All I see on this board are people asking for new builds and ways to kick some monster's butt, so I want to change things up by looking at a fairly neglected skill by Adventurer's standards, which are the Profession skills, and the crafting skills that don't involve making weapons and/or golems. In this particular example, I decided to zone in on the Professions and Crafting skills associated with making food.
WARNING: Long post incoming!
Before I get to the process of how to make food, I want to define some key terms:
Familiar Food: When one selects to take up at least 1 rank in Professions or Crafts directly related to cooking, they choose up to 3 foods that they will consider familiar. Whenever they cook with one of those 3 foods as a main course, then the food gets to add +2 cooking points when the food is all done cooking. I will explain cooking points in a later paragraph, but they are good things to have a lot of.
Main Dish: If someone were to cook a feast or a meal with multiple kinds of dishes, then the cook has to choose what will be the main dish. Once chosen, the other dishes are side dishes. The trick with main dishes is to prepare the main dish with a base component of a food that is familiar to the cook, hence the Familiar Food above.
Side Dish: When a main dish is chosen, the other dishes cooked for that meal become side dishes.
Dip: A dip is a substance that you dip something into to give that substance a flavor, like for example, using Ranch Dressing as a dip for a chicken wing. Dips are a "weaker" food, but are often a good compliment for some blander foods one might cook. But when tallying up the Cooking Points the whole meal provides, you count the DC of the dip as being the total DC of cooking the dip - 10. For example, making Ranch dressing takes a cooking DC of 14 to cook. But then when tallying up your total Cooking points, you count the Ranch dressing as being a DC of 4 to cook, rather than 14, but only for tallying up Cooking Points.
Marinade: A marinade is similar to a dip, except that a marinade is a sauce specifically made for slathering a meat or vegetable even. When you apply a marinade to a food, you add to the food's total DC the DC that it takes to cook up the marinade in the first place -10. In the end, making a marinade has an equivalent effect to a dip, but making a dip for a marinated thing might not be the best combination. I'll include notes about combination after the following example with commentary.
I think those are a good bunch of terms to keep in mind when you read the following rules. I've explained the rules as an example with commentary:
...
1. Suppose our cook, Harry the Cleric, wants to prepare a hearty dinner for his friends after a long day of adventuring.
Harry happens to have a lot of different food items swimming around his backpack, but he figures that everyone, Perry the Druid included, wants a tender beef steak tonight.
So Harry pulls out a chunk of steak, and slaps it over a metal sheet to begin his preparations.
...
Here, Harry is beginning his cooking with a base food, being steak in this case. This base food is what will define what the rest of the meal will be like.
A steak alone is easy to cook in comparison to other foods, but Harry isn't going to just cook a steak; Harry is going to cook food fit for a king, if not, a noble, and if not, for a starving group of adventurers. The more complex stuff Harry does with the steak, the higher the cooking DC gets when determining if the food comes out cooked right.
RULE 1: When starting with a food base, unless stated otherwise, the initial cooking DC is 10.
Now Harry is ready to continue cooking.
...
2. Harry inspected this raw steak, and thought about what he can do to add flavor to it. So he went and asked Perry the Druid to go out into the woods and come back with some spices, to which Perry obliged, because running around in the woods was his favorite thing to do. When Perry was done prancing, he came back to Harry with some spices; a lot of mint, rosemary, and peppers. Harry then pulled out a little salt, and began to mix the spices together, and then slathered the spices all over the steak.
...
What Harry did here was that he modified the steak to make it a little more tasty. This particular modification is a pretty simple one, so it doesn't add a lot to the total DC to cook the food. In fact, it only adds +1 to the total DC to cook the steak, thus making the total DC become 11.
...
3. As Harry is staring at this steak caressed in spices, and is wondering what he can do to make this steak even more exciting than it is right now. Then Harry pulls out some mustard seed, a lemon, some water, some vinegar, and some honey. Then he looked back down at the steak he was preparing and then Harry smiled and then he said, "I can make mustard sauce with this!"
