Captain Morgan's Guide to Getting Absolutely Smashed

The following is a loose, but hopefully balanced guide for how to handle alcohol consumption and intoxication.

Drinks

The consumption of alcohol will be measured in 4 oz. increments or "drinks". The following are examples of typical containers one might use to hold or drink alcohol from.

Drink Containers

Container Capacity # of Drinks Vial 4 oz. 1 Hip Flask 8 oz. 2 Tankard 1 pint 4 Bottle 1 1/2 pints 6 Waterskin 4 pints 16 Jug 1 gallon 32 Barrel 40 gallons 1280

The strength of the drink itself is also important. Drinking a bottle of fortified wine is going to pack a much harder punch than the same amount of cheap beer. The following are some example of different types of alcohol, their strength, and what they might be priced at per drink. These numbers will be important later.

Drink Strength

Drink Strength Price/Drink Beer, Cider 1 1 cp Ale, Common Wine 2 2 cp Mead, Sake 3 3 sp Dessert/Fine Wine 4 16 sp Rum, Tequila, Vodka 8 4 gp Absinthe, Moonshine 14 10 gp Pure Alcohol 20 50 gp

Pricey Booze The cost of alcohol tends to increase with the rarity of its ingredients, the resulting strength, the tools needed to distill or ferment it, and the difficulty or time required to do so. Something like a basic beer can be brewed in someone's barrel in a week, while strong moonshine requires an elaborate distillery setup and fine wine requires months or years of aging, and something like pure alcohol may only be possible with the use of magic.

Its not IF, but WHEN

When drinking a drink containing alcohol, a character does not immediately get smashed, otherwise drinking contests would be no fun and taverns would never make any money. Instead, a character can safely consume a strength of alcohol equal to 6 + their Constitution modifier every hour before starting to take effects This number is the character's tolerance. This amount is doubled for any character that has resistance to poison, such as dwarves or anyone under the effects of a spell such as protection from poison. Characters immune to poison, such as yuan-ti purebloods, are exempt from this entirely.

Once a character has reached their tolerance, drinking any additional drinks will prompt a Constitution saving throw from the character. The formula for the DC is equal to 6 plus the strength of the drink consumed. A character can consume more than 1 drink at once for a single saving throw with a higher DC. If they do so, the strength of the drink they consume is equal to the strength of that particular type of drink multiplied by the number of portions consumed. For example, if Hilda von Dragonslayer is at her limit and consumes a full tankard of ale in one go, that is going to trigger a saving throw DC of 14.

6 base + (2 ale strength x 4 tankard size) = DC 14

In this way, a DC can also be created for multiple types of drinks mixed together. Like before, dwarves and other characters with resistance to poison have advantage on this saving throw, and characters immune to posion are exempt from this throw.

Each time the character succeeds this saving throw, the DC for the saving throw increases by 1 until the the character fails a saving throw or finishes a short or long rest without consuming alcohol, after which the modifier is reset to +0.