As the SPUs and SD stuff I created was such a crowd pleaser I figured that I would put up my expanded cooking rules. These are based off of the “Using Technical Skills to Build or Repair” on pg 138 of SR4A.


Cooking Skill
Use of the cooking skill is an Intuition+Interests Skill[Cooking] or Intuition+Artisan (Cooking) check. This is not an extended check and one check is made per meal, not per dish. When having a meal of differing complexities use the highest threshold for the entire meal.

SITUATION DICE POOL MODIFIER
Utensils, Kitchen and/or Ingredients Are*:
Inadequate or inferior: –1
Unavailable or making substitutions: –2
Adequate: +1
Superior +2 or more
Prepackaged/SPU: +3
Recipes or Reference Materials:
Available: +1
Augmented Reality Enhanced: +2
Working From Memory:
Character’s Logic is 5+: +0
Character’s Logic is 1–4: –(5 – Logic)
Original Creations:
Character’s Intuition is 5-6: +2
Character’s Intuition is 3-4: +0
Character’s Intuition is 1–2: -2

*Note: These are 3 separate modifiers. You can have a superior kitchen (+1) with adequate utensils (+0), but not have the right type of spice (-2) for a total modifier of (-1).


Meal Creation Thresholds from Rotbart van Dainig
Simple/Prepackaged meals and standard SPU cooking (Mac and Cheese ): 1
Basic/Commonly prepared meals with few ingredients (Hamburgers or Egg Salad): 2
Complex/Made from scratch foods and foods from other cultures (Homemade cherry pie or Pad Tai): 3
Intricate/Gourmet meals made with exotic ingredients or cooking methods (Beef Wellington or Fugu): 5

Meal Creation Success Matrixfrom Rotbart van Dainig
Critical Glitch: Preparer burns themselves or cuts themselves for 1P damage or a utensil can be destroyed.
Glitch: Meal is over spiced or undercooked or slightly burned.
Threshold not reached: Meal is ruined and all ingredients destroyed.
Threshold reached: Good meal that tastes like it should.
1 Net hit: A very enjoyable meal cooked and displayed attractively.
2 Net hits: A pinnacle of epicurean delight. One of the best meals the eaters has ever had.
3 Net hits: An astounding feat of culinary artistry that few can match.



EDIT: Clarified the skills used in cooking checks. Lowered successes so no successes is OK meal. Added bonuses to die pool for prepackaged meals/SPU
Used Rotbart van Dainig's threshold modifications.

Very neat, but some of those thresholds seem a bit high to me. Does this mean the average person (3 intuition and 1 cooking, 4 dice) would regularly fail to make simple or prepackaged meals (threshold 2)?

Come on, don't create new skills for everything - Artisan (Cooking) works just fine.

Indeed - just go with the general thresholds.

I should clarify that, its not a new skill. Per the rules cooking should be an "Interests Knowledge Skill" (and why it is linked to Intuition for skill checks.) rather than an active skill (which would just be a waste of BP or Karma). If you want to use Artisan (Cooking) I guess I can add that too in the text. (Still an Intuition based check).

OK lets take making Mac and Cheese with your standard person. Lets assume he is in the kitchen and has the box handy and it hasn't been sitting in the pantry for 2 years and the milk is not spoiled.

So he starts with 3 intuition and 1 cooking for 4 basic dice.
He gets no bonuses or negatives for the Utensils, Kitchen and/or Ingredients.
He gets another dice for having the box (recipe) on it. +1 dice for a total of 5 dice.

So for your example the guy has a 15% chance of screwing up making the meal. For someone with a 1 in cooking that is entirely possible. (When learning to cook I ruined a lot of things like that because I curdled the milk.)

Ah, sorry. Perhaps I've seen too much Active Skill feature creep over the years.

I agree with that. Nope this is just to fluff out a skill. Again this is all GM caveat on it they or their players want to have a bit more fun with a fluff skill.


I did edit the main post to reflect what skill can be used though so people don't think its an active skill.

I have to agree here that the threshold for success on prepackaged foods should be 0. The maximum hits on prepackaged foods should be based upon the quality of the package. If you buy a really cheap package every hit should count toward quality, with a maximum number of hits of perhaps 1 or 2 (0 you microwaved too long and it is burnt, glitch means you set off the fire alarms).

