Does your game accurately portray the effects of characters drinking unclean water?

Does your game accurately portray the effects of characters drinking unclean water?

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I'm running a detective noir game set in Africa and all the characters drink is whisky, maybe some ice, so no one gets sick

Yes but filtering it has become effortless for the PCs so we don't bother describing it anymore.
We're still talking about local tax policies though.

Ofcourse. We also spend the first few hours determining wether anyone got cancer/aids/some other deisease that will not manisfest withing months/years.

No my I'm confident in my ability to adequately portray how much of a faggot OP is.

GRRM is kinda embarrassing for thinking he's gritty, ain't he?

Well, in most civilized places, there's water filtration and purification. So no, not really.

Instead of wasting time before starting, we just roll every turn to check for spontaneous cancer growth. Takes a while to roll for every cell in the body though.

No, because the tax policy is so efficient that no one needs to drink unclean water.

>the more she drank
>the more she shat

>He doesn't use the streamlined system from GURPS: Oncology

Purify Food and Drink is a ritual spell in 5E, you can just gather a pile of rotting carrion and a bucket of seawater and purge it.
It'll still taste bad, but you're an adventurer. You can take it.

>Not creating clean food and water out of thin air
>LaughingDruidsClericsAndWizards.gif

>It's the middle ages so everyone drank unclean piss water
>Which is why everyone was able to live in large cities relatively safe from epidemics until the black plague

Straining the water through sand or thick cloth, followed by boiling for 10 minutes will get rid of 99% of bacteria and toxins. People have done this since 2000 B.C. Any adventurer worth their salt would know this by heart.

The ones who did drink the water suffered from constant diarrhea and the ones who didn't were constantly constipated. People drank copious amounts of alcohol precisely because the water was unclean and most of the bacteria in it died during the distillation process.

>Straining the water through sand or thick cloth
From what I've seen on some documentary, Sahara nomads even do this to mud to filter out somewhat drinkable water.

You think it took 4500 years to learn how to boil water, son?
People drank alcohol because it was tasty and they knew nothing of liver damage.

>Everyone drank alcohol all the time but didn't die from liver diseased
>Even though the Church explicitly preached moderation in alcohol consumption
>Water from rivers wasn't relatively clean in the absence of industrial pollution
>Nobody knew that boiling water was a thing even though it's a far less complex process than fermentation
>And something they'd need to do to take the baths they didn't take

Realize that you're not that much more clever than average medieval man and add 2 + 2 together: what happens to your body when you drink wine or beer all day every day? Try it: beer with your cornflakes, beer for lunch, beer with your soup, a warm mug of beer before going to bed. I'm sure it'll work out great.

People just used to put some alcohol in their water, they didn't boil it.

On ships, to make it keep.
My grandma gets all the water in her house pumped up from a well, no filtration or anything. Some hill vilage in the absolute sticks of Europe is as medieval as you're gonna get around here and it's fine.

Yeah its not like they had massive complexes to bring clean water from sources to the cities and decant them.

this ignorance about the ingenuity of our ancestors triggers my ignorance

youtube.com/watch?v=qwBsdKIPvRs Watch this video. Use a copper (or silver) container.

user, no.
Everywhere, because they knew water alone wasn't as safe. It was that or beer with such a low alcohol content it barely passed as alcohol.

It takes a certain level of alcohol to become toxic to bacteria. About ~13% alcohol is sufficient to completely kill off bacteria, iirc.

This. Low percentages won't do shit.

>this ignorance about the ingenuity of our ancestors triggers my ignorance
The problem with this is the so-called "Enlightenment" or "Age of Reason", the only era in human history to name itself (except for dynastic periods of course, the Napoleonic era was probably called that when Napoleon was still alive). A big part of "Enlightenment" thought was this big emphasis on reason, which had to be emphasized by making the old look horrible. Most of the misconceptions we have of the Middle Ages comes precisely from fabrications from the "Enlightenment". From our ancestors being too stupid to tell the difference between fresh and stagnant water to the church enforcing a flat earth worldview and burning all dissidents to extreme superstition and distrust of reason to the idea that nobody bathed to the idea that medieval swords were big, clunky pieces of metal and knights in full plate had to be lifted onto their horses with special cranes. Their logic was 'the dumber our ancestors look, the smarter we look'.

