Check my system? Cooking

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Check my system? Cooking

Post by Prak »

Just got and beat a game called Battle Chef Brigade that I'd backed on Kickstarter.

Basically, it's a puzzle/platformer RPG based on a fantasy world version of Iron Chef. Instead of a pantry, you run out and kill monsters for ingredients. And then cook them in a sort of match-3 game.

I love crafting in games, I love cooking as a focus in games, hell, I played a Drow Wizard that created a food truck in one game, even though it had no real incentive (the money was on par with a high Profession roll, so not meaningful).

So I'm looking at making a cooking system. This would be for a game like BCB, where cooking is actually a major part of the game. Hell, it would actually take over large portions of the social minigame since shit would be settled "In the Kitchen" (there's actually a part toward the end where an npc who's just been convicted of treason asks for Trial by Kitchen to lighten his sentence).

At the moment, it's basically a cap system, which could ostensibly be put onto any game. This is just the cooking itself, gear and items and classes and whatnot can wait till after this is settled.

Battle Chef Brigade System Verbatim
  • When you kill a monster, you get an ingredient. A lot of monsters drop a random ingredient out of two or three possible, some, like small Hydra heads, always drop a set ingredient. More difficult monsters will typically drop one of each ingredient they can be broken down into.
  • Each ingredient is represented in cooking by 1-4 gems, which can be Fire, Earth, Water, Poison, or Bone.
  • Poison gems are volatile, and if stirred too much will pop and make adjacent gems fragile. Bone gems are just bulk. You can actually use Poison to debone your stuff, but you have to be careful to set it up that way.
  • Gems have ranks, 1-3, worth 1, 5, or 25 points respectively.
  • Cooking is done in a 4x4 grid match game, where matching gems gives you 1 gem of the next rank. Basic cookware asks you to match three, but there is cookware that will match 2 gems of a given element, but only match those gems.
  • Gems can be "fragile," meaning that moving them will break them (after three or four moves, falling due to stuff disappearing under them doesn't count)
  • Matching three poison gems gives you a space that will promote the rank of one gem within, like, 10 secs.
  • Matching three bones gives you a wild gem that will match with anything.
  • Sauces can convert gem the gems they touch into a specific flavor (like, there's a hot sauce that turns 4 gems in a line into Fire gems, eggs are a sauce that turn two gems in a line into Water gems. There are sauces that convert a square of gems into a given flavor.)
  • Your dish has a point value equal to the total value of gems in it (ie, 1 per rank 1 gem, 5 per rank 2 gem, 25 per rank 3 gem)
At the start of a competition, you're given a theme ingredient, and the judge(s) will make flavor requests. There can be up to 3 judges, they can request up to three flavors. Your dish has a requested flavor if the highest value gems of the specified flavor outnumber other gems of the same rank (so 2 r1 fire, 1 r2 water and a r3 earth gem is Earthy, as is a dish with 3 r3 Earth and 1 r3 Fire). If a judge requests multiple flavors, those flavors have to be equal.
  • Giving a judge a dish that matches their requested flavor gives your dish 50 bonus points.
  • Serving a dish with any poison reduces your point value by 20.
  • Not including the theme ingredient reduces your dish's point value by half
Various masteries are available, which provide bonus points for certain things, like using all ingredients that the theme monster/plant can drop, making a vegetarian dish, etc. These are represented by items, and you can have up to three in a given battle.

There are various forms of cookware that do different things. Ovens will change individual gems automatically--repairing fragile gems, promoting gems, cloning gems, etc. Pans alter how things match. There's a pan for each element that will promote gems by matching only two, but only affect a given color of gem, there's a pan that gives you combo bonuses that work like matching poisons, etc. A cutting board allows you to remove gems, including bone and poison.

video
Rough Draft of a Tabletop System
  • Gems are represented by dice.
    RankDie SizeFlavor Value
    11d41
    21d85
    31d1225

  • There are seven flavors/forms of die, correlating to energies/elements, and represented by colors
    FlavorEnergy or ElementDie Color
    SaltAir/ElectricityWhite
    BitterEarth/AcidGreen
    SourFireRed
    UmamiSonicPurple
    SweetWater/ColdBlue
    PoisonNegativeBlack
    RainbowPositiveOpal

  • Cooking allows you to match three (usually) dice to create one die of the next rank. You cannot have more than 16 dice in you pot at a time.
  • Bones are null values, and can be removed by cutting them out. This takes time. You can also merge 3 bones into 1 Rainbow die.
  • Poison dice are negative values, and start at rank 3. You can merge Poison dice to demote their rank, and merging three rank 1 poison dice allows you to promote one die of any type.
  • Some dice are fragile (denoted by just putting them aside). There is a cumulative 20% chance of 1d4 fragile dice breaking whenever you merge dice. If you have poison dice in your pool, 1 will automatically break whenever a die breaks, causing one die to become fragile.
  • Fragile dice lose the fragile condition when they are merged.
At the end of a competition, roll your dish's dice pool to determine its point value, with any remaining poison dice counting negative (usually. Some judges may like poison, and thus they would be positive).

Your dish has a flavor value based on the number and rank of flavor dice. When a judge requests a flavor, add up the points for the dice of that flavor (1 for each rank 1, 5 for each rank 2, 25 for each rank 3). The dish with the higher flavor value gains 25 points. If a judge requests multiple flavors, the values of those flavors must be with 5 points of each other to be eligible.

