From The Mana World

When someone has a big victory to celebrate he or she should invite all his/her friends to a tavern and get drunk with them. Almost all MMORPGs feature taverns and a lot also feature alcoholic beverages which can be consumed. But unfortunately these beverages usually have almost no effect on the gameplay besides some small gimicks. So most people just try them out once and getting drunk together never becomes a regular part of gameplay. That's why I would suggest to have an alcohol system which does give the character benefits.

Systems from other games

Kingdom of Loathing alcohol system

The browsergame Kingdom of Loathing is the only MMOG I know which gives the player benefits for drinking alcohol. The game limits the number of actions a character can perform each day. By consuming alcoholic beverages the character gains additional actions that day but also "drunkenness" points. When the character reaches 15 drunkenness it can not drink anymore and can not spend any actions that day. Fortunately unused actions are always added to the number of actions for the next day. While this system is quite interesting it has a few aspects which could be improved in my opinion:

  • It ignores the social aspects of drinking. Drinking with friends should be more beneficial than drinking alone.
  • Drunkenness has (almost) no effect on gameplay as long as you stay under the magical 15 points limit. After that it makes playing almost impossible until the next day. A more sliding scale of drunkenness would be better in my opinion.
  • You usually drink to prepare for the next day instead of celebrating what you did during the past day.


when someone knows any other games where alcohol has an influence on gameplay feel free to describe it.

Our system

The usual situation where characters drink alcohol should be together with friends in a tavern to celebrate a big event. This gives an additional bonus to the experience points gathered during this event but also makes it harder to do anything productive afterwards.

Effect of alcohol

Every alcoholic drink has two ratings: the taste rating (a floating point number around 1.0) and an alcohol rating.

Negative

When consuming a drink the alcohol rating is added to the drunkenness points of the character. The maximum number of drunkenness is equal to the vitality of the character.

When reaching a drunkenness higher than the vitality of the character it immediately vomits after consuming alcohol and it has no effect anymore. When being drunk all character skills are reduced by the percent of maximum drunkenness (Example: when a 50 vit character has 40 drunkenness points all skill levels are reduced by 80%)

The character loses 10% of the maximum drunkenness every real-time hour. The time is also calculated while being offline. This means a character who was completely drunk is completely sober after 10 hours.

Positive

Whenever a character consumes a drink the character receives an instant percentual bonus on all experience points collected in the last 6 hours. The bonus is equal to the percent of drunkenness capacity used up by it multiplied with the taste rating of the drink. Too complicated for a drunken mind? Let me give you an example: A character has 50 vitality and thus a maximum drunkenness of 50. He consumes a drink with taste 0.8 and 5 alcohol units. This will increase its drunkenness by 10% of the maximum drunkenness. Multiplied with 0.8 this would mean a 8% exp bonus.

This system has the effect that low-vitality characters need less alcohol to get drunk but have the same benefit of it as high vitality characters have.

Ideal drinking strategy

To gain the maximum exp points from an event the best strategy is to drink the maximum of high quality drinks right after the event to receive a 100% * quality bonus, wait for 6 hours until the drunkenness is down to 40% and then start drinking again to 100% to receive an additional 60% * quality bonus.

Drinking alcohol

There are three ways of drinking alcohol:

Drinking a drink alone
The character uses one drink from its inventory and receives the normal taste rating.
Inviting someone for a drink
The character needs two identical drinks in its inventory to perform this action. He/she can invite another character to drink these two drinks together. When the other character accepts both characters drink one of these drinks and the taste ratings of them are increased by 20%.
Inviting everyone for a drink
The character needs one identical drink in its inventory for every character on screen. Everyone on the screen may take the offer and consume one of the drinks. The taste ratings of the drinks are increased by 10% for every person who takes part.

By giving an additional bonus for buying drinks for others and accepting them we add another social component to the game.

I expect people to arrange meetings for drinking together after a day of adventuring. I also expect that people will ask strangers to buy them a drink when they buy one for them in return which would be a benefit for both characters.

Inviting someone for a drink without expecting something in return would mean a 20% increase in efficiency while doubling the cost. So I expect only rich but lazy people to make use of this opportunity although I think that a lot of people will actively encourage people to perform this behavior to get some drinks for free.

I could also imagine people hanging around in taverns waiting for someone to "buy everyone a drink" and thus make taverns look populated and turn them into general meeting places like they should be. I think that players will get in contact with a lot of new people by using the drink system and form new social bonds.

Balance considerations

The system might effectively allow to double the experience points of every character who can afford it. Organizing very large drinking parties (100+ people) and then "inviting everyone" (could be compared to a folk festival) might give an exorbitant exp bonus of about 10x exp for everyone participating (but on the other hand: shouldn't people who have the social skills to organize such events deserve this?).

The effect of the system can be easily balanced by tuning the taste ratings of the beverages. By setting them very low (around 0.1) the exp bonus would only be marginal.

Obtaining drinks

Drinks can be bought from NPCs in taverns or crafted by characters using a "cocktail mixing" skill. The best drinks ingame should be craft-only drinks.