Dridders and coffee

Well, you can't count out just plain old curiosity. Giant preds are people, too.

That said, I agree with the ideas of it being restricted to smaller dridders, or even just a rumor as Stabs suggested.

They are sapient like humans, but their values and overall quirks differ due to a different upbringing. It's very likely many wouldn't even bother since there's hardly anything useful for them among a merchant's wares, unlike a human thief or brigand who can try to sell the stuff for an inflated price.  There could be cases of curiosity, true, but as Stabs pointed out, instances of giant dridders finding a caravan of coffee beans in the middle of the woods and being curious enough to taste the beans in sufficient amount would be so impossibly rare that the quirk just isn't worth mentioning.

Of course there could be a special coffee plant native to Felarya that some Dridders like to to eat, especially if their knowledge of it was something handed down from the ancient Dridder empire.

At this point, we're just trying to create something insanely specific all to justify a largely irrelevant quirk of only one species. I still believe the argument that giants are too big to be affected, but small-sized ones aren't, is already a simple and effective answer.

DarkOne wrote:

Of course there could be a special coffee plant native to Felarya that some Dridders like to to eat, especially if their knowledge of it was something handed down from the ancient Dridder empire.

Like Opium Coffee? Perhaps made from extra large magically enhanced beans? <.< Cause I can so total see that. Heck I'll bet old King Tonho had piles of cat nip during his reign as Supreme Neko Emperor. I would if I were him.

haha that's cool nice find.

Stabs wrote:

Shady has a point there- we already have the dryad gut worm, and its coffee weakness is already a long shot by itself. I think we'd be overstating the importance of coffee in the jungle if we make not one, but two creatures who are stated to be affected by it.

Perhaps this doesn't so much warrant an addition to the dridder wiki entry as a simple rumor. Whether a predator or a standard rumor, I'm not sure.

In my opinion, how coffee works on Dryad Gut Worms and Dridders are two entirely different traits that cannot be stacked like that. It is like chocolate is a nice treat to human but poison to dogs.

Dryad Gut Worms will be killed if it eats a swallowed prey of a Dryad if he has consumed coffee before hand. To what degree is not mentioned though. While Dryad's Gut worm is certainly smaller than a Dryad (so that it can fit into the Dryad's stomach), it is still big enough to swallow a person whole. Is an intake of mere normal-sized cup coffee enough to kill it? Or the person eaten have to be a coffee-addicted one whose blood is pretty much flowing with cafein?

Meanwhile, coffee on Dridders makes them drunk. I don't think this will work as a rumor, as smaller dridders will have better ways to access coffee. Of course, humans can guess that if coffee works like that on smaller dridders, than the bigger ones may get affect too with a large enough amount of coffee.

jedi-explorer wrote:

DarkOne wrote:

Of course there could be a special coffee plant native to Felarya that some Dridders like to to eat, especially if their knowledge of it was something handed down from the ancient Dridder empire.

Like Opium Coffee? Perhaps made from extra large magically enhanced beans? <.< Cause I can so total see that. Heck I'll bet old King Tonho had piles of cat nip during his reign as Supreme Neko Emperor. I would if I were him.

*In the progress of making super-compressed coffee powder. One pinch gives a tankard of coffee!*

The problem is how do you get and carry enough coffee to make them drunk, and how do you force them to consume it? Meanwhile, as you're lugging all that junk, how do you stay hidden from everything else? If you want to use it as a mean to defend yourself against giant dridders, you have to take into consideration the more common threats that will show up and won't be affected by your cunning strategy. It all boils down to an overspecialized defense that requires too much of a set-up to ever be considered practical.

Also, Stabs' point with the Dryad Gut Worm still stand. Why? Because a human that has consumed coffee would have, by all rights, an absolutely tiny amount of caffeine in its bloodstream, and an even tinier amount by the time it's completely digested. How such a minuscule amount of caffeine is able to kill a giant worm is a stretch. Your metaphor of chocolate being a treat to us but poison to dogs doesn't make sense because, while indeed poisonous to them, a piece of chocolate is much more substantial than trace amounts of caffeine.

It's actually quite easy. Just take Godot with you. ^_^

Shady Knight wrote:

The problem is how do you get and carry enough coffee to make them drunk, and how do you force them to consume it?  Meanwhile, as you're lugging all that junk, how do you stay hidden from everything else?  If you want to use it as a mean to defend yourself against giant dridders, you have to take into consideration the more common threats that will show up and won't be affected by your cunning strategy.  It all boils down to an overspecialized defense that requires too much of a set-up to ever be considered practical.

Also, Stabs' point with the Dryad Gut Worm still stand.  Why?  Because a human that has consumed coffee would have, by all rights, an absolutely tiny amount of caffeine in its bloodstream, and an even tinier amount by the time it's completely digested.  How such a minuscule amount of caffeine is able to kill a giant worm is a stretch.  Your metaphor of chocolate being a treat to us but poison to dogs doesn't make sense because, while indeed poisonous to them, a piece of chocolate is much more substantial than trace amounts of caffeine.

I never say that coffee acts as a good defensive measure against giant dridders, you know. A Giant drunk dridders may be even more dangerous than a sober ones, unless you make her sleep somehow. The "dridder-drunk-on-coffee" is more like a funny trait that can exist on Dridder due to their spider-based characteristics.

The trait can common among smaller Dridders, but an event where a giant Dridder can take enough coffee to get drunk is extremely rare. In fact, there should be many giant dridders that spends their life without  knowing about such a drink called "coffee", or how coffee affects them. They can get the ideas through rumour, but hardly have a chance to test it out. And like you said, it is not practical to use coffee as a Dridder-warding strategy, which may not actually ward anything and may even make thing worse.

Talking of Dryad's gut worm, I don't mean that "because gut worms can be killed just with a tiny cup of coffee, it means Dridder can be drunk with that too". Sorry if I mislead you somehow. What I mean is like this: Stab said there is already gut worms affected by coffee (which was what I interpreted frpm his words) so there should not another creature that gets affected by coffee. I disagreed with him and said that two creatures certainly affects by coffee, but in different way, just like how a dog get poisoned from chocolate which is a treat to humans.

About chocolate and dog, in fact, dog gets poisoned by a chemical called theobromine,. So, saying that a piece of chocolate is harmful to a dog due to a combination of substances is fail. Another fact, coffee contains more kinds of substances than just mere caffein.

Stabs' point was that Dryad Gut Worms being killed by coffee is a ridiculous weakness because it's near impossible for a dryad to acquire coffee, let alone enough to be able to realistically kill a giant tapeworm, not that only Dryad Gut Worms should be the only creature that react badly to it.

What he's saying is that it'd be a nice little easter egg on the part of dridderkind. Does every little part of a species' physicality have to be ultimately relevant in some situation? I personally don't think so. The point is, if small dridders can get drunk off coffee, which seems to be what we're collectively leaning towards, TK is saying that the same might be true of giant dridders, even though it'd be unlikely for the hypothesis to ever be proven. It's just something to think about in-universe. It's not a point of whether or not it could actually happen.

What I'm saying is that this little funny tidbit would probably best stay just a funny tidbit, and it accomplishes that best by being a rumor; placed on the dridder entry, it would overstate both its own importance and that of coffee in dridder society and culture.

Then there's the retcon factor, I just don't feel one is warranted just to match spider biology.

P.S: coffee is a grain.

Shady Knight wrote:

"Stabs' point was that Dryad Gut Worms being killed by coffee is a ridiculous weakness because it's near impossible for a dryad to acquire coffee..."

inb4 coffee dryad.