The dish with the higher point value wins the competition.
Cooking needs to be done in rounds, I think, but not necessarily in combat time. It could just be "you have 60 minutes" and each match takes some number of minutes, and cutting bones or poison out of an ingredient takes some number of minutes, and plating takes some number of minutes. This could interact with character abilities, where someone is really fast at plating, so they halve the time cost for it, and someone is really fast at prep, so they halve the time cost of cutting out bones and poison, and so on.

Again, this is for a game where cooking is a major thing, and every character is expected to cook.
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Post by Prak »

Ok, I'd honestly like some feedback on this. So... is there a better question I could be asking?
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by GnomeWorks »

Couple examples of how this is supposed to work might help. I've read it a couple times, and I'm still not sure I follow.
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Post by Prak »

Ok, that makes sense.

So, cooking (or, really, component based crafting for games that care about it):

The cook starts by going out hunting. They fight a gorgon and take it down. This gives them Gorgon Meat and Gorgan Organs.

Gorgon Meat provides two Rank 2 Earth dice (green d8s), and two bones. Gorgan Organs provide a Rank 2 Earth die, a Rank 1 Fire die (a red d4) and two Poison dice.

They also find and harvest Assassin Vine leaves, which provide two Rank 1 Earth dice and a Poison die.

So they decide to make Gorgon Dolma. They have a pool containing the following:
-3 green d8s
-1 red d4
-2 green d4s
-two bones
-3 purple d12s

I'm going to say Cooking is done in 5 minute rounds, and the standard cooking competition (which this sort of is for) is 60 minutes, or 12 rounds. And each round allows you to add an ingredient or move cooking vessels, and merge one set of dice. Basically a move and a standard, and sure, you can take your standard and instead do another move. Prep, basically cutting out unwanted gems, takes 1 round per gem.

So, they need to take care of the bones and the poison, they could cut them out (5 rounds, or almost half the match), or they could merge them. But they need one more bone to take care of the bone that way. Lets say they have some Gorgon Broth on hand, which provides a Rank 3 Earth die, a Rank 1 Fire die, and a bone.

So now they have:
-1 green d12
-3 green d8s
-2 red d4s
-2 green d4s
-three bones
-3 purple d12s

Each time you merge dice when poison is in a dish, there's a cumulative 20% chance per poison die that it will break, inflicting the fragile condition on 1d4 other gems of the highest rank. This is the trade off for dealing with poison dice more quickly. Lets say they handle the poison dice first, merging the 3 purple d12s into 1 purple d8. This merge counts for the 20% chance, but it's done after the merge, so roll d%, and it's honestly unlikely the die will break this time, but lets say it does. So poison die is gone, and 1d4 gems of the highest rank become fragile. We'll say it comes up 2, inflicting the fragile condition on the green d12 and a green d8, so they both have a cumulative 20% chance of breaking and downgrading per merge.

The next round, they merge the green d8s, since that deals with one die having the fragile condition. There's a 20% chance the green d12 will break. We'll say it doesn't, but next time they merge dice, there's a 40% chance it will break. Right now they have:

-1 fragile green d12
-1 not-fragile green d12
-2 red d4s
-2 green d4s
-3 bones

At this point, maybe they put the Dolma into a Fire oven for a few rounds and let the red d4s become d8s. Or they can move to an Earth Pot to merge dice in twos instead of threes, turning the green d4s into a d8, which they could then merge with the opal for another green d12.

If they use the oven, there's no risk of the green die breaking. If they use the pan, however, they can merge the 2 green d4s into a green d8. They also still need to deal with the bone. Lets say they leave the dish in a normal pan, and merge the bones into an opal d4. There's a 40% chance the fragile green d12 will break and demote, we'll say it does, becoming a non-fragile green d8. They can then move to an Earth pan, merge the 2 green d4s into a green d8, and then merge the two green d8s into a green d12.

At this point they have:
-2 green d12s
-2 red d4s
-1 opal d4

If they called it good at this point, they would roll 2d12+3d4 for their dish's point value. But they still have more than half the competition left, so they merge a red d4 and the opal d4 into a red d8, then move to a Fire oven instead, which will slowly promote red dice, at a rate of 1 per two rounds. Over the next 6 rounds, the red dice promote, starting with the lowest rank dice.

Plating takes 1 round per dish. We're going to assume this is a one-judge competition. So they have literally just enough time to plate, and get the dish to the judge, with the following dice pool:

-2 green d12s
-2 red d12s

They roll 4d12 for the dish's value, which, on average, will be 26. The Flavor Value is 50 Earth and 50 Fire. If the judge asked for a dish of both these flavors, and the opposing dish doesn't have that much, this dish gets 25 bonus points.

So, round by round:
Round 1- Put Gorgon Meat and Gorgon Organs into Basic Pan.
Round 2- Put Assassin Leaves into Basic Pan (acceptable breaks from reality), and merge purple dice. Die breaks, makes a green d12 and a green d8 fragile.
Round 3- Merge green d8s. Green d12 breaks and becomes a green d8. Move dish to Earth Pan.
Round 4- Merge green d8s into a green d12.
Round 5- Merge red d4 and opal d4 into a red d8. Move to Fire oven.
Round 6- nothing really, oven does the work.
Round 7- nothing, oven does the work, a red d4 becomes a red d8.
Round 9- a red d8 becomes a d12.
Round 11- a red d8 becomes a d12.
Round 12- Plate dish and serve to judge.

