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[Batgirl1]

I vote for Tea being part of Brewing.  Cooking for food, Brewing for drinks.

As for iced tea, I was going to point out that it's initially made hot and then chilled, but now I can't recall why that's important.

We could probably have Medicinal Teas as a subset, using the same workshops and skills but *also* requiring a medical background in order to make.  I.E., Urist McBrewer can make Pigtail Tea, which is delicious but has no medicinal value, but he cannot make Dimple Cup Tea, which would cure Dwarf Measles; only Urist McDoctor can make that, and it comes out crappy because he only has a Dabbling rank in brewing/cooking/whatever.

[Starver]

Ice has always been harder to create, and more luxurious a process to use in comestibles, than fire. It could be gathered from the environment during suitable conditions, like fire, but wasn't so easily self-perpetuating and so having it available at times when it wasn't easily available in the environment (when you probably most wished for it) required special provision.

Dorftech, of course, could employ something like nethercap barrels (at least to store crushed ice, if not to generate it). Ice used for numbing (as per that link, in dentistry) seems more likely, though, than iced tea. Tea is generally hot-'brewed' (though you can design infusions to work better at room-or-lower temperatures, that's not typical - "sun tea" is tea steeped for an hour in a glass of water warmed under a hot sun rather than a few minutes at near-boiling) and the leaving to cool part (as per some brewing of alcohols) is perhaps Ok if it's not for immediate consumption, but actually lowering the temperature with extravagant use of ice (diluting the product) is an anathema to me.

(I don't even have ice in my carbonated-drinks. I'd rather a full container of whatever it is than a partial one buffed up to the rim by blocks of solid water that hang around longer than the drink itself, leaving me with increasingly diluted dregs if I'm still thirsting enough to try to imbibe the homeopathic cola or fruit-juice. Similarly I'd rather have a splash of water in my whisky (and rarely even that! - maybe only in a whiskey) than ice. And while it might not have the ice in it (hopefully!) any beer that has to be drunk at mouth-numbing temperatures to be palatable is probably best avoided. This being a personal thing; other people have the right to be wrong about this, naturally...)


I'd say ice, as a separate thing, could be useful in Fortressing. Not (typically) to the scale of building ice-palaces in a desert, perhaps, even though that is veery dorfy. Perhaps an auxilliary aspect food storage (along with salting) if it ever becomes more than "safe to store forever in an open food stockpile", untrameled vermin excepted. And as a medical aid (enhances surgical procedures? Used for burns? Used to keep a drowning victim's remaining heartbeat slow to aid resuscitation? ...getting a bit 'modern', that, thpugh) a bit of ice might be useful if not actually vital.



But that's all a different thing from tea, and seems as unnecessary to me as combining your smelting industry to ensure your favourite food and/or drink having one or other of the E170s additives. Staving off a particularly capricious noble by serving them their favourite mineral as a meal in lieu of their only other preference of Dodo Testicles (sic), maybe? Ok, so iced tea isn't that bad, extravagance-wise, but it's not something I recognise in my experience, and doubt it's a 14thC-cum-proto-Industrial-Revolution thing.  My opinion being my own.

[Bumber]

We could probably have Medicinal Teas as a subset, using the same workshops and skills but *also* requiring a medical background in order to make.  I.E., Urist McBrewer can make Pigtail Tea, which is delicious but has no medicinal value, but he cannot make Dimple Cup Tea, which would cure Dwarf Measles; only Urist McDoctor can make that, and it comes out crappy because he only has a Dabbling rank in brewing/cooking/whatever.

Why does one need a medical background in order to prepare a folk remedy?

[GoblinCookie]

The grey area between the disciplines is rather large, both in techniques and in terms of historical time. Tea falls under the "seasoning" aspect of Cooking (which of course doesn't really exist yet), because like other herbs, it's collected and consumed in quantities far too small to satisfy hunger, all it can really do is provide flavor. But I disagree with tea being unlike medicines: Many healthful herbs are delivered via infusion, and compounding the precise ratios of such plants would definitely fall under the Medical purview. If anything like the Innovations plan is ever developed, I would place Tea as a discovery that could be unlocked by a Cook or an Herbalist/Herbologist.

That seems to point in the direction of having general skill classes.  So things that involve the same skill, for instance boiling would result in transferable skills, if you learn one skill you also learn the other skill, or it becomes easier to do so.  This also seems like an idea for another thread.

I doubt it's a 14thC-cum-proto-Industrial-Revolution thing.  My opinion being my own.

It isn't actually supposed to be the replication of an historical era.  There is just an arbitary technological limit set in order to keep things manageable.  So if iced tea exists in real-life and dwarves have the technology to make it then it is an option. 

[Starver]

Those two quoted points might be considered separately, as they were not intended to be run-on reasoning for my stance.