...
Now Harry is off to go and cook something separate from the steak, being a sauce that will later be part of the steak, but in the process of it being cooked, its a separate part.
In the case of Mustard Sauce, you begin at the base of it being Mustard Seed, which gets ground down. The process of preparing the mustard seed takes a cooking check DC of 10. Then by adding the additional stuff to make it into a paste, which is a straight-forward process, you add +1 to the DC for every ingredient being added, being water, lemon juice, vinegar, and honey. Add those together, and you get a cooking DC of 14 to make the Mustard Sauce.
This Mustard Sauce will be used like a dip, rather than a marinade. If this sauce were to be used to marinade the above steak, then you add to the DC of cooking the steak the DC it takes to make the mustard sauce - 10 (Coming out to add +4 to the DC to cook the steak if being applied to the steak during cooking).
But again, this is being used as a dip and not a marinade, so the DC for cooking the mustard sauce will not be applied to the total DC for cooking the steak.
...
4. Now Harry stuck the steaks onto the metal slab over the campfire, and Harry has his mustard sauce in preparation when he had another thought, "Say, I could cook some vegetables!"
So Harry searches his backpack, and he pulls out a sack with a few potatoes left, thankfully, there are enough to feed everybody, which Harry can use, but Harry still needs vegetables, as potatoes are grains, and not vegetables.
Harry then looked at Perry and says, "Hey Perry, can you go and fetch me some vegetables from the forest?" To which Perry happily hurried into, and returned with a bundle of carrots, mushrooms, leeks, and onions (Either Perry is resourceful, or the forest is just that awesome).
While Perry did that, Harry found a good deal of butter, and some cheese. Then he looked over at the potatoes and got another idea.
In that time, Perry delivered the vegetables.
...
Harry is now plotting new foods with different bases than the steak or mustard mentioned above. The difference however is that the food above is intended to be its own separate entity rather than as part of the steak, even if the mustard was intended to be used for dipping rather than as a marinade, it still bears differentiating that potatoes weren't meant to have steak dipped into it by the time of its cooking.
...
5. Harry began to mash the potatoes in with butter and cheese and onions and began to bake the mixture in a Portable Oven. Meanwhile he begins to use some spices lying around and butter and slathers the vegetables with them, and then adds a dash of salt atop the vegetables, and then begins to grill them on the side of the steaks.
...
By the time Harry got around to the potatoes, he treated the potatoes like a base for cooking the potato dish, to which he mashed them up with butter, cheese, and onions. Mashing is a straight forward process that takes a bit of patience (+1 to the cooking DC), and then also having other foods applied, some of which have a harder time of mashing, like the onions, meaning that onions add to the DC of cooking. The Butter and cheese are fairly easy to mash, adding +1 and +1 again, but onions being more to mix than mash add +2 to the DC, totalling the cooking of the mashed potatoes at a DC of 15.
Then there were the vegetables, what is the base? Is it the Carrots? Onions? Mushrooms? or the Leeks? In this case, all of the vegetables are the base, and not just one specific one. However if one of those foods is familiar to Harry, then Harry does get a slight bonus at the end of cooking, which will be explained later. If however Harry was familiar with cooking one or more of those vegetables, like say, Harry was familiar with cooking carrots and mushrooms, then Harry would have to pick either the carrots or the mushrooms to get a Cooking Point bonus from, which will be explained in a greater detail later.
The Vegetables however having a base of different kinds of vegetables adds a +1 to the DC of cooking the dish. Start with any vegetable, which in Harry's case, decides to focus on the carrots. Then from there, the mushroom, onion, and leeks add a +1 to the cooking DC totalling at 13. But then with the spices, he adds a +1 to the DC of cooking them, totalling now at a DC of 14.
...