Does that help?
Last edited by Prak on Sun Nov 26, 2017 3:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by erik »

Seems like an exercise in failure.

If I understand this, you are trying to emulate a browser game via tabletop mechanics. I think your methodology of designing this game is all wrong. You're coming up with these dice mechanics and gems, but I don't know what you really want to do, or how you envision that this plays out. [edit: ah that post wasn't all there when I was writing... I see how you envision it plays out and that sounds really unfun]

I really want to throw out all the gem merging mechanics, and the escalating dice ranks. I have even more confusion from your example of dice merging than I did beforehand. Why would merging 3d8 into 1d12 be a good idea? Doesn't that kill your score? Even moreso merging 3d12 into a d8? Why? Why are only purples popping? What is the virtue of using a cooking method where they can pop?

It may run into problems of either being too predetermined by having huge piles of dice, or too swingy depending on what the d#'s actually are (d4 vs. d12).

Does it really sound fun to have a table top minigame where you are merging different colored dice and rolling randomly to see if you are screwed? Right now it looks too predetermined because the optimal course of merging this or that will probably be pretty obvious if you know what colors your judge wants.

I'd start over and do mechanics at the end.

Things to ask yourself.
How much do player decisions matter.
- more specifically, how much will system mastery matter vs. randomness vs. character prowess vs. starting ingredient selection
How many decisions do you want players to make in the course of making a dish?
How many different actions do you want available for players to choose at each stage?

Let's start with those last 2 questions first.

I think having something like 4-10 rounds of decisions with between 4-8 action choices is probably ideal. Probably near the middle.

Example Options: Gathering, Preparation, Cooking, Plating, Frenzy, Interfere, Read the Judges

I'm envisioning having a spell book recipe book which you can draw from to create various signature dishes using different ingredients, and they will outline how cooking/preparation/plating/equipment needed.

I'd think it would flow best if you are rolling only once per round to determine how successful you are at your chosen option. A good roll would let you accomplish maximum amount of actions. A poor roll would make you have to choose what actions to sacrifice.

It might be nice to have a kitchen and recipe layout where you allocate blocks to various actions similar to games like Puerto Rico.

As rounds go on you can kind of tell how well you are doing with your various dishes respectively, and if one winds up getting ruined you can try an alternate option, or double down on making one a masterpiece.
Last edited by erik on Sun Nov 26, 2017 4:06 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Prak »

It's not a browser game, but might as well be.

You make good points. I was looking at that as a rough draft for a reason. So let me think about this a bit more from the other direction, gamifying actual cooking, rather than translating another game format's cooking system.
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by erik »

A cooking game à la Iron Chef or Hell's Kitchen does sound interesting. There is room for strategy as you have your 3 dishes (appetizer, entree, desert) which you can choose to focus on differently depending upon how your expertise melds with your main/signature ingredients.

You want a way to basically codify success and failure, with a bit of granularity on each dish, and you will want choices to matter during the creation of each dish. It would be nice to also reward things like being a Elven Pastry Chef, or a Dwarven Grill Master, but that part is easy and can come at the end of game design.

I keep coming back to a role selection template where you have different actions you can choose that will assist in allocating your attention blocks to various tasks. Kind of like Puerto Rico or Mission: Red Planet. Mostly a reskinning of Puerto Rico tho probably without exclusive role selection (so in that regard more like Red Planet).

Place your recipe cards down and fill them in with blocks as you proceed each round until they are filled enough to enable the next stage of creation (Preparation/Cooking/Plating). You may have bonus blocks you can put in each stage to make it more excellent (possibly the bonus amount available determined by character expertise), but you cannot further prepare a dish once you have starting cooking it, and cannot cook it more once you have started plating it.

Different dishes/recipes can have value bonuses for your 7 flavor types. Special ingredients can provide value bonuses as well. Probably judges will have sweet-spot ranges of their preferred flavors. You don't want too much sweet or salty, etc.

It may make things interesting if during cooking you have a random selection of blocks of different flavor categories to choose from. You may have hard choices like whether to make fill in the cooking meter for your your Displacer Roast Beast with an unwanted extra sour in order to finish cooking it and move on, or risk overcooking it by taking an extra round for a sweet flavor block to be available if that's what you're needing (overcooked items get a burn token, undercooked items get a raw token).

It could be scaled back, but I'm rating this basically as an equivalent time sink to a DnD boss battle. I'm aiming at a minigame that probably takes 30-45 minutes to resolve. About 7 rounds of 5 minute resolutions. And that fits as it has a lot less moving parts/victory point strategies than Puerto Rico.

Example:
Round 0: You have your starting main ingredient either provided by the judge(s), or gained via battle.
Round 1: Typical actions: Start preparing food, gather additional ingredients, sneak a peek at the judge's preferences, throw a monkey wrench into the opponent's action.
- you select your Recipe choices and with your action you start filling them in.
Round 2-6: Keep making choices to further your recipes. If something gets ruined you may be able to convert some of it to another recipe (I can still use this chopped Assassin Vine to make a salad instead of a quiche). Or if really screwed start a much simpler recipe from scratch or write off a selection and double down on another dish.
Round 7: Final round. Usually Plating this round, but may use Frenzy as a high risk maneuver to git er done.
Judging: tally scores on each dish/round.


