A neat drunkenness mechanic

Community Game ideas
#1

Via Fair Escape, an interesting drunkenness mechanic, from the larp Who Killed High Hat:

I also really liked the drinking mechanic, which involves drawing the top index card off of your personal deck each time you have a drink. The cards have simple instructions for ways to blurt out secrets and/or offend people, and keep the squabbling and tension going. I would love to see that mechanic make an appearance in more LARPs.

Casino Xanadu (last years’ Cerberus flagship) had a generic version, where those taking a drink at the bar got a random direction or effect, and I think I’ve seen a similar mechanic used for items as well (“if you read the book, draw a card”). Personalisation makes it a bit more work, but also more reward - you can create either generic issues (trip up and spill your drink on someone), or target specific characters to drive specific plots (drunkenly propose to your secret love). And the mechanic of individual decks is pretty obviously useful for things like exhaustion or sanity loss as well.

#2

Funny. I’ve always thought you were just meant to roleplay that…

#3

Roleplaying it works fine; this is if the GM wants to use it to push specific things. e.g. you have two characters who dislike one another for some petty reason, so you have a card somewhere in that deck about finally picking a fight publicly with them over it. Or for sanity loss, people are great at acting genericly nervous and twitchy, but you could use a deck to introduce specific thematic content for them to work with (and then the other players can correlate all the contents, for yet more fun!)

The trick I think is writing the cards so people will want to keep drawing :slight_smile:

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