6. With Harry busy cooking, something struck him, he forgot the dessert! So Harry rushed back and sifted through his bags for anything, and from here he found some more honey, a pound of flour, another pound of butter, and a pound of sugar. Excellent! Time to make pound cake, but the honey, yeah, Harry will use the honey as a filling for the pound cake.
...
So Harry put the flour into a large bowl he carried around, and then he dumped the butter and sugar inside, and began to mix away by hand, using flour as the base ingredient. With Butter and Sugar being easy to mix with flour, and the fact that its all being mixed adds +1 to the DC as well, totalling the DC of making the Pound Cake into a dough blob at a DC of 13.
But then Harry wants to do something special with the dough blob. So Harry pulled out some Blind Beans, and stuffed them into the blob of dough, and then put it into another rack of the Portable Oven. The act of stuffing like that is moderately difficult, adding +3 to the total DC, clocking the total DC at 16.
Then when Harry is done, he'll pull the cooked pound cake out of the oven, and pull the beans out, and then stuff it in with a big gob of honey, adding +1 to the DC, making it a DC of 17 to cook the pound cake.
...
7. The steaks are grilled, the potatoes cooked, the vegetables grilled, the dipping sauce made, and the pound cake baked, all of this food is ready to be served to the hungry adventurers.
But there is one more thing Harry must do mechanically to see what kinds of things his adventuring partners could benefit from his cooking. These benefits can be added hitpoints, to added saving throws, to even more times to cast a spell or increased speed, or if the food isn't generic, a new ability for a short duration!
The strength of those buffs however are measured as Cooking Points.
To find out how many Cooking Points Harry can spend on this meal he prepared for his fellows, he begins firstly by reviewing what kinds of foods he is familiar with cooking, which in Harry's Case, he is familiar with cooking, "Chicken, Beef, and Rabbit". Then if any of the main courses consists of a food base that is the same as any one of his familiar cookings, then Harry gains +2 bonus Cooking Points when allocating points for cooking.
The next step Harry goes though is determining which part of the meal is the "Main Course", and which are the "Sides". For this, Harry looks for either Chicken, Beef, or Rabbit as a base in any of his food, and Harry realized that the steaks he cooked was beef, and so he selected to have Steak be the main course, adding an instant +2 Cooking Points.
Next, Harry looks at his Cooking skill ranks, to which Harry has 7 ranks in Cooking. Each rank Harry has in Cooking is 1 more Cooking Point per rank towards the total, meaning an instant 7 Cooking Points, adding it to +2 for the main course being beef, equals 9.
Now Harry goes and adds up the total DCs of cooking all the other food together, which includes the steak, the mustard sauce, the potatoes, the vegetables, and then the pound cake. After that, the number is divided by 10.
The numbers are: 11 + 4 + 15 + 14 + 17 = 61
Now divide this by 10, and you get: 61/10 = 6.1
Then rounded down, the total becomes 6. (Even if the total comes up to 69, you still drop it down so the total becomes 6)
Harry adds 6 to 9, making it so that Harry has 15 Cooking Points to spend on buffs for his party.
...
Additional Rules and Comments:
All that the Cooking DCs really determine are if you've cooked the food successfully. However, not all failures are total failures, in that a food can still be good, even if its been burned. For this, you subtract the "failed" roll on the player's part by the total DC it would take to cook it. For example, a chicken dish takes a DC of 18 to cook. The player however ends up rolling a low number, and after all the modifications, ends up with 15 as the result. The chicken dish ends up not being so savory, and the penalty would be measured as, (The Food's DC to cook - The Player's Cooking Outcome (But only if lower than the Food's DC)). So, 18 - 15 = 3. This means that you treat the chicken dish as if it were worth a DC 15 to cook rather than a DC of 18, meaning less possible Cooking Points.
As a whole, the players can only benefit from Cooking Points if they are hungry, and also up to a maximum of 3 times per day, and they get as many cooking points worth as the cook cooks into the food. If a character isn't hungry when they eat the food, they gain no Cooking Points worth of buffs. How does one measure hunger? Give about a few hours for adventurers, and they'll be hungry. At least thats my rule of thumb. Also, the cooking point benefits only last until the players get hungry again, or until after 6 hours.