LOL. I was just forcibly reminded of our censorship filter necessitated by a "kitchen" company that used to spam the shit out of us.
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Post by hyzmarca »

Basically, the gems are a video game abstraction that you don't need, and gets in the way, since you're abstracting an abstraction.
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Post by Prak »

Ok, before I get into mechanics, here is the top view for my second draft-

Second Draft-
From the top, starting in character, top down.
Overview-
  1. Terms are set, either by judges or mutually agreed upon by contestants. When cooking outside the competition, this is skipped.
    • In a competition, this includes time limit, special ingredient, number of dishes, and possibly judges talking about what they want to see.
  2. Gather ingredients and Decide Forms and Executions. Sometimes this may involve hunting/gathering, sometimes the ingredients are all provided or in the pantry. When a competition involves hunting and gathering, that portion of the competition will be a separate time limit, usually a day prior to the cooking.
  3. Prep and Cook. Various ingredients and dishes will require different amounts of time to prep and cook.
  4. Plate
  5. Serve
Forms require ingredients, executions require time.

Example: Battle Warg.
  1. The chairman declares the battle will be one hour in length, with two dishes, and the featured ingredient is Warg.
  2. The contestants gather ingredients, and one decides they will do roasted peppers stuffed with a puree of braised warg meat, warg fat and a cheese as an appetizer, and warg sweet meats pasties as an entree.
    • The appetizer’s form is Stuffed Produce and Braised. The Stuffed Produce requires Produce, and a Stuffing (which has very open requirements). The Braised requires a protein and a medium. The execution is Braising, Pureeing and Roasting. Braising takes 10 minutes, Pureeing 5, and Roasting depends on the ingredient, in this case, 10 minutes.
    • The entree’s form and execution are Pastry with Stewed Meats. Pastry takes 20 minutes, Stewing takes 40 minutes.
  3. Peppers are set to Roast, while other dishes are begun. A Warg steak is set to braise with Warg fat in Dwarven beef, and Warg organ meats and some Warg leg meat are set to stew in a mixture of beef stock and Elven wine. Both these things take little prep time and can sit on their own for most of their cooking time. Peppers are removed from roasting, and a pastry dough is made (10 minutes) and set aside. Braised meat is shredded and pureed with extra Warg fat, and some soft cheese, the puree is stuffed into roasted peppers, which are then wrapped in warg skin, breaded and fried. The stew is reduced, scooped into pastry dough, then baked (10 minutes).
    • Note- a lot of this cooking is taking place simultaneously.
  4. The appetizers are plated and served while the entree is being prepared, the pastries are plated and served at the end of the time limit.
  5. Dishes are consumed as they are served, and judged.
Thoughts-
  • example doesn’t include garnishes or sauces. These can probably be declared, and not affect the time, or affect time very minimally.
  • Is this too fiddly?
  • I like the idea that Forms and Executions are essentially spells in a spell book. The idea of a cooking repertoire in book form, essentially. This also allows something like Rituals, where a character can use another book to artificially increase their repertoire,
  • Prepping meat and veg can involve a roll. Usually Dex based, but could be Str in the case of hacking through tough connective tissue, bones, etc, or Int or Wis in the case of prepping dangerus ingredients.
  • Making dough is essentially prepping pastry. This can be a roll, probably Dex based, though bread could be Str or Int based (heavy knead, or avoiding too much gluten development, respectively)
  • Cooking methods (roasting, braising, frying, baking) can involve a roll, probably Int or Wis based. Some methods will be Dex based (like basting).
  • Plating is Cha and/or Dex based.
  • Some executions can be part of prep or cooking or plating. Quinels are a ready example, they can be part of prepping a starchy product before cooking, or part of prepping a creamy product for plating.
  • Should plating use Forms and Executions? This would allow for various plating methods to require various “ingredients” (dishes) and amounts of time.
  • Times specified are for a cooking competition. A chef cooking outside a competition might braise meat for an hour or more, as an example of difference between competition and non-competition.

How does this look for the top view to start mechanizing? Is there anything I'm missing in the thoughts? IS this too fiddly?
Cuz apparently I gotta break this down for you dense motherfuckers- I'm trans feminine nonbinary. My pronouns are they/them.
Winnah wrote:No, No. 'Prak' is actually a Thri Kreen impersonating a human and roleplaying himself as a D&D character. All hail our hidden insect overlords.
FrankTrollman wrote:In Soviet Russia, cosmic horror is the default state.

You should gain sanity for finding out that the problems of a region are because there are fucking monsters there.
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Post by erik »

Okay, you've kind of summarized how the cooking shows go like Iron Chef, but I'm not seeing game elements in your example other than that you should probably be chunking time rounds into 5 or 10 minute increments... and your Thoughts that followed which I'll address after reposting where I think you should start your game design process.
How much do player decisions matter.
- more specifically, how much will system mastery matter vs. randomness vs. character prowess vs. starting ingredient selection
How many decisions do you want players to make in the course of making a dish?
How many different actions do you want available for players to choose at each stage?
Additionally I will add:
How much out of character knowledge will players need to grok this game? Are you expecting players to have a working understanding of different food products and their preparation in order to play?
How long do you want people to spend in player time on this minigame?

This sounds like a single player game. Or at least not a cooperative game. Just an observation.

