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[Snaake]

Yea, ancient Romans/Greeks drank a lot of wine, too. Often watered down, at least for children. Again, we're back at the "water wasn't always/usually safe" thing. For a more modern example, this persisted in navies and on merchant ships well into the industrial age, I think. Rum was given to sailors, so they could mix it with water; one of the reasons being to cover the awful taste of the water that had been in wooden (not modern/sanitized) barrels for weeks. And the last rum rations in Her Majesty's Navy were only given out in the 1960s IIRC.

[Larix]

Freshwater on ships and well water in cities tended to be not very safe, but i suspect the bias against drinking water is seriously overstated. AFAIK, it was considered odd in ancient Greece/Rome _not_ to water down the wine - someone who drank unmixed wine was an alcoholic. The huge aqueducts were built to get drinkable water to Rome. Labourers commonly drank watery vinegar, and in the Bible, you find many places where people drink plain old water; and judaism has no anti-alcohol taboo.

Hygienic standards and thus water quality went down the crapper in the middle ages, though; i'm still not sure it was as bad as it's often made out to have been.

Oh, the topic? Yeah, i think dwarfs just have a different metabolism, so that alcohol doesn't mess up their brains and they have a quicker/less damaging mechanism to break alcohol down.

[misko27]

I'm going with the vitamin of this one. Dwarves are internal combustion engines, they burn a food-alcohol mixture to move, which is why they don't excrete, and when the internal alcohol reserve runs low they start diluting the alcohol component with beard hair (which is infinite) and their remaining supplies and with water to make them last. Dwarves can attain an essentially perfect dilution, allowing them to live solely off water, but they are running off a inferior fuel.

[Monk321654]

It's almost as if the game isn't 100% realistic.

Of course not.
We've still got fifty years before we reach that point.

I do like the idea of the dwarves having different bio-chemical tolerances than their tall, beardless counterparts...

[Monk321654]

It's almost as if the game isn't 100% realistic.

Of course not.
We've still got fifty years before we reach that point.

I do like the idea of the dwarves having different bio-chemical tolerances than their tall, beardless counterparts...

And because I'm an idiot, I posted this twice.
Fantastic.

[MrWillsauce]

I'm certain that the ultimate goal of Toady and ThreeToe is not to make their game a hyper-realistic simulation. Absolute realism general doesn't make good stories after all.

[AndrewC]

I've always thought dwarfs are naturally knurd (see the Discworld books or http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/index.php/Knurd for details). They need alchohol to smooth the rough edges off reality and function normally.

[Lord_lemonpie]

Dwarves are internal combustion engines, they burn a food-alcohol mixture to move.

Can i sig this?