Also, what if a creature that doesn't need to eat wants Cooking Points, like a Warforged or an Outsider? Those creatures can eat as well and gain the cooking points, but they can only benefit from cooking points once every few hours like a human, and only up to 3 times per day. I don't know if a Warforged has the capacity to eat, but I would personally rule the eating in their favor, but if you don't think it makes any sense, then rule accordingly.
Also a Variant Rule, is that for every dish and/or dip that the cook is cooking at the same time, you add +2 to the DCs of all the dishes to cook for every dish being cooked at the same time, but only if the total number of dishes being cooked at the same time are 2 or higher. So if you're cooking 3 dishes at the same time, then you add +4 to the cooking DCs of all the food being cooked. This variant rule is meant to measure the attention span of the cook, especially of the cook is a human. Whether or not you want to add those DCs to the total number of Cooking Points at the end is up to you.
But what if some of the ingredients didn't go well together when mixed?
In the above examples, Harry used ingredients that went well with each other, but what if there's an ingredient in a food that just doesn't work?
Suppose Harry used Salt instead of Sugar in the Pound Cake, which makes for a much more disgusting cake than if it were sugar. Still though, it cooks just as easily with salt as it does with sugar, making the total cooking DC the same. However, because the end product isn't so delicious, the DC for determining the amount of Cooking Points received drop by -10 - 1 (1 being because salt added +1 to the DC of cooking the cake), making the total out to be effectively +6 rather than +17.
Though some foods don't go as well with certain foods, but also doesn't ruin the dish, like salt ruins Pound Cake in heavy quantities. When its an odd flavor in the dish, just subtract from the total whatever modifier the food added to cooking it when figuring out exactly how many Cooking Points one gets.
But at the same time, some foods that go strangely for some people don't go so strangely for others, be they human, or orc, or dragon even. Rule accordingly, this kind of stuff is to be determined by the GM's intuition, and some player's convincing too.
But for my last note, I want to include the kinds of things you can spend Cooking Points on. Each of the following stacks on top of each other, meaning you can purchase multiple of the same thing, and it will stack:
List of Cooking Point Buffs:
1 Cooking Point Buffs:
- +1 Hitpoint per cooking point spent
- +1 Skill Point to a specific skill per cooking point spent
2 Cooking Point Buffs:
- +1 to a specific Saving Throw per 2 cooking points spent
- +1 to damage with all physical attacks per 2 cooking points spent
- +1 to damage with all spell attacks per 2 cooking points spent
- +1 to damage with all psionic attacks per 2 cooking points spent
- +1 to casting a 0th level spell without using up a slot per 2 cooking points spent
- +1 to Power Points total per 2 cooking points spent
- +1 to Initiative per 2 cooking points spent
- +1 to SR per 2 cooking points spent
- +1 to PR per 2 cooking points spent
4 Cooking Point Buffs:
- +1 to all saving throws per 4 cooking points spent
- +1 to melee attack rolls per 4 cooking points spent
- +1 to ranged attack rolls per 4 cooking points spent
- +1 to touch and ranged touch attacks per 4 cooking points spent
- +1 Dodge Bonus to AC per 4 cooking points spent
- +1 Natural Armor Bonus to AC per 4 cooking points spent
- +5ft of Movement per 4 cooking points spent
- +1 to casting a 1st level spell without using up a slot per 4 cooking points spent
- +1 Bonus Essentia per 4 cooking points spent
6 Cooking Point Buffs:
- - +1 to casting a 2nd level spell without using up a slot per 6 cooking points spent
And for every 2 Cooking Points you spend, the total spell level that can be buffed to have an extra charge for casting goes up by 1. For example, 3rd level spells can be cast 1 more time than normal if you spend 8 cooking points, and then for an extra 8, the caster can cast an extra 3rd level spell.