It originally sounded like you wanted this to be a cap system that is agnostic to the type of game it get appended to, but almost all the mechanical ideas you just introduced seemed to revolve around DnD stats with suggestions of attribute or skill checks to succeed at actions...

You sure this is the direction you want to go? DnD skills are kind of a failure point. And I only say "kind of" out of my adamant tendency to hedge things. Imagine making an important minigame that revolved around *any* DnD skill. Diplomacy, Search, Stealth, Use Magic Device, Iajutsu Bullshit, etc. Have any of them been something you'd want to spend more than a couple minutes on in player time? Skill checks are at best, quick and dirty ways to quickly resolve something that you don't want to spend a lot of time on. Anything more than that usually leads to a clusterfuck.
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Post by Prak »

Yeah, mostly I wanted to make sure that I was on the right track and not overlooking shit in my starting point. Like I said, I want to try going from the top down this time, taking cooking and mechanizing it instead of trying to just translate another game.

My specific desire is to be able to play something like a tabletop game set in the Battle Chef Brigade world, or at least a world like that, where PCs are, like, adventurer-chefs. I don't particularly care what system it is, except that if it's d20 based, it's easier for me to get people to playtest it and possibly run it so I can play in it. I started with a cap system in my rough draft because I was straight translating BCB's mechanics and the basic system for cooking didn't scream for anything reliant on an overall system.

I've been focusing on single chefs because its easier to write the example, but I do see it as being party based. Party based allows you to have a character who excels at the hunting (lets say a Ranger), a character who excels at prep, a character who excels at cooking, and a character who excels at plating (this would be an interesting shtick for Bards in this setting)

My issue may be that I'm trying to segregate "this is what I want to represent happening in the story" and "this is how it's done mechanically" too hard to keep from mucking shit up.

I definitely want player choices to matter, and I want different characters in a party to shine in different parts of the overall game.



Ok, so, here's basically what I want as an end result-

I want a game about playing fantasy adventuring foodies. The PCs go out and hunt monsters, pick fictional flora, and then cook it all up. The setting has a social structure that involves cooking competitions. Maybe in the world mythology a god of hearth and home got together with a god of contest and competition, and the resulting culture is all about cooking as sport. I like to be able to use my own knowledge of cooking in a game, but I want such player knowledge to be about as important to the game as a knowledge of mythology and magic beliefs of various cultures is to a standard game of D&D- helpful, especially for fluff and style, but not actually necessary. At the very least, I want a game where a player's lack of cooking knowledge is not a disadvantage, and maybe just points them towards being a character who does the hunting, or the prep, or maybe the plating. There's not a lot of need for individual knowledge of cooking when it comes to plating.

I definitely see a game where you have you Combat abilities and your Cooking abilities, and the two are not in competition for character build resources, if anything, they inform one another. To go back to the source material/inspiration- Mina is a dual-wielding human rogue with wind magic. This informs her combat style for hunting, and in the kitchen she's a generalist. Thrash is a one-hand weapon using orc berserker with fire magic. This informs both his combat style for hunting, and his cooking ability, as he is really good at and focused on Fire as a dish element. Ziggy is an undead necromancer who uses ghost and skeletal minions in both combat and his restaurant. Different chefs use different weapons, from Mina using "daggers" that look like chef's knives, to Thrash using a carving knife, Ziggy a boning knife, and another npc, Shiv, using giant skewers.

Maybe the game/setting will primarily appeal to foodie gamers, but if I put together a group of my foodie friends and my friend who is more about systems and numbers, I want him to still find it interesting, even if he's less involved in the cooking portion by being relegated to a Prep character who basically just takes orders on what he's prepping how.

edit: if I go with d20, I don't envision this revolving around its skills, at worst, it would be a separate set of skills, things like "Carving" and "Dicing" and "Dough" that are bought through a separate set of points.
Last edited by Prak on Mon Nov 27, 2017 4:43 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Prak »

Idle thought-

Conceivably, cooking could be done with something like the One Roll Engine, but... not.

O.R.E. is sort of terrible and swingy, but I like the idea of looking at "sets" of matching die results and the "height" of the roll. Something like "the number of dice showing a single number determines the speed at which you [do thing]" and "the highest number of your whole roll determines how well you [do thing]." And then maybe the size of the die is variable. So a person who's fast at [thing] rolls lots of small dice, and a person who's good at [thing] rolls a few large dice, and a person who's good and fast rolls lots of large dice.

I don't know. Idle thought. If I did this, the actual cooking part of the game goes back to being more of a cap system.
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Post by hyzmarca »

First of all, pick your skills.

You want a set of cooking skills that have some overlap, and you'll want to use multiple skills per dish, so that different chefs will have different competencies in different dishes, but none are incompetent.

Once you know what you're skills are going to be, then you build the backbones for your recipes.

Your recipe will be a series of actions that you can slot ingredients into.

Ingredients will come last, and will have keywords telling you what they can be used for.

Actual cooking will be accomplished by slotting ingredients into a recipe, then rolling the appropriate skill for each step.

Total success will be based on your cumulative successes at each step of the recipe, modified by ingredient keywords.

So if you're a competent chef using shitty ingredients, you can get a mediocre result. If you're a shitty chef using top-tier ingredients, you still get a shitty result. And if you throw ingredients together at random conflicting keywords will make sure that your dish tastes horrible.
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Post by Zinegata »

I want a game about playing fantasy adventuring foodies. The PCs go out and hunt monsters, pick fictional flora, and then cook it all up. The setting has a social structure that involves cooking competitions
I think you need to be very clear as to whether you want your Cooking system to bear some resemblance to reality or is it just an excuse to add a new subsystem for stat boosts into the game.

