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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8144308" data-attributes="member: 6779196">I’d honestly just wing such a challenge. Your players have a goal: defeat the fae lord in a cooking challenge. You have an obstacle in the way of that goal: the fae lord  himself, and his preternatural cooking skills. It’s up to the players to come up with a plan to resolve that conflict, and it’s up to you to apply the rules of the game to resolve the outcomes of the players’ actions. Fortunately for you, your source of conflict is also naturally dynamic, so you can have it react to the players’ actions, making the encounter far more interesting than a static challenge would be.The one thing I wound caution you against is breaking this potentially dynamic encounter down into a series of simple execution challenges. If the encounter is just roll to gather ingredients, roll to prepare the ingredients, roll some number of times to cook the meal, roll to plate and present it appealingly, try to get enough successes to do better than the fae lord, it’s going to feel static and boring. What you want to do is have the challenge evolve in response to the players choices. Present the players with the scenario and let them come up with their own strategies and declare actions. Resolve those actions as you would, and introduce new complicating elements, like maybe the fae lord tries to sabotage their ingredients or tools. Maybe he uses magic to charm the judges. Maybe he warps time so the players have to rush to get their dish completed while he can take his time. What exactly he’ll do will really depend on what the players do; that’s the advantage of a dynamic source of conflict.If it helps, you could devise a simple system for tracking the players’ progress. Maybe they need X successes before Y failures. Maybe there’s like a judge satisfaction stat that goes up when the players do something well and goes down when they mess something up, and they win when they reach a certain score and fail when it gets to low. But keep it simple. Let your fundamental DMing skills do the heavy lifting, rather than your system design skills.</blockquote>

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