I'm not sure if I was just ignorant, but I didn't know that alcohol tolerance worked the way it does. Apparently, all it does is give you a random chance to not have an alcoholic sip count. I therefore propose it is changed to simply resist the bad effects of alcohols. For instance, a newbie sipping whiskey would start fumbling after the first sip, but a more seasoned drinker would have to become relatively drunk before suffering any ill effects from it. This would work well with the amber and dark malts, allowing them to be used safely in low amounts, instead of starting to fumble after the first sip.

Theoretically, alcohol tolerance means you can drink more and last longer before falling over dead drunk. Mechanically, the way it currently is replicates that. It's useless for anyone except rp drunks, which are rare for a good reason - drunkard effects are obnoxious to not only the drinker, but also those around them, not to mention it looks uncool and no one wants to be uncool in a text game where they are heroes.

Also, respectable guilds/orders/cities won't tolerate public drunkenness for that same reasoning.

Putting aside the fact that drunk rp is nearly nonexistent (and so one-dimensional it isn't even fun), alcohol tolerance in the game adheres to the theory pretty much on the spot. It's rare to see a mechanic actually closely replicate the rp that it's supposed to represent. As a result, however, tolerance is useful only if you have a drinking buddy that you often compete with to see who can kill themselves first.

I'm not sure about changing tolerance to actually have an impact on combat. While, as I already mentioned, its effects are dismal for the occasional rper and entirely useless for the combatant/basher, turning a previously flavour mechanic into something that interacts with combat robustly may upset the status quo considerably. Darkmalt and ambermalt's problem is currently being addressed via an envoy report, though it remains to be seen if those solutions will be accepted or if they will help solve issues.

An example: The idea of having those who build up a tolerance have a drunk-free ambermalt/darkmalt effect up to how tolerant they are, an effect that cannot be reliably measured or limited and must involve lots of time investment, doesn't sit well with me. This means that a person of a class with already heavy dmp defences can spend time just building up tolerance, and maybe get an ambermalt effect of 5 to 15 dmp over 30 minutes by constantly drinking the malt when it wears off, during which the drunken effects are nearly entirely mitigated by tolerance. At the same time, a person of a class with more flimsy dmp defences will be unable to maintain even 5 dmp from amber for more than 10 minutes simply because he did not build up tolerance and trying to go for longer with the ambermalt defence will make the drunkenness inhibit combat to an unreasonable degree for him. This imbalance is created by an arbitrary time investment, and is difficult to control or limit.

I'd get behind making tolerance useful any day, but the changes will have to be more carefully thought through, I think.

Amber/Dark Malt went from being a defense obscured from lack of DMP data, to (seemingly) overpowered due to lack of alcohol content, due to the fact there is little player feedback on tolerance levels. What is the level of drunkenness needed to build up tolerance? How much tolerance can be accumulated (i.e. is there a cap)? We really need a discernment skill to report back tolerance levels.

I was about to run a report (see below) on Bewmeister's brews to bring them back into the realm of use-ability... though now I feel the larger issue is the mechanics of tolerance. Rather than slightly reduce the alcoholic content of each drink, it gives a chance to outright avoid accumulation of drunkenness per drink. The former method would better allow for sustaining the baseline 5 DMP over longer periods of time. The other method seems erratic at best, doesn't contribute to "fun," or tactical use of brews.