Because quite frankly, I don't think you really understand what cooking is really about. Sure, I can understand the Monster Hunter element to tie it with an RPG - but as a foodie who can actually cook your system looks more like Guy Fieri's Diner show than Iron Chef with the way it treats the subject - meaning its more an avenue of presenting a ton of gimmick dishes like "Deep fried Alligator with BUFFALO SAUCE" that is almost certainly going to taste over-the-top and awful.

A world that basically worships food as a spectator sport by contrast would almost certainly develop a highly complicated structure of different cuisines - such as how there are top cuisines in the real world such as French, Japanese, and Mexican; each with their own unique histories, flavor profiles, and traditions. A Japan-inspired fantasy cuisine for instance might have strict rules regarding the capture and killing of animals - much like how the real-world Japanese hold great reverence for top-tier ingredients like Tuna - or have particular rules regarding serving certain dishes in certain seasons.

I would highly suggest watching Shokugeki no Soma (anime)- as it's the "grail" series for cooking battle shows in the present; and despite its over-the-top sexualization of characters it actually knows a thing or two about the actual food they cook in the show. Indeed, the best thing about the series is how the food battles are essentially debates in food philosophy - such as the age-old debate between the merits of populist cuisine (e.g. diner fare) as opposed to fine dining.

I'd also note that the premise is really interesting, but if the execution is so divorced from reality then it's likely to just turn foodie RPG fans off.

More specifically, the best piece of advice I can give is this: Real cooking is an art, not a science. The exception is baking, which is closer to chemistry rather than art. Unless your system can capture this reality, it's not really going to be much more than yet another crafting system.
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Post by Prak »

Ok, first of all, Zine, I have a culinary arts degree. I do know what cooking is about. The example of Warg Battle is weird because it's based on Iron Chef, and Iron Chef dishes tend to be weird, because you're given some exotic ingredient, or an ingredient that is not often used in one or another course, and you have to figure out how to use it in three or more courses, typically appetizer, main and dessert.

I just watched an episode with beef as the feature, and someone made beef marrow chocolate cake.

Cooking competitions produce weird results.

Here's the thing- I basically want a crafting system that is robust enough to be an actual feature of a game, that is representative of the actual craft, in this case cooking, but has acceptable breaks from reality so that it's still fun, and is accessible to people like my friend who would seriously eat various forms of pizza for every meal if it were financially feasible for him.

Strictly, cooking doesn't need a system. I played a character that had a food cart. I harvested meat from our kills, bought pantry ingredients from the book price lists, and just told my DM "this is what I'm doing, it needs this stuff, this is the cost, this is what I sell it for" and I rolled, like, profession. Or craft-cooking and we used the rules for profession checks.

But because I want a game that is the tabletop version of Battle Chef Brigade themes, cooking obviously needs a system. And craft systems are fucking hard, especially for something like cooking where there is an accepted way to do things, but not exactly a right way to do things. I mean, fuck, look at Fieri. His food is far from the accepted way to do things, but whether you or I like his stuff or not, you can't say he's doing it wrong if the people that eat it like it.

Which is very different from carpentry or smithing. There is definitely a wrong way to make a chair or a suit of armor.


I'll have to think about the skills. Gives me something to do mentally while I drive Lyft tonight. I'm starting to think something along the lines of "Knife," "Dry Heat," "Wet Heat," "Dough," etc.

On the O.R.Esque thought, it occurred to me to use a modifier instead of larger dice. So if I go that route, maybe you roll 3+(speed stat) d6, and take your largest group of matching dice to determine your overall speed, then your highest die and add your mod to determine your quality. Maybe you get a bonus if your highest die is also in your set.
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Post by Zinegata »

Prak wrote:Ok, first of all, Zine, I have a culinary arts degree. I do know what cooking is about. The example of Warg Battle is weird because it's based on Iron Chef, and Iron Chef dishes tend to be weird, because you're given some exotic ingredient, or an ingredient that is not often used in one or another course, and you have to figure out how to use it in three or more courses, typically appetizer, main and dessert.

I just watched an episode with beef as the feature, and someone made beef marrow chocolate cake.

Cooking competitions produce weird results.
Then you should also know that Iron Chef's very weirdness makes it a generally bad basis unless you're into hardcore tail to nose cooking, because it precisely leads to weird shit rather than teaching people fundamentals.

If that's what you're aiming for, then it can basically be any kind of Yet Another Crafting System. Just be prepared for the system to devolve into people making weirder and weirder stuff to top last week's monstrous creation - because that's what "Weird ingredient cooking" shows tend to turn into.

But if you really want it about to be a reflection of real-world cooking - more specifically good food that people can eat - then the fundamental conflicts between your various character's cooking styles should reflect real-world debates about food rather than just going over-the-top with adding bone marrow to a desert. That's why I recommended Shokugeki, because it's precisely the sort of series that gives intellectual stakes to the food battle - like say Fieri-style "feed the masses" (which I personally detest; particularly in comparison to Japan's wonderful mom-and-pop restaurant scene), as opposed to overly snobby fine dining.
Here's the thing- I basically want a crafting system that is robust enough to be an actual feature of a game, that is representative of the actual craft, in this case cooking, but has acceptable breaks from reality so that it's still fun, and is accessible to people like my friend who would seriously eat various forms of pizza for every meal if it were financially feasible for him.
The main thing where I feel that the system deviates entirely from the "actual craft" is how your system is centered around the addition of ingredients. That's basically indistinguishable from potion-making (albeit not that far off from baking, as baking very often requires precise ingredients).