>Everywhere, because they knew water alone wasn't as safe.
Nigga wat?
history.howstuffworks.com/medieval-people-drink-beer-water.htm
You do know the creation of beer involves boiling water at some point, right? Do you really think nobody ever considered doing that and skipping all other steps involved in making beer? And even if medieval man was somehow too stupid to do that, how dirty do you think riverwater is in the absence of big, polluting factories? How do you think humans could've evolved on earth if drinking naturally occurring water makes them ill? Do you think early man was like the aliens from Signs, utterly allergic to the most common and most vital substance on this planet?

It is true that alcohol and water were sometimes mixed, but so were water and honey or water and certain herbs/spices. It was for taste rather than safety.

That depends on the germ. ~13% alcohol content is the point at which yeast can't survive swimming in its own neurotoxic excrement anymore, which is why you need destillation to produce beverages with higher alcohol content than that.

Alcohol wasn't necessarily all that strong. And it usually had bits of whatever it was made from, so it was more nutricious.

To be fair, many people reflect on medieval or earlier tines through the victorian lens, where they had to figure out that shitting in your water is bad for you again.

While the bit about the alcohol content is true, part of the beer-making process involved boiling water.

Same reason the English saw a drop in gut-related diseases after the introduction of tea: incidental sterilization.

As we all know, all animals die from diseases unless they boil their water first.

That is stupid. You don't need chunks of barley or grapes floating around in your beverage to make it more nutritious than water.
Beer contains carbohydrates, alcohol (technically speaking a macronutrient and a source of energy for your body) and various micronutrients, all of which are not usually found in plain water. The filtrated and sometimes even pasteurized versions of beer that we drink today have the same nutritional value as beers from the middle ages that were made without those processes.

In ASOIAF, it's a very specific character that gets diarrhea from drinking water (and eating berries she doesn't recognize), and it was far away from any city.

And no, that water was not clean. Or filtered. Daenerys is really bad at everything except for conquering. A part of the chapter is dedicated to her trying and failing to make a hat for herself.

Animals don't need to cook their meat, either. It's been a while, even on an evolutionary scale, since humans could survive in a natural environment like animals.

fucking brits, when they will ever learn

Most meat doesn't need to be cooked in the first place. Unless you don't know the chickens that were raised, for example in a modern factory farm complex where salmonella may run rampant.
If you kill the cow yourself, and know the cow wasn't dying of disease, you can damn well eat the meat raw within a few hours of the slaughter.
It just won't taste great. And you're not gonna eat a significant portion of the cow before the rest starts to go bad.

The earliest form of alcohol was fermented onions. Yum! It couldn't get you drunk because it had so little alcohol but it had just enough to kill anything.

My game doesn't even accurately reflect the effects of a character getting ripped in half by a Tarrasque, I don't think we've been described as drinking or eating anything in months.

Parasites and bacteria were extremely common and horrifying.

Would you like to guess how long you need to boil water or would you prefer a extremely watered down drink with a ingredient that kills everything?

People drank whine and watered down alcohol in the west. In Asia they focused on tea and boiling. Its why they genetically have a hard time processing alcohol. That is also why their nose turns red.

The same is true for most carnivores. There's a good reason why they go for the organs and marrow first - high nutritional content and calorie density. Muscle meat is actually the least valuable bit, but strangely almost the only animal parts Westerners will touch (not so in Eastern Europe, Asia etc.)

You know people was unaware of germs, right?

Onions have natural antibacterial properties, so low-proof fermented onion water was probably pretty safe anyway

It doesn't take a guy with a microscope and a lab coat to figure out that drinking heated water doesn't give you the shits.

My characters never eat or drink. They're magically animated.

