Dridders and coffee

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.