The central "art" of cooking in the real world by contrast is heat management - more specifically knowing how much heat to apply to each ingredient.

Good cooks in the real world just don't seek out the best ingredients (indeed many cooks in the real world rely on third party suppliers to source their ingredients and just do the quality control). Instead, they know how to apply the correct amount of heat to a specific ingredient - even a bad one - to create an extraordinary meal.

For instance an ordinarily tough piece of beef rib can be braised for hours and turned tender as part of a beef burgundy stew, or meat bones can be used to create a stock. Plentiful garlic can be added to a recipe, but care must be taken not to overheat the pan when the garlic is added as it can easily be burnt and ruin the dish.

It's making these adjustments - especially considering that no two pieces of meat, fish, or vegetable will ever be exactly alike - that defines someone who can cook and who can't. Someone who can't cook and just follows the recipe would sear a steak on a pan based on the temperature and time noted in the recipe, but would likely leave portions of the steak over or undercooked based on the irregularities of its shape. By contrast someone who can cook would know how to adjust the pan, the meat, and the heat to ensure the whole thing is cooked properly (or just use an oven to ensure even internal cooking then sear the damn thing).

To be fair, no cooking game has ever really managed to "get" this nuance; but I would say that this mini-game of ensuring that the food is cooked perfectly (not overcooked or undercooked) should be the central focus on the cooking system.

That said, some ideas that you can apply include giving each ingredient an ideal "Doneness" range, and that your characters should apply techniques to get all of the ingredients of a dish within their ideal "doneness" range within a specific time limit.

[Note: I know your poison values kind of try to simulate this, but you're trying to simulate cooking, not potion-making. A bad dish might be burnt or undercooked, but very rarely should it be poisonous and the stakes must reflect this.]

That would force players to actually do some of the real techniques of real cooking - for instance don't just throw the veggies at the same time as the meat in the stew (as the veggies will be overcooked by the time the meat is done), while planning to make sure they have enough time to do high-focus tasks like searing a steak or cooking a scrambled egg where it's easy to screw up and overcook something.

As for acceptable breaks in reality, your characters live in a magic world. What's a little wind magic to stoke up the flames of your opponent's grill to make him overcook the dish, or to use time magic to short-circuit a normally 6 hour stewing process? Or it could be a game of mutually trying to sabotage each other's dishes without being caught, or your party being too damn honorable and refusing to sabotage any opponent's dish even as they get thrown one monkey wrench after another.

In short, don't make it just a potion-making experiment where you're adding up numbers or selecting the right colors. Turn it into an active mini-game where your players are seeking to get everything cooked correctly within a specific time limit and with a potentially hostile team trying to sabotage them; and where their meta problem-solving skills (by combining various techniques) will be put to the test rather than just color-matching. I think you will find a tonally much more consistent experience with cooking, and it would potentially result in more compelling battles - both from a story and philosophical perspective - than trying to top last week's bone marrow desert..
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Post by JonSetanta »

Soooo... Dungeon Meshi.
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Post by JigokuBosatsu »

I know the Iron Chef fluff was the inspiration, but isn't this ultimately a metaproblem of making a crafting system that's worth half a tinker's shit?

I don't know about you guys, but I've never seen a crafting system that makes me stand up and say "This works and I will use it with very little difficulty!" So what this thread suggests to me is that if you come up with a system that can handle all the "Dungeon Chef" beats:

-Solo crafting
-Coop crafting (with meaningful roles for varied party members)
-Versus crafting
-Quests for rare ingredients
-Usable monster drops
-Mechanical benefits from crafting products

Etc. If you had a system that covered all those, I think it would work just as well for Dungeon Chef as it would for a magic item factory, or for the workshop where they make the forklift golems, or the potion lab where they brew potions that the factory workers drink to forget their brutal existence. Or postapocalyptic base building.

So yeah. I think it's a noble goal and I would love to see a great system. Hell, I'd love to help.
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Post by Iduno »

Throwing out ideas from the terrible cooking shows I've watched when I'm with relatives, the main 4 routes to failure for a contestant are:

1. Don't know something about the ingredient they're preparing
2. Run out of time
3. Over/undercook something, either because of time (above) or not knowing a particular cooking style
4. The judges are dicks

For mechanics to represent that (may or may not be your goal), you could use something like:

1. Knowledge roll for the plant or critter you're cooking
2. Maybe have a dex roll based on the number of things you're doing to accomplish everything correctly in the right amount of time (do summoned allies help? Are they allowed?)
3. Allow a penalty to one or both of the above for using special ingredients/techniques in exchange for a quality bonus(es) at the end
4. Maybe a charisma or sense motive-type roll to determine unstated requirements the judges might have that they didn't mention? Or just roleplay it
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Post by Prak »

Going a tad out of order since some replies are shorter-
JonSetanta wrote:Soooo... Dungeon Meshi.
Yeah. Dungeon Meshi, Rutabaga, other shit.
JigokuBosatsu wrote:I know the Iron Chef fluff was the inspiration, but isn't this ultimately a metaproblem of making a crafting system that's worth half a tinker's shit?