That's why in Asia and among Native Americans there's less tolerance to alcohol. They figured it out earlier and never had to adapt to alcohol.

But do you determine anal circumference? Huh?
Yeah, didn't think so, pleb.

Most animals prefer cooked food to. It's just that our digestie system sucks balls.

Drinking alcohol instead of water was much more common in cities where water was truly dangerous.

Mongols believed that boiling water would appease the water spirits and keep them from cursing them with sickness. An amusing thought occurs that driving off germs wouldn't sound any less odd to people used to thinking about spirits but who never thought of germs.

>how dirty do you think riverwater is in the absence of big, polluting factories?
This. Most running and well water is pretty safe to drink, it's usually human activity that increases the risk of getting sick.
The cholera epidemics only sprung in places with a relatively high human density and bad waste management.

>Thinks only man made pollution in water make water unsafe.

Hey user why don't you go to the wilds of Africa or a South American jungle and drink the water that is untouched by man?

>Hasn't seen children in Africa with stomachs swollen from parasites the kids can feel squirm in their stomach.

>Doesn't know when archeologists analysed preserved poop on the silk road they found a massive infestation of parasites in every persons leavings.

>Doesn't know the number one cause of death for people lost in the woods is bacteria infections from unclean water.

Bahahahahaha!!!

Victorians believed malaria was caused by bad (mal) air. Missionaries in Africa wrote home about the primitive superstitions of the natives, who foolishly believed malaria was caused by evil swamp spirits. Both groups were wrong, but closing your windows at night and staying out of the swamp is a very effective way to avoid mosquitoes, which are the real vector of the disease. In a way, the mosquitoes can be seen as evil swamp spirits and especially if there are many of them attacking you.

More than one ancient city mitigated their malaria problems by filling in their local wetlands. This wasn't because they knew what caused malaria, but that the seasonal nature of it and the fact that a high number of mosquitoes tended to presage outbreaks of it was not lost on them.
The bad air (or miasma) theory of disease led to attempts to stave off illness by burning incense. This proved very effective in protecting against mosquitoes, a major disease vector. The main concept of miasma theory (that disease is caused by unpleasant smells generated by corpses) is also one big example of this trope — the smell itself is not the cause of disease, but rather a byproduct of the bacteria attracted to the decaying tissue.

Organ meat is more dangerous even if the animal appears healthy, it's almost guaranteed to have some kind of parasite

>he thinks having a parasite is some sort of instantaneous death sentence
People just lived with parasites ya git. They did they and they do now.
The most successful parasites are barely noticeable in the first place.

Florence Nightingale did a lot to improve sanitary conditions in hospitals. Although her work was based on miasma theory, better sanitation is better sanitation and death rates fell.
London's current sewer system was built because of cholera epidemics throughout the city in 1858. The logic was based off the flawed miasma theory, but the sewer system improved sanitation by discharging the sewage downstream of the city, effectively ending mass cholera epidemics in the city. Indeed, one final cholera epidemic in 1866, prior to the full completion of the sewer system, proved the real reason for the cholera outbreaks (cholera is a water-borne illness), but also validated the building of the sewer (the outbreak was limited to a portion of the city that hadn't yet been connected to the sewer).

In Ancient Rome, the blood of a sacrificed animal would be added to concrete mixture. They believed this made it stronger. As it turns out, they were right. It wasn't due to divine favor, however - the blood aerated the concrete, making it more durable.

Most parasites won't kill you. Even nasty ones like Hookworm "merely" fuck you up and make you weaker, dumber and more sickly; you can still survive and procreate.

It was once believed that the Jewish practice of washing hands several times a day for religious purposes, including before every meal, contributed to the relatively tiny number of Jews who died in plagues during the Middle Ages. It also caused the survivors to be chased out of the country since the only reason people could see for this phenomenon is that the plagues were the Jews' fault.

Not just ships.
The earliest human civilizations that invented farming used a very weak alcohol made from fermented onions.

