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Old 04-20-2017, 05:53 PM   #161
Bruno
 
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Default Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Housekeeping

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Originally Posted by Flyndaran View Post
Put non-metal object in box, push buttons to heat, take out object, and eat doesn't sound remotely requiring weeks worth of learning to me.
"Put non-plastic object in box, push buttons to heat, take out object, and eat" is exactly how an oven works, but being a baker is freeking wizardry.

The sheer number of professionally trained chefs on e.g. Cutthroat Kitchen who are profoundly at sea with a microwave (who tries to cook a whole chicken in a microwave when they only have 10 minutes?) says that microwaves are definitely not magic cooking boxes.

Cooking a pre-packaged microwave meal according to the directions is pretty easy, but that's the same as the oven-ready "TV Dinners" of TL 6 and early TL 7. I won't say "that's not cooking" because that's ridiculous - but it's a pretty good task modifier.

I have a microwave cookbook from the end of TL 7 that covers how to cook tin-tray foil-covered oven-designated TV Dinners in the microwave. Safely. And without setting fire to your apple crumble while you try to defrost the creamed corn! Also the secret on how to brown meat in the microwave (it involves abusing metal), how to boil an egg or bake a potato without it exploding, and various other things that are Not Done any more, because the general public have consigned the microwave to "defrost convenience food and reheat my coffee".

(EDIT: Sorry, I've had this argument before, repeatedly, and now I have a pre-packaged rant)
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Old 04-20-2017, 08:09 PM   #162
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Default Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Housekeeping

It isn't Cooking. It's Housekeeping, which is somewhat like Soldier in that it can only do things that other proper skills would allow with a +4 or so bonus.
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Old 04-20-2017, 09:03 PM   #163
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Default Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Housekeeping

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Originally Posted by Phil Masters View Post
And second, there's division of labour. As Bill says, in pre-modern societies especially, marriage is very much the expected norm because it's a practical partnership in which the man goes out and grows crops or earns cash while the woman stays home and does Housekeeping for both of them. The pre-TL8 sitcom stereotype of the man who comes home at the end of a long day at work and then slobs out while his long-suffering wife cleans around him doubtless has a basis in truth for many, many families.
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Yes, but this is a moralistic fable about gender roles or gender relations, so cases which don't fit the moral get quietly ignored. I can't think of any of those American sitcoms where the husband is portrayed as having overcome more by 5 pm than the wife and therefore it being fair for them to take a break.

Edit: in other words, when I spoke of "that pattern" I meant the literary one you described in '90s sitcoms, not the real one from the preindustrial world which you described in previous paragraphs.

In Greg Laden's version of the fable the men of the village spent a lot of time sitting around and telling hunting stories and enjoying the local intoxicant and talking about the awesome hunt they were going on real soon now, while the women of the village were moving and working with their hands. But again, I don't know if he was telling it as objective observation, or as a topos to influence a conversation about gender in the US.
Actually there is one Sitcom that comes to mind as the exception. Married with Children where the running gag was Peg did almost nothing all day while Al struggles at a job he hates. Though mysteriously the Bundy household is will maintained. I can only guess that Kelly and Bud did a lot of chores.
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Old 04-20-2017, 10:33 PM   #164
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Default Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Housekeeping

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Originally Posted by Flyndaran View Post
It isn't Cooking. It's Housekeeping, which is somewhat like Soldier in that it can only do things that other proper skills would allow with a +4 or so bonus.
A good point, and it brings up some general questions of mine I didn't know I had. ^^'

Doesn't GURPS only require a roll when it is, well, significant? Rolls against base skill are for "adventuring" conditions. Many things a chef would do in his normal kitchen are going to get circumstantial bonuses. How do you calculate that +4; is it over the bonuses one might get for not being in an adventuring situation, or does it include them?

Which could make avoiding TL penalties even more important. I can tell it is late, I think I am simultaneously agreeing and disagreeing with Flyndaran. As TL advances, there are more labor saving devices that Housekeeping is going to cover the use of because they grant hefty bonuses to even the unskilled. On one hand, the Housekeeper from a lower or higher TL should be able to adjust, but on the other hand, these technologies are why I'd often give someone a bonus when using the Housekeeping Skill and a bigger bonus when using the appropriate narrow focus Skill.

