Cooking and Carnivores Brainstorming Help

[crabwizard77]

I had this idea for a RPG that is your standard fantasy dungeon crawling, except:

1. Monsters can be cooked and eaten.
2. Food gives magical benefits.
3. Classes get their abilities from different types of food.

Any ideas for features, classes, mechanics, etc?

Stuff I am probably using.
Classes
Basic Flavors
Three Skill Categories (Cooking, Baking, Brewing)

[josefromeo12]

Imagine an RPG adventure where culinary creativity meets magical prowess. Picture exploring dungeons not just for treasures, but for rare ingredients to cook and devour monsters, much like discovering the best Mexican breakfast in San Antonio that infuses morning magic into your day. In this fantastical realm, classes like Gastronomancers and Brewmasters derive their abilities from culinary expertise, with cooking, baking, and brewing as essential skills. Taste-testing mechanics and recipe gathering akin to hunting for unique flavors in dishes would be part of the journey. Just as savoring a well-prepared breakfast nourishes your day, this RPG blends traditional fantasy with a flavorful twist, celebrating the power of food in both sustenance and magic.

[NichG]

For open-ended crafting-like things (of which cooking can be one), I like the system of recipes, wildcards, keywords, and traits from the Atelier series. So for a cooking game, a recipe might be something like: Crazzard Stew = Crazzard Meat + 2 spices + 1 thickener + 1 vegetable + Boiling, where the 'spices' and 'thickener' and 'vegetable' are wildcard ingredients that can be anything with those keywords. Then each specific ingredient you could use would have sets of traits like Hot, Sour, Sweet, etc, and the cooking method (Boiling) would transform or elevate specific keywords - e.g. maybe Boiling removes any Texture traits the ingredients have.

Then you'd have a list of effects for combinations of traits that the chef managed to get the dish to have. So something that is Crispy, Hot, and Sour might give an attack bonus. Something that is Bitter, Medicinal, and Sweet might heal, etc. If you want it to be difficult, you could have 'incomplete sets' e.g. traits that don't group up with some effect basically add a random negative side-effect or otherwise interfere with the dish working. Or you can have the traits that have actual effects be rarer, more exotic things and have the flavor/texture/etc stuff just be there alongside in case the players ever enter a cooking contest. You can have a variety of cooking skills that have to do with adding, removing, or transforming traits beyond what the cooking method would normally do - someone with a high Boiling skill might be able to only remove the Texture traits they want to remove while leaving others alone, etc.

The thing that then makes it open-ended is you can have sub-recipes, so you can have something like Secret Sauce [spice] = 1 vinegar + 1 sweetener + 1 spice + Fermenting. And in this case because Secret Sauce is a Spice and takes a Spice, it can be fed into *itself* as an ingredient in its own recipe, meaning that this can be used to accumulate and transfer around traits from a variety of different sweetener and vinegar ingredients (which themselves could be the output of recipes rather than just raw materials). You might want to have a limit on the number of traits that can be accumulated into a single intermediate ingredient (based on chef skill perhaps) before it turns into 'mush' or 'inedible glop' or whatever.

[Old Harry MTX]

Some time ago I made an entry for a D&D subclass contest that basically allows the player to cook and eat a monster to temporary gain one of its traits, actions or resistances. I added several rules to avoid more shenanigans as possible, but you probably should not need all of them if you design a game with that idea as main mechanic. Take a look here if you want.

[Notafish]

That was a fun contest.

I'm curious about the concept of "basic flavors" - would these be in monster stat blocks (eg, Dragons are Umami 2, but their scales are Spicy 5)? Would these be descriptive, or would they have mechanical effects?

Depending on how much table time you want to spend on cooking, some other things this concept makes me think of are character knowledge of ingredients (what parts are toxic? Which cooking oils work best?), and whether the cooking process could be treated like an encounter.

[Old Harry MTX]

Mmm, I'm not an expert but I'm sure that there are few tabletop games that ask you to cook, you could take a look at them. For example, representing ingredients as cards could be an easy way to make combination. Each card could add an effect, plus additional effects depending on the combination of colors, seeds and/or types of the cards.

[brian 333]

Mechanically this would be exactly like Alchemy, which has in all editions been a tack-on to Wizard rather than a class itself.

Making this so that each class could benefit from it using their own ability rather than relying upon the party magic-user intrigues me. If a character is sufficiently skilled, he could create his own buffs using his own exp.

I would approach it from the "one at a time" model. Each time you introduce a new creature, choose which parts contain what benefit. You might only do this for creatures your players choose to investigate. You can even have side effects if improperly prepared.
Keep stacking limits in mind. You don't want multiple easily achieved stat-boosters or AC up to Wazoo levels.

Example: Wild Boar

Wild Boar jerky makes excellent trail rations, daily consumption of which grants the benefit of +1 Con, beginning after 3 days. A normal boar can produce a month's worth of jerky for one person, requiring 48 hours of work, uninterrupted except to sleep, eat, and to perform other daily personal needs.
Possible side effect: fight to the death once engaged in melee. Rage automatically triggers this side effect.
Requires spices, 32 cubic feet of firewood, and butcher's tools.
Kinnikinnick is a wild, rare, mountain herb which mutes the gamey flavor of boar, and mitigates the fight to the death side effect.

Example: Dragon Heart
Dining upon a single dragon heart confers the permanent effect of comprehending all spoken languages and written works. Possible additional benefits by dragon type and age may also apply.
Possible side effects include, development of small patches of appropriately colored scales, vulnerability to weapons vs dragons, alignment shift one step toward that of the dragon.
Requires 30 minutes, basic cooking gear, and 5000 exp.

[crabwizard77]

Imagine an RPG adventure where culinary creativity meets magical prowess. Picture exploring dungeons not just for treasures, but for rare ingredients to cook and devour monsters, much like discovering the best Mexican breakfast in San Antonio that infuses morning magic into your day. In this fantastical realm, classes like Gastronomancers and Brewmasters derive their abilities from culinary expertise, with cooking, baking, and brewing as essential skills. Taste-testing mechanics and recipe gathering akin to hunting for unique flavors in dishes would be part of the journey. Just as savoring a well-prepared breakfast nourishes your day, this RPG blends traditional fantasy with a flavorful twist, celebrating the power of food in both sustenance and magic.

Exactly what I was going for

[Lacco]

I had this idea for a RPG that is your standard fantasy dungeon crawling, except:

1. Monsters can be cooked and eaten.
2. Food gives magical benefits.
3. Classes get their abilities from different types of food.

Any ideas for features, classes, mechanics, etc?

Stuff I am probably using.
Classes
Basic Flavors
Three Skill Categories (Cooking, Baking, Brewing)

I'd extend the three skills, so it's possible to get some additional classes and specifics...

Cooking itself can be split into a lot of stuff:

Soup-making
Roasting
Grilling
Sauteeing
Steaming
Stewing
Pressure-cooking
Glazing


Preparation skills are also important:
Butchering (cutting off raw meat)
Cutting (making prime cuts/cutting vegetables)
Marinading
Brining
Stuffing
Charcuterie (making sausages, ham, bacon...)
Pickling

And some additional ideas:
Fermentation
Engastration (stuffing animals into other animals)
Dark cuisine

For baking, the specializations should be more about 'what' we are baking. Bread, pastry, cakes, meat... there is a lot of stuff to unpack.

I'd suggest you check out the following thread on a crazy alchemy idea that I opened a loooong time ago. Can't say it will work, but it may have few ideas for you.

EDIT: Additional idea; the specializations above could be used as 'maneuvers' or techniques in cooking minigame. Each of them would modify the potential result.