...
I hope this all made sense. If you have questions, comments, and/or concerns about this, please comment, I could use your feedback.
WARNING: Long post incoming!
Before I get to the process of how to make food, I want to define some key terms:
Familiar Food: When one selects to take up at least 1 rank in Professions or Crafts directly related to cooking, they choose up to 3 foods that they will consider familiar. Whenever they cook with one of those 3 foods as a main course, then the food gets to add +2 cooking points when the food is all done cooking. I will explain cooking points in a later paragraph, but they are good things to have a lot of.
Main Dish: If someone were to cook a feast or a meal with multiple kinds of dishes, then the cook has to choose what will be the main dish. Once chosen, the other dishes are side dishes. The trick with main dishes is to prepare the main dish with a base component of a food that is familiar to the cook, hence the Familiar Food above.
Side Dish: When a main dish is chosen, the other dishes cooked for that meal become side dishes.
Dip: A dip is a substance that you dip something into to give that substance a flavor, like for example, using Ranch Dressing as a dip for a chicken wing. Dips are a "weaker" food, but are often a good compliment for some blander foods one might cook. But when tallying up the Cooking Points the whole meal provides, you count the DC of the dip as being the total DC of cooking the dip - 10. For example, making Ranch dressing takes a cooking DC of 14 to cook. But then when tallying up your total Cooking points, you count the Ranch dressing as being a DC of 4 to cook, rather than 14, but only for tallying up Cooking Points.
Marinade: A marinade is similar to a dip, except that a marinade is a sauce specifically made for slathering a meat or vegetable even. When you apply a marinade to a food, you add to the food's total DC the DC that it takes to cook up the marinade in the first place -10. In the end, making a marinade has an equivalent effect to a dip, but making a dip for a marinated thing might not be the best combination. I'll include notes about combination after the following example with commentary.
I think those are a good bunch of terms to keep in mind when you read the following rules. I've explained the rules as an example with commentary:
...
1. Suppose our cook, Harry the Cleric, wants to prepare a hearty dinner for his friends after a long day of adventuring.
Harry happens to have a lot of different food items swimming around his backpack, but he figures that everyone, Perry the Druid included, wants a tender beef steak tonight.
So Harry pulls out a chunk of steak, and slaps it over a metal sheet to begin his preparations.
...
Here, Harry is beginning his cooking with a base food, being steak in this case. This base food is what will define what the rest of the meal will be like.
A steak alone is easy to cook in comparison to other foods, but Harry isn't going to just cook a steak; Harry is going to cook food fit for a king, if not, a noble, and if not, for a starving group of adventurers. The more complex stuff Harry does with the steak, the higher the cooking DC gets when determining if the food comes out cooked right.
RULE 1: When starting with a food base, unless stated otherwise, the initial cooking DC is 10.
Now Harry is ready to continue cooking.
...
2. Harry inspected this raw steak, and thought about what he can do to add flavor to it. So he went and asked Perry the Druid to go out into the woods and come back with some spices, to which Perry obliged, because running around in the woods was his favorite thing to do. When Perry was done prancing, he came back to Harry with some spices; a lot of mint, rosemary, and peppers. Harry then pulled out a little salt, and began to mix the spices together, and then slathered the spices all over the steak.
...
What Harry did here was that he modified the steak to make it a little more tasty. This particular modification is a pretty simple one, so it doesn't add a lot to the total DC to cook the food. In fact, it only adds +1 to the total DC to cook the steak, thus making the total DC become 11.
...
3. As Harry is staring at this steak caressed in spices, and is wondering what he can do to make this steak even more exciting than it is right now. Then Harry pulls out some mustard seed, a lemon, some water, some vinegar, and some honey. Then he looked back down at the steak he was preparing and then Harry smiled and then he said, "I can make mustard sauce with this!"
...
Now Harry is off to go and cook something separate from the steak, being a sauce that will later be part of the steak, but in the process of it being cooked, its a separate part.