When you are thirsty now, you don't want to wait for water to reach a boil, and then wait for it cook through for a unknown time while watching the water you gathered evaporate away.

Contributing information to the civil debate

The easiest way to make water filthy is to shit in it. The easiest way to farm crops is using irigation and manure. So long as you are upstream of large scale agriculture or settlements you would be pretty much fine.

African parisites cant spread if the africans stop shitting in the water

Obviously, immunity to God's scourge means you're a devil worshipper. if they dont just die like the rest of us God-fearing True Christians™ the it's our duty to persecute them so they can repent and be Saved™ (or y'know, kill them if they don't, they were going to hell anyways)

>>Everyone drank alcohol all the time but didn't die from liver diseased
Yes, they did.

>>Even though the Church explicitly preached moderation in alcohol consumption
The idea of what constituted "moderate alcohol consumption" was very different then from what those words make us think of today.

>>Water from rivers wasn't relatively clean in the absence of industrial pollution
No, it wasn't.

>>Nobody knew that boiling water was a thing even though it's a far less complex process than fermentation
They had no reason to believe that boiling the water specifically was what killed the bacteria. They didn't even know that bacteria was a thing. They simply noticed that drinking alcohol didn't give you the shits while drinking pure water did.

Not really, for reasons already covered, but I might as well walk through the attempt AD&D did at this. (IMHO it handles disease better than any other edition of D&D, but that's not exactly a high bar to clear.)

You have an 8% chance of getting a parasite every time you fuck around in polluted water, and a 2% chance of getting a disease from drinking bad shit.
Disease is generated on a random table that decides what it affects (is it an STD or joint problems or something that fucks up your throat or what), how often it occurs (is it a single attack or a chronic disease), and how severe it is (does it leave you bedridden for bit, completely disable you, or kill you outright).

Parasites are always chronic, of course, and don't give a fuck about your constitution and immune system. Some variants are more dangerous than diseases, some less: muscle parasites are bad shit and you don't want them in your lungs either, but skin parasites are relatively mild in comparison to skin diseases. (The odds work out so that at 3-5 constitution disease is deadlier, and at 6 upwards parasites win. 18 Con has you immune to death from any disease that doesn't go for your bones or connective tissue, but parasites keep the 15% death rate.)

If you have a chronic attack at the same time as another disease or parasite, both get more severe - from mild to severe to terminal, so there's not a lot of room for error.


But yeah, that's not exactly accurately portraying anything, it's just trying to make a general random disease table for when the PCs do something that could conceivably get them infected. I reckon that it's at least better than 3E's sorry excuse for a disease system, where every disease is some kind of fantasy illness with a ridiculous name and little practical use, but I'm unsure how well it would actually play at the table. Especially when Cure Disease is a thing.

My pancreas has never been so nerfed.

>it's usually human activity that increases the risk of getting sick.

>how dirty do you think riverwater is in the absence of big, polluting factories?

Christ, how old are you two? Is it now common for schools to teach Man is the cause for everything bad? Its like I'm in the middle ages again except instead of every single disease "riding on the winds" they ride on minerals and chemicals man produces.

Niggers, aquaducts were amazing because they transported water directly from a clean source. Wells come from underground water where no bacteria and parasites can land in it and thrive.

Hint, both come from sources that do not include the taste of animal shit in your water along with massive numbers of bacteria and parasites.

Man did boil water, but they also took the extra precaution of making sure something else killed what your poorly boiled water could not get. After seeing Ted the neighbor's ten kids die from poorly boiled water, or poorly stored water, or dehydration from waiting for it, wouldn't you add another step? Plus some toxic chemicals actually increase in intensity with boiling so some area had to strain the water to even make it safe.

In case you forget they did not have Google to tell them the exact amount of time they should boil. Everything was guess work. What didn't kill you was passed down to your kids. That was it. The only way they had was taste to test water. It was evolution in its purest form. This doesn't kill me so I live. That way killed them so they died.

