A Crusader Kings 3 player was amazed by the game's realism – his daughter became an alcoholic at just 15

Medieval dynasty simulators tend to produce stories no scriptwriter could dream up. There you are, counting taxes and planning a marriage alliance with a neighboring duchy, when the game casually informs you that your fifteen-year-old daughter has already become a drunk.

That's exactly the kind of screenshot from Crusader Kings 3 that made the rounds on Reddit: a young Swedish heiress has "Drunkard" listed among her traits, despite being a year away from adulthood. The player openly admitted having no idea this was even possible.

There's nothing mysterious about the mechanic behind this. Drunkard belongs to the set of stress-coping traits a character can pick up during a mental break, and kids aren't exempt from that system. The catch is that children have almost no way to relieve stress, since feasts, hunts, and tournaments are off-limits to them, so all that built-up pressure ends up venting itself in exactly this kind of compensation.

There's also a second, much more mundane path. The childhood event pool includes a "stealing a keg" storyline that hands out both Gregarious and Drunkard at once, and a separate event called "I Learned It From You" passes a caretaker's or parent's traits onto the child. It works both ways, so with a good guardian you could end up raising a whole family of athletes, though it's not something to bank on.

Shaking the habit is tough. There's no reliable way to remove the trait, only random events and pilgrimages that occasionally forgive a character's sins, provided their religion recognizes those sins in the first place. The person who posted the screenshot responded with a bit of national pride:

i am a swede and started drinking at 14, but i couldnt imagine that this game could be so realistic!

As for the historical accuracy, medieval society was pretty relaxed about the whole thing. There were no age restrictions on alcohol, and weak beer along with watered-down wine were consumed by everyone, kids included, mostly because water wasn't safe to drink. Scandinavia's first real restrictions didn't show up until the 19th century, a good eight hundred years after the events depicted in the game.

Paradox gets accused of cold, mathematical vassal relationships all the time, and yet the most believable detail in the whole game turned out to be a teenage alcoholic.