A) It would necessarily be an aspect of the fantasy world that isn't demanded or even suggested by the baseline aspirational era that is considered its mundane baseline (unlike brewing in the alcoholic sense and likely general herbal infusions taken hot or after cooling)
And B), iced Tea is, in my opinion, not a 'flavour' that readily comes to mind. But that's me. In a famously tea-drinking country, but who doesn't like (normal, never mind 'exotic') tea personally, wherever that leaves my authority on the matter.

Combining the two, however, let's say that it's not such an easily logical addition to the fantasy world that it's worth pursuing over other possible staples of the genre such as bubbling magic potions capable of healing, even to the extent of regrowing damaged/lost limbs and eyes (to suggest a rather more plausible direction to take the tea-making art).

[Batgirl1]

Why does one need a medical background in order to prepare a folk remedy?

I was just thinking in terms of knowing that X is medicinal, and how to apply it.  Herbology would probably also be a good skill check for it; possibly even a better one, come to think.

[therahedwig]

Or perhaps, tea requires cooking, but to use tea for the purpose of healing requires some kind of herbology. You can then also say 'to determine if tea is not poisonous' also requires a herbology check, though not necessarily experience gain if you were just consuming the tea and not using it for a specific purpose.

No idea how this would work in adventure mode. Some kind of identification round on objects?

[betaking]

what about including "old wives tales" that could make a dwarf "think happy thoughts" or reduce their misery while not necessarily curing the disease.
or even ones that aren't true or mistaken, so dwarves will think "boiled root of X" is a cure rather than a poison or "bad for them".

thinking about it tea /etc. should all be part of some kind of overall upgrades to cooking/brewing or agriculture. maybe include smoking along with it as some "traditional" medicines require smoking certain plants.

[therahedwig]

wouldn't that be more of a laws and customs style thing? Dwarves have a traditional measure in their personality, it seems stuff like this would go in there...

[FantasticDorf]

thinking about it tea /etc. should all be part of some kind of overall upgrades to cooking/brewing or agriculture. maybe include smoking along with it as some "traditional" medicines require smoking certain plants.

you might be thinking about Pipe Weed, or Hobbit Leaf for recreational smoking via a fantasy trope route or just straight up start harvesting tobbacco from the wilderness.

[scourge728]

I have this strange feeling smoking tobacco/marajuna is unlikely to make it in...

[therahedwig]

It was on the old dev notes?

Don't forget that a lot of the things that are on the, eh, banned list is because the playerbase has a bit of a tendency to trivialize certain crimes, and for the elements on the banned list that would go from 'edgelord' to 'downright tasteless'. Though, they've mellowed down a lot, earlier notes and stories also contained a lot more references to trite kidnap the wimmins plots, and later ones have women far more often in combat roles and have generally been more open minded.

I dunno, smoking doesn't seem that controversial to me if the related syndrome is able to simulate all effects. 'Dwarf Fortress, the game where your character can gain a nicotine dependence and die of lung cancer' seems a bit odd, but nothing compared to the combat reports or 'Dwarf Fortress, the game where you drown your enemies in poop, because poop is hilarious'(Which is on the banned list). Alcoholism is already sort of simulated in adventure mode as a response to trauma...

That said, bringing this back to tea: Dependencies on caffeine? There's alcohol dependency for Dwarves, after all.

[Batgirl1]

That said, bringing this back to tea: Dependencies on caffeine? There's alcohol dependency for Dwarves, after all.

That should totally be an Elf trait!  Dwarfs are dependent on alcohol, Elves on caffeine! =D  If you cut down too many trees, you can avert war by offering the elf leader a coffee.

[betaking]

I was more thinking of "traditional medicine" in the form of opium... (in the context of herbal remedies), though I guess that's on another level of "controversial".

[GoblinCookie]

Those two quoted points might be considered separately, as they were not intended to be run-on reasoning for my stance.

A) It would necessarily be an aspect of the fantasy world that isn't demanded or even suggested by the baseline aspirational era that is considered its mundane baseline (unlike brewing in the alcoholic sense and likely general herbal infusions taken hot or after cooling)
And B), iced Tea is, in my opinion, not a 'flavour' that readily comes to mind. But that's me. In a famously tea-drinking country, but who doesn't like (normal, never mind 'exotic') tea personally, wherever that leaves my authority on the matter.

Combining the two, however, let's say that it's not such an easily logical addition to the fantasy world that it's worth pursuing over other possible staples of the genre such as bubbling magic potions capable of healing, even to the extent of regrowing damaged/lost limbs and eyes (to suggest a rather more plausible direction to take the tea-making art).

Iced tea was proposed as an example as to why everyone drinking cold tea isn't a problem.  That is why we don't need to wait until hot meals are served in order to have tea. 

I have this strange feeling smoking tobacco/marajuna is unlikely to make it in...

The main problem is the smoke mechanics needed for it's effects to be modeled realistically.  In effect there isn't much moral difference between those things an alcohol, which all fall into the Poisoning myself = Fun category. 

In any case there is a fairly recent thread on smoking here.