In the case of Mustard Sauce, you begin at the base of it being Mustard Seed, which gets ground down. The process of preparing the mustard seed takes a cooking check DC of 10. Then by adding the additional stuff to make it into a paste, which is a straight-forward process, you add +1 to the DC for every ingredient being added, being water, lemon juice, vinegar, and honey. Add those together, and you get a cooking DC of 14 to make the Mustard Sauce.
This Mustard Sauce will be used like a dip, rather than a marinade. If this sauce were to be used to marinade the above steak, then you add to the DC of cooking the steak the DC it takes to make the mustard sauce - 10 (Coming out to add +4 to the DC to cook the steak if being applied to the steak during cooking).
But again, this is being used as a dip and not a marinade, so the DC for cooking the mustard sauce will not be applied to the total DC for cooking the steak.
...
4. Now Harry stuck the steaks onto the metal slab over the campfire, and Harry has his mustard sauce in preparation when he had another thought, "Say, I could cook some vegetables!"
So Harry searches his backpack, and he pulls out a sack with a few potatoes left, thankfully, there are enough to feed everybody, which Harry can use, but Harry still needs vegetables, as potatoes are grains, and not vegetables.
Harry then looked at Perry and says, "Hey Perry, can you go and fetch me some vegetables from the forest?" To which Perry happily hurried into, and returned with a bundle of carrots, mushrooms, leeks, and onions (Either Perry is resourceful, or the forest is just that awesome).
While Perry did that, Harry found a good deal of butter, and some cheese. Then he looked over at the potatoes and got another idea.
In that time, Perry delivered the vegetables.
...
Harry is now plotting new foods with different bases than the steak or mustard mentioned above. The difference however is that the food above is intended to be its own separate entity rather than as part of the steak, even if the mustard was intended to be used for dipping rather than as a marinade, it still bears differentiating that potatoes weren't meant to have steak dipped into it by the time of its cooking.
...
5. Harry began to mash the potatoes in with butter and cheese and onions and began to bake the mixture in a Portable Oven. Meanwhile he begins to use some spices lying around and butter and slathers the vegetables with them, and then adds a dash of salt atop the vegetables, and then begins to grill them on the side of the steaks.
...
By the time Harry got around to the potatoes, he treated the potatoes like a base for cooking the potato dish, to which he mashed them up with butter, cheese, and onions. Mashing is a straight forward process that takes a bit of patience (+1 to the cooking DC), and then also having other foods applied, some of which have a harder time of mashing, like the onions, meaning that onions add to the DC of cooking. The Butter and cheese are fairly easy to mash, adding +1 and +1 again, but onions being more to mix than mash add +2 to the DC, totalling the cooking of the mashed potatoes at a DC of 15.
Then there were the vegetables, what is the base? Is it the Carrots? Onions? Mushrooms? or the Leeks? In this case, all of the vegetables are the base, and not just one specific one. However if one of those foods is familiar to Harry, then Harry does get a slight bonus at the end of cooking, which will be explained later. If however Harry was familiar with cooking one or more of those vegetables, like say, Harry was familiar with cooking carrots and mushrooms, then Harry would have to pick either the carrots or the mushrooms to get a Cooking Point bonus from, which will be explained in a greater detail later.
The Vegetables however having a base of different kinds of vegetables adds a +1 to the DC of cooking the dish. Start with any vegetable, which in Harry's case, decides to focus on the carrots. Then from there, the mushroom, onion, and leeks add a +1 to the cooking DC totalling at 13. But then with the spices, he adds a +1 to the DC of cooking them, totalling now at a DC of 14.
...
6. With Harry busy cooking, something struck him, he forgot the dessert! So Harry rushed back and sifted through his bags for anything, and from here he found some more honey, a pound of flour, another pound of butter, and a pound of sugar. Excellent! Time to make pound cake, but the honey, yeah, Harry will use the honey as a filling for the pound cake.
