tongue.

I was a bit skeptical about adding grape juice and honey to a beer I was making, but it actually came out quite nice. I may use less hops next time though, as they're still quite overpowering.

Chili beer is a thing we get asked about a lot. Better in theory or for heavier drinks, for winter.

People question me when I tell them they can make dark rum taste like creaming soda with lemonade and lemon juice.

If you've ever had banana ice cream, we have a recipe for a drink that tastes exactly like it. That itself was a derivative from a drink called Tequila Rose, basically Tequila and strawberries and cream. Better than it sounds.

Most shots of different spirits in beer actually go quite well, barring cream drinks. Dat curdling. Notable examples, whiskey, rum and red wine all go well with heavy beers like dark ales and stouts, wine and schnapps play well with ciders, or if it's a particularly dry cider, I've had jaeger being decent with it before. Lighter beers like lighter flavours like flavoured vodkas or even just straight honey.

There are many, many drinks and mixtures. There's even a recipe for a drink that tastes like you're eating apple pie.

Oh man my local bar serves something that tastes like apple pie and it's the greatest thing of all time

Wait, there are people with characters without alcoholism?!

Unless the player has been living with an alcoholic I doubt they can pull it convincingly. Of course, if they have been, I don't see why they would want to relive it.

Use my dad as an example.

Or if they themselves are an alcoholic

Make the character drink a lot.

My nigger.