The TTRPG Cooking Minigame
Dinner is finally ready. When I started this blog in the waning days of 2020, my third post ended with the bold claim that “my next post with be a cooking subsystem and other bits and bobs to add to your UVG (or similar) game”. Are you finally ready to smell what the blog’s been cooking?
Every game, with the exception of games inexplicably already about fishing, can be improved by a fishing minigame. However, I am not much of a fisherman, and fishing has never come up in one of my games, despite ample opportunities (perhaps my players are too stocked up on rations to see the rivers they pass as opportunities). Additionally, there are already two excellent fishing minigames in circulation: The Fishing Game, from Marcia of the Traverse Fantasy blog, and Riverbend, from Torthevic and Gustavo Tertoleone. So I looked a bit downstream of fishing: cooking. Every time my players reach a kitchen when exploring a dungeon, they want to cook. And every time I must develop an ad hoc cooking minigame (which is, for what it’s worth, the best way to do minigames. But the second best way is to use some weird blog post you found online).
A minigame should eschew the core mechanic used everywhere else in the game. That is what makes it feel like a minigame and not just an extension of the maxigame. Calling for a Dexterity test for chopping potatoes lacks a certain allure; it just blends into the rest of the game, forgettable, boring.
Blogger’s Note: This, and almost every tabletop cooking minigame I have come across, fails to fully replicate the fun and chaos of cooking. There is obviously a tradeoff between speed of play and accuracy of simulation. We can’t fully replicate cooking, we can’t do it. Now, what we might be able to do is re-create cooking. Re-create cooking in the aggregate. One area that the minigame below misses is the joy of a video game like Overcooked, in which the chaos and collaboration of cooking are on full display. Another is measuring the types of nutrition in a meal and creative uses of monster parts, of which Dungeon Meshi (or Delicious in Dungeon) is the shining example.
When the player-characters are at camp or in a safe place in the dungeon, have access to adequate cooking equipment, and at least two ingredients, they can attempt to cook a succulent meal.
Ingredients
Ingredients come in 5 varieties. Every ingredient, whether bought at a farmer’s market or extracted from the corpse of a monster, falls into one of these types. Each type has an associated Ingredient Die, which will come into play when cooking begins.
| Ingredient Types | Examples | Ingredient Die |
|---|---|---|
| Oils, Herbs, Sweets and Spices | Olive oil, salt, honey | d4 |
| Grains, Starches and Nuts | Rice, bread, beans, walnuts | d6 |
| Produce and Preserves | Onions, potatoes, lemons, jams | d8 |
| Dairy | Eggs, butter, cheeses, milk | d10 |
| Meat | Pork, beef, chicken, fish | d12 |
| Monster Parts | Gelatinous cube, cockatrice, | d20 |
Cooking
To cook a meal, the cooking player-character selects at least two but not more than five ingredients they have on hand. No one type of ingredient can be used more than once. The player describes what type of meal their character is attempting to make. The referee may ask further questions about the meal.
The player then rolls the ingredient die for each ingredient used. For each of the following that is true, the player can reroll one die:
The player-character is a trained chef
The player-character is using cookware
The player-character is following a recipe or cookbook
The player-character is being assisted by at least one other competent character
The meal the player describes sounds delicious or is a novel and inventive use of a strange combination of ingredients, as decided by the referee
The effect of the meal is based on the result of the ingredient dice, after any and all rerolls.
Meals
Each meal produces a number of rations equal to the median die result of the dice rolled. However, each ration may have an additional effect based on the combination of all dice rolled.
That’s right, I’m doing Yahtzee again. If multiple meal types could apply to a combination of dice, the cooking player must choose one. If only one meal type applies, it has that effect. Consuming a meal takes at least one hour.
Inedible Meal (No Matches). These rations deal 1d6 damage.
Fetid Meal (2 of a Kind). Each day these rations are consumed, the chance of random encounters doubles.
Simple Meal (3 of a Kind). Normal rations.
Buffet (4 of a Kind). Produces rations equal to the total rolled.
Comfort Food (Full House [2 of a Kind & 3 of a Kind]). Reduces fatigue or exhaustion.
Hearty Meal (Small Straight [Sequence of 4]). These rations provide 1d6 temporary hit points.
Feast (Large Straight [Sequence of 5]). Cures all disease, poison, and mind-altering spells.
Banquet (Yahtzee [5 of a Kind]). Increase one ability score of your choice by 1.
Dungeon Meshi (Nat 20). Exact effect depends on the monster that was incorporated into the meal. Choose one ability or feature of the monster. When you consume these rations, you gain that ability or feature but it is single use. So one use of a dragon’s fire breath, or a medusa’s petrifying gaze, or a lich’s magic resistance (i.e., the first time you benefit from the magic resistance, it goes away).
Dessert
If this blog post only whetted your appetite for more cooking mechanics, I must recommend Yes Chef!, a cooking supplement for Errant (but generally adaptable to pretty much any fantasy TTRPG). While maintaining elegant rules, Yes Chef! is a more detailed set of rules for cooking than what I present and also has a really inventive use of playing cards. I got one of the physical copy (zine format) and definitely recommend it for those with a defining TTRPG palette.
While I am talking food and TTRPGs (oddly, a recurring theme for me, as evidenced by the games I’ve released to date, which are all either about candy or drinks), my colleague, Ty Pitre of the Mindstorm Press blog, and Barkeep interior artist, Norn, is working on Can’t Take The Heat, a paranormal romance RPG where your monster-characters work together in a restaurant’s kitchen, which will be on Kickstarter later this year. I playtested it and can also attest to it being fun. It reminds me of the Fog of Love board game, but you get to be a Frankenstein or a Vampire, so it’s therefore better.