Fuck, extremely ancient man didn't boil water and lived, but they sure as fuck died from diseases and parasites constantly and at earlier ages.
Have you seen how flea ridden and tick ridden wild animals are? The modern theory for why we are even hairless is because it was the best way to deprive ticks and fleas from a place to hide.

The wild world is big ugly and full of diseases and parasites. Not the fucking evil nasty leftovers of mans' doing.

Yes. However the players, and all humans on the world areegenetically enhanced to be able to settle any world without fear of disease, but think they live on a fantasy planet because the only contact with the rest of the galaxy that survived the extinction level event are scientists who adopted a 'wait and see' policy on the world full of primitives genetic supermen, and other pre-calamity era petridishes.

always relevant

Look up Small Beer.

Also debatable how good a lot of it tasted before hop cultivation.

>Africa, whiskey
>Not Brandy and coke
Its like you dont know anything

>Also debatable how good a lot of it tasted before hop cultivation.
Ancient beer would have been very sour due to people at the time having no way to regulate which strains of yeast took hold in the brew.

>plagues were the Jews' fault
Plagues, no. Poisoning water sources? Yes.

>Medieval Europe = the wilds of Africa
Alright m8. If anything, you're explaining why civilization didn't get started there.

I play warhammer fantasy roleplay, so yes.

Both. How do you even choose between them, do both!

>enter thread
>expect 70 posts of "THE MORE SHE DRANK, THE MORE SHE SHAT"
>actually get an informative discussion of medieval hygiene

It's always nice to know Veeky Forums can still do things right

>Poisoning water sources? Yes.
Explain

He's a /pol/tard parroting conspiracy theories literally from the Middle Ages about the Jews poisoning wells being what caused the Black Death. Jews rarely got sick with it (due to a cleaner lifestyle), so people assumed that was the logical explanation.

Some medieval European Jews testified that they had started epidemics by poisoning water wells. They testified while under torture, mind you.

Sunset found her squatting in the grass, groaning. Every stool was looser than the one before, and smelled fouler. By the time the moon came up she was shitting brown water. The more she drank, the more she shat, but the more she shat, the thirstier she grew, and her thirst sent her crawling to the stream to suck up more water.

Prestidigitation can explicitly be used to improve the taste of food and is a cantrip. Whatever arcane caster is in the party can do that after the cleric's done his thing.

No, but my character still died from food poisoning anyways.

Game of political intrigue?

The outdoors are gross. I'd rather pretend indoors so I have cool adventures without disentery

He's just a hack that has drawn his terrible series out for way too long.

>I'm running a detective noir game set in Africa and all the characters drink is whisky, maybe some ice, so no one gets sick
What do you think the ice is made of?

More whisky of course

I can say with absolute certanty yes, yes it does.

We were sent as diplomats to recruit a neighboring nation into an alliance against the incoming demonic invasion. The finer cuisine of their people is often poisonous to other races, which I didn't know because the player next to me was talking over the DM.

Nope it’s sci-fi.

h-hawt!

>Player is about to do something obviously suicidal
>It's obvious because it's common knowledge
>Might my player might have missed this?
>I better ask.
Literally every normal person.

>My player wants to do something obviously suicidal
>Lel better let the little shit kill himself to demonstrate my enlightened superiority
Fucking neckbeards.

Alcohol in the whisky disinfects it even if there were some parasite or spore that can survive being frozen in ice

Blood Diamonds.

Russian ambassadors at King Louis XIV's court wrote back home of the "animalic" stench around the courtiers and the King himself.

Drinking unclean water causes mutations. Purge the unclean! Drink only pure water blessed by your local Sister.

>untouched by man?

Toppest kek. There's no place to run from atmospheric pollution, bro.

>go from whash&sauna daily and clean unclean rooms by setting the surfarces on fire with alcohol or at least smoke them out good with incense to "WATCH ME TAKE A SHIT AND NOT WIPE MY ASS"

Yeah, there'd be a lot of stench.

Need I remind you that the entire predicament which created the setting of Brian Aldiss' sci-fi classic Non-Stop was caused by colonists drinking contaminated water?