What Edition to use II: Electirc Booagloo

[MichaelSomething]

The sequal to a question I asked a couple of months ago on these very forums! What edition would you use for a certain situation? In the first installment, the situation was a poetry contest and 4E was the most popular option.

Now, I want to ask, which edition of D&D would be best for enacting something from the show Dinner Impossible? To sum it all up, you get a chef and have him cater an event, except it's a lot harder then it would normally be due to a bunch of factors like little time/having no food to start with/having only non-chef to help cook/etc. Let me get some YouTube clips so you can see how it works.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWvA64bL5Xo"]Here's one![/ame]

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2541rVvRD9A&feature=channel_page"]Here's another one![/ame]

Some the issues you would deal with is getting the supplies you need (like food, things to cook with, and plates), figuring out how to deal with weird things the event requires (cooking for a culture/in a situation you don't really know), and keeping whatever counts as your "sous-chefs" in line.

This could be the set-up for a silly one shot or as part of a campaign ("The Kingdom wide peace conference will be ruined if we don't get lunch up there RIGHT NOW!")

What Edition would this be best for?

For 4th Edition, it's yet another Skill Challenge! I could ask this question a thousand times, and a skill challenge would be 4th Edition's answers almost every time. Either the skill challenge system is really fexible or really repetitive.

For 3rd Edition, this can be considered one of those situations where casters rule, fighters drool. Hero's feast, Create Food and Water, and Unseen Servent are just some of the endless tools casters have at their disposal. Bards, Rouges and the like can pitch in via skills and certain special abilites. Fighters get to chop stuff. If the Fighter made a good case that a certain feat he has would make him a better chopper, I would say he chops more/better. Of course, any character who happened to have a lot of ranks in Profession: Cook would be quite useful. If you want to boil it all down to a signle roll, you would have to take a -4 or -6 to the roll due to all those negative factors mentioned above.

For the earlier editions, you can't assume that a party would have spells/character abilities that would be useful here. I'm sure they exist but I think it's not very likely. Since there are few rules to apply to such a situation, it would depend largly on DM Fiat, Improv, and maybe some die rolls just because. I'm not sure how it would turn out exactly. It would be highly DM depedent.

I ask this because I'm intrested in how to resolve conflicts that are not fights. Dinner Impossible is pretty close to an adventure where you don't kill anything for XP. It's easy to figure out how to stab a pig, but harder to figure out how to turn it into pulled pork BBQ...

 

[Crothian]

Not D&D, I would go with the only RPG I can think of off the top of my head that deals specifically with food: Ninja Burger!!

 

[Lanefan]

D+D is, at its heart, a very flexible game; and in the uncommon cases where it fails, there are often other RPGs that can pick up the slack.

That said, there are some things that the RPG hobby is just not designed to do. I submit that this is one of those things.

Might I suggest charades instead, only with props?

Lan-"here, eat this"-efan

 

[Oni]

Wouldn't every edition basically handle this in the same way. I.E. break it down into smaller challenges. Players concoct a way to tackle each challenge, use appropriate spell/ability/skill based on how they chose to approach it to determine success. Use relative number of challenges overcome to challenges botched to determine overall outcome. 4e gave the structure a name, but it's not really anything new IMHO.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

I say 4E, because that is what people play. If people don't play, you don't have a game.

 

[Philotomy Jurament]

A narrativist indie game with a couple pages of rules and setting custom designed around the Dinner Impossible concept. Maybe you could make a My Life With Master variant where Master is the Head Chef.

 

[Crothian]

I say 4E, because that is what people play. If people don't play, you don't have a game.

Other people do play other games. And many people are even willing to try a new game even if all they know and play is 4e.

 

[thecasualoblivion]

Other people do play other games. And many people are even willing to try a new game even if all they know and play is 4e.

Still, most people would agree more people play 4E. The biggest obsticle in the RPG world is finding players. Its always easier to find players for the most popular game. Sometimes the choice is between playing what most people play or playing nothing.

A lot of times the best game is the one you can get players for.

 

[Crothian]

Still, most people would agree more people play 4E. The biggest obsticle in the RPG world is finding players. Its always easier to find players for the most popular game. Sometimes the choice is between playing what most people play or playing nothing.

A lot of times the best game is the one you can get players for.

But that isn't what this thread is about. It is given a situation what is the best game for that? It has nothing to do with finding players or popularity of the game.

 

[Obryn]

I vote "Not D&D!"

Maybe FATE. Risus, perhaps?

-O