I think that it is important to set maximum hits for some meals. I don't care how many hits you get, a box of Kraft Mac and cheese is never going to be anything but a 1 or 2 without adding something to it. I think that at 1 hit above threshold meal is average for it's type, not burned or barely edible. If I prepare a meal with a higher threshold (my first sushi threshold of 5 for example) 1 hit over the threshold is still success. In that case, it is tasty, properly prepared, but lacking creativity. As some say "Mechanically correct, but not aestetically pleasing". Possibly there could be more variance based upon value and quality of ingredients.

Low quality
Boxed meal 1-2 max hits
simple ingredients 1-5 nuyen per meal no bonus max hits of 5 (old mirepoix and soy or Freshly killed devil rat)

Medium quality
Multiple ingredient SPU 3 max hits
average ingredients 6 - 10 nuyen oer meal +1 bonus max hits of 8 (Fresh Vegetables, fresh spices, bioengineered chicken)

High quality
Multiple ingredient SPU with multiple flavors 6 max hits
quality ingredients 11 + nuyen per meal Variable bonus no maximum for hits (Finest quality Fresh Vegetables, fresh herbs and spices, free range beef, Sushi grade fish, etc...)

If the meal is simple, and you have the right ingredients, good equipment and utensils (threshold of 4 to make a hamburger as given previously) I would suggest that you need 5 hits to make 1 net hit. the best you can do without high quality ingredients would be 3 net hits, or "A very enjoyable meal cooked and displayed attractively". Not sure, but 8 hits to make an enjoyable meal might be a bit high for a common meal.

intuition of 4, skill of 4 specialization of 2, +1 ingredient, +1 kitchen, +1 utensil, +2 for ARE recipe = 15 dice on average you will get 5 hits which is barely edible. I think that the thresholds need more work.

Of course, the thresholds are quite high, and the success table is pretty harsh, too. Keep in mind that even in SR4A, the threshold table is 1-2-3-5 and that an exceptional success is just 4 net hits.

Drop the critical glitch effect, make the glitch effect the new critical glitch, and the base success the new glitch, then shift accordingly:

Meal Creation Thresholds
Simple/Prepackaged meals and standard SPU cooking (Mac and Cheese ): 1
Basic/Commonly prepared meals with few ingredients (Hamburgers or Egg Salad): 2
Complex/Made from scratch foods and foods from other cultures (Homemade cherry pie or Pad Tai): 3
Intricate/Gourmet meals made with exotic ingredients or cooking methods (Beef Wellington or Fugu): 5

Meal Creation Success Matrix
Critical Glitch: Preparer burns themselves or cuts themselves for 1P damage or a utensil can be destroyed.
Glitch: Meal is over spiced or undercooked or slightly burned.
Threshold not reached: Meal is ruined and all ingredients destroyed.
Threshold reached: Good meal that tastes like it should.
1 Net hit: A very enjoyable meal cooked and displayed attractively.
2 Net hits: A pinnacle of epicurean delight. One of the best meals the eaters has ever had.
3 Net hits: An astounding feat of culinary artistry that few can match.

Why I am I suddenly reminded of "The Wedding Job?"

Oh, yeah.

I was making modifications like you were talking about while you were typing this. Dropped the 0 hits to Edible. Added +3 for prepackaged food or SPUs.

Should make things more even now.

I would just like to point out, that in a thread about cooking, you have an avatar with his hands over his mouth. Perhaps his is trying to avoid throwing up?

BIG OPPS

OK I cute and pasted threshold when I meant the target number to beat. So for Mac and Cheese 2,3,4,5 count as successes towards the threshold and for Fugu only 6s counted towards the threshold.

No wonder people thought it was impossible to cook.

I know there is a proper term for changing the target number for successes. Anyone know it off hand?

Double post says the "Yan can cook and so can you!"

In SR4a, the Target Number is always 5. I don't think that there is a term for changing it.

Then the question is do I get rid of that table or let it stand? It is a house rule at the end of the day...

But I do so love keeping it RAW.

See my post.

I wouldn't give a penalty for working from memory. If you cooked a meal often before, you shouldn't get a penalty for doing it from memory. Especially if its something relatively simple.

I would base the skill off a rating 3 skill + rating 3 attribute. Runners for various reasons probably don't have time to learn how to cook, so no wonder they can mess up.

Ok, Lets do it your way...