...
So Harry put the flour into a large bowl he carried around, and then he dumped the butter and sugar inside, and began to mix away by hand, using flour as the base ingredient. With Butter and Sugar being easy to mix with flour, and the fact that its all being mixed adds +1 to the DC as well, totalling the DC of making the Pound Cake into a dough blob at a DC of 13.
But then Harry wants to do something special with the dough blob. So Harry pulled out some Blind Beans, and stuffed them into the blob of dough, and then put it into another rack of the Portable Oven. The act of stuffing like that is moderately difficult, adding +3 to the total DC, clocking the total DC at 16.
Then when Harry is done, he'll pull the cooked pound cake out of the oven, and pull the beans out, and then stuff it in with a big gob of honey, adding +1 to the DC, making it a DC of 17 to cook the pound cake.
...
7. The steaks are grilled, the potatoes cooked, the vegetables grilled, the dipping sauce made, and the pound cake baked, all of this food is ready to be served to the hungry adventurers.
But there is one more thing Harry must do mechanically to see what kinds of things his adventuring partners could benefit from his cooking. These benefits can be added hitpoints, to added saving throws, to even more times to cast a spell or increased speed, or if the food isn't generic, a new ability for a short duration!
The strength of those buffs however are measured as Cooking Points.
To find out how many Cooking Points Harry can spend on this meal he prepared for his fellows, he begins firstly by reviewing what kinds of foods he is familiar with cooking, which in Harry's Case, he is familiar with cooking, "Chicken, Beef, and Rabbit". Then if any of the main courses consists of a food base that is the same as any one of his familiar cookings, then Harry gains +2 bonus Cooking Points when allocating points for cooking.
The next step Harry goes though is determining which part of the meal is the "Main Course", and which are the "Sides". For this, Harry looks for either Chicken, Beef, or Rabbit as a base in any of his food, and Harry realized that the steaks he cooked was beef, and so he selected to have Steak be the main course, adding an instant +2 Cooking Points.
Next, Harry looks at his Cooking skill ranks, to which Harry has 7 ranks in Cooking. Each rank Harry has in Cooking is 1 more Cooking Point per rank towards the total, meaning an instant 7 Cooking Points, adding it to +2 for the main course being beef, equals 9.
Now Harry goes and adds up the total DCs of cooking all the other food together, which includes the steak, the mustard sauce, the potatoes, the vegetables, and then the pound cake. After that, the number is divided by 10.
The numbers are: 11 + 4 + 15 + 14 + 17 = 61
Now divide this by 10, and you get: 61/10 = 6.1
Then rounded down, the total becomes 6. (Even if the total comes up to 69, you still drop it down so the total becomes 6)
Harry adds 6 to 9, making it so that Harry has 15 Cooking Points to spend on buffs for his party.
...
Additional Rules and Comments:
All that the Cooking DCs really determine are if you've cooked the food successfully. However, not all failures are total failures, in that a food can still be good, even if its been burned. For this, you subtract the "failed" roll on the player's part by the total DC it would take to cook it. For example, a chicken dish takes a DC of 18 to cook. The player however ends up rolling a low number, and after all the modifications, ends up with 15 as the result. The chicken dish ends up not being so savory, and the penalty would be measured as, (The Food's DC to cook - The Player's Cooking Outcome (But only if lower than the Food's DC)). So, 18 - 15 = 3. This means that you treat the chicken dish as if it were worth a DC 15 to cook rather than a DC of 18, meaning less possible Cooking Points.
As a whole, the players can only benefit from Cooking Points if they are hungry, and also up to a maximum of 3 times per day, and they get as many cooking points worth as the cook cooks into the food. If a character isn't hungry when they eat the food, they gain no Cooking Points worth of buffs. How does one measure hunger? Give about a few hours for adventurers, and they'll be hungry. At least thats my rule of thumb. Also, the cooking point benefits only last until the players get hungry again, or until after 6 hours.
