How do you do fantasy food in your setting?

How do you do fantasy food in your setting?

The best dishes get up and attack you.

Medium rare typically

Inventing new plants and animals to eat.

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Like minor buff potions that take a lot more material components.

I make them worth the time to partake. They give buffs or temporary ability bonuses when eaten. Trail rations merely restore hp. Everyday meals gives you temp hp plus some more stuff, feasts and special dishes give stat increases and a lot more.

Every time without fail. Fuck you for posting those and making me hungry again.

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Not saying your fun is wrongbad, but for me this is a touch too gamey and cheapens the atmosphere.

Not exactly food, but I had a bunch of custom alcohols made by an alchemist brewer, each with different effects, and not all of them good.
Jackrabbit Whiskey gives you a jump bonus, Melt Liquor deals 1d4 fire damage if you fail a save, Fizzle Glory lets you belch a 1d3 sonic cone, all the way up to the save-or-pass out Dragon Tranquilizer.

I would say cooking should be almost a school of magic on it's own. Then again, it falls into my idea that skills should be allowed to achieve magic like effects when a PC focuses on it.

So someone who's so devoted to cooking should be able to do those things. You prepare a good breakfast for your mates and they feel so invigorated that even though they had a shitty night sleeping they feel like a million bucks. Cooking a meal for your enemies should give you a bonus towards charisma checks. You're so good at cooking that your ranger bro brings back giant scorpians and you feast like your eating lobsters.

Also, that gastro witch is now my waifu.

Cooking is an art and a science, the same as alchemy. A proper chef should be able to cook spellcraft into their dishes, much like an alchemist can brew spellcraft into a draught.

Well it depends on the tone and the magic you are working with.

I like the food to have fictional components so that it is part of exploration, but be mainly mundane.

The social implications of eating dragon should overtake the mechanical effects.

And then a backloaded effect for prolonged consumption maybe. Something more lowkey than eating your buff-food before the battle.

Talking mechanics:
Anybody wander across an interesting system for nutrition in a survival sense?

Clearling in a world where you extract magic abilities by using the properties of the items your using the same could be said for the things you eat. Certain fish and animals with magical properties or by virtue of being magical creatures should obviously have an exploitable effect when cooked.

Cooking should definetly be something an alchemist can do and specialize in.

>incentivising extra effort in cooking and variety in diet beyond rations via benefits is too "gamey"

I mean if people spontaneously want to give attention to food and have a nice atmosphere that's great but you can definitely reward it in mechanical ways too without ruining anything.

Our experiments with using food in games basically introduce it as a meter of it's own, being full (and eating really good food) add small bonuses, mostly mental, while significant lack of food gives penalties,both mental and physical. Eating bad food just makes you sick.

In other words, cooking up a big feast before a fight does not make you a superman, but having a full belly makes you a little more confident, and a little more resolved to win this.

My worlds start wars over who invented a particular variation on a base sauce.
The orcs will let their culinary genius be known! THE FRENCH MUST FRY!

>I would say cooking should be almost a school of magic on it's own.
Sorry, but that's stupid.
That's like saying polishing your shoes is almost the same as enchanting.

>Implying players care
>Implying I should care if they don't

Hey now, the Guild of Urchins, Shoe-Shiners and Paperboys spent much to get it recognised as a sub-category of thaumoperceptive enchanting!
A pair of shoes shined by a master shiner will repel dirt for days and keep your feet warm and dry. Not to mention that it makes you look neat and proper.

A way to show that we aren't on Kansas. What the local tavern or brewer peasant serves works as immersion.

Bat wing powder and lead for seasonings? Dwarven cooking.

Fey spices, which have an undescribable glamoured taste to each individual? Someone is tird with regular pepper and can afford the Ivory Road stuff.