Meal Creation Thresholds from Rotbart van Dainig
Simple/Prepackaged meals and standard SPU cooking (Mac and Cheese ): 1
Basic/Commonly prepared meals with few ingredients (Hamburgers or Egg Salad): 2
Complex/Made from scratch foods and foods from other cultures (Homemade cherry pie or Pad Tai): 3
Intricate/Gourmet meals made with exotic ingredients or cooking methods (Beef Wellington or Fugu): 5

Meal Creation Success Matrixfrom Rotbart van Dainig
Critical Glitch: Preparer burns themselves or cuts themselves for 1P damage or a utensil can be destroyed.
Glitch: Meal is over spiced or undercooked or slightly burned.
Threshold not reached: Meal is ruined and all ingredients destroyed.
Threshold reached: Good meal that tastes like it should.
1 Net hit: A very enjoyable meal cooked and displayed attractively.
2 Net hits: A pinnacle of epicurean delight. One of the best meals the eaters has ever had.
3 Net hits: An astounding feat of culinary artistry that few can match.

Memory is more for someone told you how to do it, or your mom made it that way or you saw it on a show a while ago.

I would change the examples for complex foods. On average that you have to throw 9 dice for that, and I believe that a average cook can whip those up no problem.

Keep the modifiers in mind. You get +4 just for having the right tools, ingredients, recipe and a proper kitchen. If your making it from a mix you get +3 for that too. So if the average person has 6 dice like you suggested then they should be able to make it most of the time.

Ah right, missed that. I guess it works out good then. Given the fact that most ingredients in SR are soy and krill I think that is just about right. Keep up the good work sirs.

P.S. If you want to get really nitpicky, you could cap the net hits for lower "quality" foods. Probably only Gourmet meals should be able to be described as culinary artistry.

Yeah I agree this is way over the top and is way inflexible if a cook has good skills she can recover pretty well even if doing something new. For a RL exampe a couple of months ago I was trying a new sauce for a fish dish. The sauce started to break down but as I looked at it I realized that it looked like a broken mayonais (even though I wasn't using eggs) The was nothing in the recipe about how to fix it or what might have gone worng, but I treated it like a mayonais and soon had it fixed.

In general I like to follow written recipes, even if they're mine "I wrote it down so I wouldn't have ot remmeber it!" but looking at ingredients and how things are developing I can ad-lib pretty well. I followed a recipe for tapinade (an olive paste) and found it way too bitter, just working on my own I subsituted half the mass of olives with aritchoke hearts, which would maintain the mass and texture but cut the bitterness. It works just fine.

It might be over the top, but I'm trying to model cooking in a combat simulator. Its not an easy task.

Well, your rules are missing the boni for having a smartlinked Hellhound biodrone...

But why? My characters usualy have some sort of speicalized cooking skill as a knowledge skill "Cooking- Chinese" "Cooking French" as examles for character development but it would be rare, to say the least, to need this as an active skill in SR.

I addressed this above. Might want to reread the section on the skill test, cooking is not an active skill unless you want to use Artesian for it. Other wise its just a knowledge skill. I don't know why everyone thinks I'm trying to create a new active skill

probably with all the modifiers and such it looks pretty active.

Its tricky with skills that can either be active skills or knowledge skills. It's slowing me down on writing stuff for this for skateboarding, skiing and gambling.

but how often will someone actually ever use that skill? My characvters usually have a cooking skill and RL I love to cook and experiemnt but no one really needs to know that my face had 5 successes against several detractors to create that sushi.

The same for gambling etc. The other problem is that you're making the system overly complicated, highlighing stuff that does need to be developed beyond what is already there. sure you can develop a whole skiing rountine beyond and athletic skill for those runs like the escape in "On her majestiers secret service" or a wild skate bnoard ride down the hills of Seattle-a trip most likely to end in a hospital or Pueget sound, but why? this will slow down game flow and add needless complexity to something that is supposed to be fluid.

Because sometimes people want to show off in a non-combat way. I've played with some real heavy RP people and it was important to their character.

ultimately if your players have fun, that's the key thing. I know we'd go nuts with all the rule modifications. Much of our group have done serious mountain climbing in our mispent youth andany time in D&D we'd discuss climibng in caves and such it became a real break down in play while we planned how we'd rig ropes and stuff. Now several of us are highly proficent with guns and happily 'sit on our hands' a lot of the time. (example if they don't want to hear about the problems a woman has with a hsoulder rig, I'm happy to keep quiet. let me character use one even though in real life I hate them and am happy with a hip carry.)