Also, what if a creature that doesn't need to eat wants Cooking Points, like a Warforged or an Outsider? Those creatures can eat as well and gain the cooking points, but they can only benefit from cooking points once every few hours like a human, and only up to 3 times per day. I don't know if a Warforged has the capacity to eat, but I would personally rule the eating in their favor, but if you don't think it makes any sense, then rule accordingly.
Also a Variant Rule, is that for every dish and/or dip that the cook is cooking at the same time, you add +2 to the DCs of all the dishes to cook for every dish being cooked at the same time, but only if the total number of dishes being cooked at the same time are 2 or higher. So if you're cooking 3 dishes at the same time, then you add +4 to the cooking DCs of all the food being cooked. This variant rule is meant to measure the attention span of the cook, especially of the cook is a human. Whether or not you want to add those DCs to the total number of Cooking Points at the end is up to you.
But what if some of the ingredients didn't go well together when mixed?
In the above examples, Harry used ingredients that went well with each other, but what if there's an ingredient in a food that just doesn't work?
Suppose Harry used Salt instead of Sugar in the Pound Cake, which makes for a much more disgusting cake than if it were sugar. Still though, it cooks just as easily with salt as it does with sugar, making the total cooking DC the same. However, because the end product isn't so delicious, the DC for determining the amount of Cooking Points received drop by -10 - 1 (1 being because salt added +1 to the DC of cooking the cake), making the total out to be effectively +6 rather than +17.
Though some foods don't go as well with certain foods, but also doesn't ruin the dish, like salt ruins Pound Cake in heavy quantities. When its an odd flavor in the dish, just subtract from the total whatever modifier the food added to cooking it when figuring out exactly how many Cooking Points one gets.
But at the same time, some foods that go strangely for some people don't go so strangely for others, be they human, or orc, or dragon even. Rule accordingly, this kind of stuff is to be determined by the GM's intuition, and some player's convincing too.
But for my last note, I want to include the kinds of things you can spend Cooking Points on. Each of the following stacks on top of each other, meaning you can purchase multiple of the same thing, and it will stack:
List of Cooking Point Buffs:
1 Cooking Point Buffs:
- +1 Hitpoint per cooking point spent
- +1 Skill Point to a specific skill per cooking point spent
2 Cooking Point Buffs:
- +1 to a specific Saving Throw per 2 cooking points spent
- +1 to damage with all physical attacks per 2 cooking points spent
- +1 to damage with all spell attacks per 2 cooking points spent
- +1 to damage with all psionic attacks per 2 cooking points spent
- +1 to casting a 0th level spell without using up a slot per 2 cooking points spent
- +1 to Power Points total per 2 cooking points spent
- +1 to Initiative per 2 cooking points spent
- +1 to SR per 2 cooking points spent
- +1 to PR per 2 cooking points spent
4 Cooking Point Buffs:
- +1 to all saving throws per 4 cooking points spent
- +1 to melee attack rolls per 4 cooking points spent
- +1 to ranged attack rolls per 4 cooking points spent
- +1 to touch and ranged touch attacks per 4 cooking points spent
- +1 Dodge Bonus to AC per 4 cooking points spent
- +1 Natural Armor Bonus to AC per 4 cooking points spent
- +5ft of Movement per 4 cooking points spent
- +1 to casting a 1st level spell without using up a slot per 4 cooking points spent
- +1 Bonus Essentia per 4 cooking points spent
6 Cooking Point Buffs:
- - +1 to casting a 2nd level spell without using up a slot per 6 cooking points spent
And for every 2 Cooking Points you spend, the total spell level that can be buffed to have an extra charge for casting goes up by 1. For example, 3rd level spells can be cast 1 more time than normal if you spend 8 cooking points, and then for an extra 8, the caster can cast an extra 3rd level spell.
...
I hope this all made sense. If you have questions, comments, and/or concerns about this, please comment, I could use your feedback.
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