(...)

If you had a system that covered all those, I think it would work just as well for Dungeon Chef as it would for a magic item factory, or for the workshop where they make the forklift golems, or the potion lab where they brew potions that the factory workers drink to forget their brutal existence. Or postapocalyptic base building.
Yeah, pretty much. I'm interested primarily in a cooking system, but cooking games twig the same buttons and dials in my brain as crafting games, because it's honestly the same idea.

Iduno- Yeah, I'm thinking that there's definitely a place for Knowledge type rolls, and more specifically, I'm thinking a good use for the bard type character is making plates look pretty and knowing about judges.
Zinegata wrote:Then you should also know that Iron Chef's very weirdness makes it a generally bad basis unless you're into hardcore tail to nose cooking, because it precisely leads to weird shit rather than teaching people fundamentals.
That's a good point, and now has me thinking about different sorts of competitions, Orcs will give you some giant beast and say "use as much of this noble animal to make as many courses as possible," while Elves want some pretty fancy (french bullshit) dish that requires patience, dexterity, and probably hand temperature somewhere around 5 degrees to not fuck up, Dwarves are more interested in how well you cook than what you cook, and so on.
But if you really want it about to be a reflection of real-world cooking - more specifically good food that people can eat - then the fundamental conflicts between your various character's cooking styles should reflect real-world debates about food rather than just going over-the-top with adding bone marrow to a desert. That's why I recommended Shokugeki, because it's precisely the sort of series that gives intellectual stakes to the food battle - like say Fieri-style "feed the masses" (which I personally detest; particularly in comparison to Japan's wonderful mom-and-pop restaurant scene), as opposed to overly snobby fine dining.
I will definitely look at Shokugeki when I have a chance, and it sounds like this is exactly what I just talked about above, just translated into fantasy races.
The main thing where I feel that the system deviates entirely from the "actual craft" is how your system is centered around the addition of ingredients. That's basically indistinguishable from potion-making (albeit not that far off from baking, as baking very often requires precise ingredients).

The central "art" of cooking in the real world by contrast is heat management - more specifically knowing how much heat to apply to each ingredient.
This probably belies the fact that I'm a good baker and a mediocre cook... But then, you could probably surmise that from my posts here anyway.
Good cooks in the real world just don't seek out the best ingredients (indeed many cooks in the real world rely on third party suppliers to source their ingredients and just do the quality control). Instead, they know how to apply the correct amount of heat to a specific ingredient - even a bad one - to create an extraordinary meal.

For instance an ordinarily tough piece of beef rib can be braised for hours and turned tender as part of a beef burgundy stew, or meat bones can be used to create a stock. Plentiful garlic can be added to a recipe, but care must be taken not to overheat the pan when the garlic is added as it can easily be burnt and ruin the dish.

It's making these adjustments - especially considering that no two pieces of meat, fish, or vegetable will ever be exactly alike - that defines someone who can cook and who can't. Someone who can't cook and just follows the recipe would sear a steak on a pan based on the temperature and time noted in the recipe, but would likely leave portions of the steak over or undercooked based on the irregularities of its shape. By contrast someone who can cook would know how to adjust the pan, the meat, and the heat to ensure the whole thing is cooked properly (or just use an oven to ensure even internal cooking then sear the damn thing).

To be fair, no cooking game has ever really managed to "get" this nuance; but I would say that this mini-game of ensuring that the food is cooked perfectly (not overcooked or undercooked) should be the central focus on the cooking system.

That said, some ideas that you can apply include giving each ingredient an ideal "Doneness" range, and that your characters should apply techniques to get all of the ingredients of a dish within their ideal "doneness" range within a specific time limit.
So maybe the system needs to be way more focused on methods, and then ingredients are, er, boiled down to categories. So, in game it's a Warg steak, but from the system's point of view, it's just Protein (Meat, Tough), and you know that you're looking at methods in the Slow Cooking category or a heavy marinade.
[Note: I know your poison values kind of try to simulate this, but you're trying to simulate cooking, not potion-making. A bad dish might be burnt or undercooked, but very rarely should it be poisonous and the stakes must reflect this.]
The poison thing was part of replicating BCB. But there's a lot of D&D creatures who would probably be bad to eat if not prepared carefully.
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

Hrm, just got back from playing a game of Stone Age...a worker placement where you can:

A> Place meeples in the various town squares to give you various advantages to future actions.
B> Send your meeples out to forage where they roll to collect various resources
C> Assign one of your meeples to spend resources on one of the victory point cards / huts that is currently face up.

I could see something along those general lines working for a competitive cooking minigame. (but not for a general purpose downtime crafting system)

The two aspects that make me think frenzied kitchen simplification and retheme are :

1> The randomization of the VP cards/huts means that there are turns where your best moves are slow gathering or investment moves and there are other turns where you are racing opponents for the plethora of strong VP options currently available. Much like how in kitchens there are times you are moving slow and waiting and then there are times where you have multiple dishes that all need immediate attention.

2> While the huts are straightforward VP mechanism to trade resources for their cost in points, the VP cards are mainly multipliers and set collection. Thus you have points for simple production but to win you need to make sure you are specializing in just a couple things and also collecting the cards which give bonuses for those things you've invested the most heavily in. But you also want to try to block your opponents from getting any of the big multipliers for their investments.
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