Rum rations WILL kill the pcs, don't drink and sail

[Goldfinch Rosa]

checking the drugs and addiction on game mastery guide i've noticed that you only heal 1 point of con damage per day, and rum ration does 1d3, so eventually rum will kill the pcs since it does a minimum of 1 point of damage.

did i misread something? or eventually alcohol will reduce con of the pcs to 0 an kill them

[Story Archer]

There's a few rules that seemed a bit too much in the Wormwood Mutiny that we simply ditched since they weren't germaine to the story - one was the rum ration and the other was the botflies spreading ghoul fever. Getting whipped every day and facing actual ghouls was more than enough.

[Orthos]

You're not the only one to notice. James Jacobs answered that one here if you're interested in his take on it. The short version is "alcohol penalties don't really work out the way they're supposed to, nor do they take acclimation/resistance into account other than bonuses such as dwarves get".

[thejeff]

The plan is the PCs will usually ditch the drinks and only drink them when they want the CHA bonuses.
It's kind of workable that way. As long as you don't want to roleplay drunken pirates or stop to think about what it's doing to the NPCs.

[DM_aka_Dudemeister]

I added the option of sipping.

DC 10 Fort Save or Fatigued for 8 hours, no bonus.

[The Shifty Mongoose]

The way I handled it was smoothing over the rolling: -1 Con, +1 Cha, fatigued for 8 hours, but since you'll sleep soon after, it all resets the next day. Basically, it was something to do for winning NPCs over, or something to avoid when, say, arm-wrestling or insulting the higher-ups.

[Fitzwalrus]

The Shifty Mongoose wrote:

The way I handled it was smoothing over the rolling: -1 Con, +1 Cha, fatigued for 8 hours, but since you'll sleep soon after, it all resets the next day. Basically, it was something to do for winning NPCs over, or something to avoid when, say, arm-wrestling or insulting the higher-ups.

This is pretty much the way I wound up handling it.

The RAW version just didn't make sense historically or in-game: rum is the legendary drink of pirates and doesn't ever seem to have had repercussions as extreme as this, and why would any captain (even a hardcase like Harrigan) deliberately poison their crew to death every three weeks?

[Tem]

I just changed the damage to 1d3-1 and it's working fine. You'll probably still get into a situation where a PC is going to be suffering a bit and need to ditch the drink, but that's the fun part. There's always some guy who's just had too much and pays for it... :)

I also changed the DC to ditch it to 15 making it a bit more of a gamble fo the non-sneaky sort.

[TheChozyn]

I adjusted it to only damage if the save failed, and still had a char almost die due to having to drink with the cook and playing drinking games to gain respect with some of the crew.