Black FEP.

[fenrirfenix]

After drinking 15 litres of wine and watching my health gradually drop, I had to wonder what the point was. I don't particularly need charisma, and even if I did there's like a 1/3 chance that instead of growing a stat my health goes down. So at this point wine seems to be fairly useless. Never the less, I like making and drinking alcohol too much to let things like massive damage and virtually no gain stop me.

This is mostly about the black spot FEP, and the recent status effect update.

I understand that eating things like raw meat potentially being damaging, due to the nature of eating uncooked food. But doing straight damage? Maybe, I guess. Maybe there should be a chance to gain intestinal parasites and food poisoning status effects that cripple respective stats, affect move speed, reduce FEP gain, and do damage over time. Not only is it more of a reason to avoid black spot FEP, but I read how you Devs wanted to make survival in the hearthlands inherently dangerous. Status effects like that are easily avoided, just like the feet thorns, but laziness or ignorance could be inconvenient and costly.

Being forced to stumble around at a crawling pace while periodically losing handfuls of stamina or fullness gauge to puking your guts out can be a pain in the ass to deal with, and potentially lethal if you were already vulnerable. Parasites would be more difficult to notice (maybe even lacking the status effect icon) as they leech tiny amounts of FEP as you gain it. Growing more and more to ultimately do damage, consume majority amounts of FEP, and drain your fullness gauge. It's at this time when you start noticing your bear bangers give you way less than they should and you get hungry way more often, then maybe the status effect icon shows up.

This of course creates a need for medicine (or for parasites, try to somehow starve them without killing yourself, or induce hardcore vomiting to purge your system) either created or foraged.

As for alcohol, I don't see why drinking a little should have a chance to have such a direct on one's health. Unless you really get into it and suddenly die of liver failure or alcohol poisoning after polishing off half a barrel of beer. Again, I suggest status effects over damage. Alcohol could add cumulative drunk points that stack and add up to varying levels of drunk status effects. Different alcohol (when there's more than two kinds) would naturally add points at different rates, perhaps using the CON attribute to gauge how many points are needed. Let's suggest four or five levels of the drunk status effect, starting from least to greatest.

Buzzed. More than a couple drinks. This would be the first step to bad news, while itself being mostly harmless.
-Slight reduction to attributes like dexterity and perception.
-Slight reduction in skills, being that it's harder to concentrate or coordinate your efforts to something useful.

Tipsy. The effects start to stack up, but still nothing damaging. Minor bonuses begin to show.
-Random changes in move speed.
-Further reduction in attributes, also affecting charisma and intelligence. (based on how powerful the specific hearthling is, not a set amount)
-Possible failure option when trying to craft or work.
-Slight increase to stamina
-Small bonus to constitution and strength.

Drunk. This would be the midpoint on the scale. Shouldn't need to explain being drunk.
-Major reduction in skills and attributes.
-Crafting, while still possible, faces a common failure rate or massive downturn in quality.
-Balanced increase to constitution and strength as the the other stats suffer. While the constitution bonus could be great on a higher-end character, swimming should be twice as difficult.
-Further increase in stamina.
-A matched penalty to melee combat and bonus to unarmed combat.
-Temporarily gains the Rage skill. Drunken fist fighting? I think so.
-Small chance to randomly vomit and lose stamina, fullness. Puking on your drunken fist fighting opponent? I think so.
-Small chance to fall down and be immobile for a few moments, with a chance of taking damage. If you can get thorns in your feet from just wandering, you could still get them in your face after collapsing in a drunken heap.
-Criminal acts stuck 'on'. Doesn't do much, but it's hard to be moral while drunk.
-Speech is slurred.
-Pass out. When health is reduced to a certain point, the hearthling passes out.

Hammered. Shit gets crazy. Definitely the reason why you should know your limits.
-Crafting becomes impossible.
-Attributes suffer greatly.
-Boon to strength and constitution.
-Boon to unarmed skill, while melee drops drastically
-Do damage randomly to nearby objects, regardless of who owns them while taking relative damage in return. Damage would have to be controlled and not pose the possibility of destruction. Unless the devs would like to see bands of drunken raiders barging into a village and busting shit up uncontrollably. I was thinking more like... Logging on to see that a drunken, passed-out hearthling had put his head through the side of your oven, and maybe couldn't get it out.
-Move speed reduced to walking at max.
-Falling down more common.
-Vomiting more common.
-Randomly drop inventory items.
-Randomly drop equipment you're wearing. "Let's go streaking! Hey, where'd all these thorns come from?"
-Speech is incomprehensible.

Wasted. Why would anybody go this far?
-Can barely move.
-Can barely act, without dumping your lunch everywhere.
-Possible bowel-rending, system-purging vomit. A harsh cure to that 80' tapeworm you're been hand-feeding bear bangers for the last two weeks.
-Hard to stay upright.
-Hard to keep hold of your belongings, carried or otherwise.
-Blackout. Fair chance to just lose control and the screen goes black for a period of time. What happened? Who knows, better hope there were witnesses. I saw the devs talking about a 'lost' effect when dealing with swimming. Instead of just instant drowning, they would just wash up on some shore, somewhere. This could be similar.

When the hearthling blacks out, they teleport a random distance in a random direction (hopefully not into a lake or river, or if they do, they get washed up somewhere way the hell out there) and wake up half-naked, sick, hungry, tired, covered in thorns, with major deficits in ability and health. Or in a village's jail for smashing baskets with his face and confusing ovens for toilets.

[loftar]

Oh, don't worry -- the charisma/black-fep effect of wine (and of beer) is just a placeholder. We were mostly waiting until we had implemented buffs properly, which we have now. We have some very different plans for their effects, though.

[fenrirfenix]

My hopes are still high for drunken fistfights and internal parasites.