I... should probably just turn in. ;)
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Old 04-21-2017, 04:21 AM   #165
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Default Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Housekeeping

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Originally Posted by Otaku View Post
Doesn't GURPS only require a roll when it is, well, significant? Rolls against base skill are for "adventuring" conditions. Many things a chef would do in his normal kitchen are going to get circumstantial bonuses. How do you calculate that +4; is it over the bonuses one might get for not being in an adventuring situation, or does it include them?
Yeah, but one of the great things about this game is that if I want to run GURPS Aluminium Chef the system will cope with it.
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Old 04-21-2017, 07:02 AM   #166
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Default Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Housekeeping

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Yeah, but one of the great things about this game is that if I want to run GURPS Aluminium Chef the system will cope with it.
Aye, but unless you choose to amend the rules, you'll still only be making rolls when it is significant. This is flexible in that when a simple DX+10 roll to avoid dropping something matters, a character has to make that simple DX+10 roll. What doesn't change are things like the Task Difficulty guidelines on p. B345-346.

Knowing GURPS, I wouldn't be surprised if there are more advanced rules for Cooking somewhere, but I don't own them so looks like I'll be trying to extrapolate from the Driving example given. For a +4 or +5 task involving the Driving Skill, it reads

Quote:
Originally Posted by p. B345
Most mundane tasks, including rolls made by ordinary people at day-to-day jobs. Example: A driving roll to commute to work in a small town.
Applying that to Housekeeper, I'm thinking that would include most cooking rolls to fix a simple, traditional meal for your culture. Not completely from scratch, not with a complicated recipe, but a simple meal. Don't think "recipe", think "common cooking knowledge or following instructions on the box". ;)

Which, getting back to where I originally jumped in on this part of the discussion, is where TL matters. For a late TL7, TL8, and probably at least an early TL9 kitchen, the microwave oven is a huge time saver, even if you're not using it to fix stuff only intended to be cooked in the microwave. A typical meal at my house might include a main dish heated in the oven, but the frozen vegetable and certain ingredients e.g. boiling water, melting butter, etc. heated in the microwave. This frees up the stovetop for other things, and is faster, requires less attention, or both.

Housekeeping covers more than food prep, so I'd handle a missing microwave as just a -1 equipment penalty, and if that seems too severe, I would probably also just make failures by a small margin (one to three) varying levels of late but otherwise successful. Now, if the entire household is TL6 and I've got TL7 Housekeeping skill? Either the familiarity bonus or the TL bonus (maybe both), really are going to handicap housekeeping until you get used to them.
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Old 04-21-2017, 08:21 AM   #167
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Default Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Housekeeping

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I've met men who were always chased out of the kitchen by their mothers. They tend to lack the cooking part of default Housekeeping; they learn it as adults but it's slower and harder for them.
I met a young man on my first acting tour who had been brought up by doting parents and had never had to work out how to use a laundromat. I, having been to university, had already gone through that particular initiation.

However, this thread is making me aware how many skills I use from default, never having tried to study them seriously. Housekeeping and Professional Skill(Librarian) are two that strike me, looking around the flat.

I probably have a few points in both Cooking and Research however.
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Old 04-21-2017, 08:49 AM   #168
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Default Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Housekeeping

I have cooked whole chicken in the microwave before! And liver to

The secret to microwaving chicken is to have a STALWART microwave that can really crank, feeble microwaves take forever to cook the pink out and when it's done the chicken no longer resembles food

I actually use a microwave fish recipe that is not only quick and easy, but very good

How much is the penalty for housekeeping if people have quirk 'Hates washing dishes' and require a will roll to dirty anything, using only paper plates, plastic silverware, tin foil and other disposable cooking supplies?

Anyway, I can do microwaving a chicken, but anyone microwave a Turkey?
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Old 04-21-2017, 03:53 PM   #169
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Default Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Housekeeping

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Originally Posted by Kalzazz View Post
I have cooked whole chicken in the microwave before! And liver to
When you have to get chicken cooked in 10 minutes you don't put the carcass in whole, which is why I put those constraints on my statement. The microwave can cook all the meat on a chicken in 10 minutes, but you have to cut it up or, as you noted, you don't get more than the surface cooked.

If you have more time, you can totally roast an intact chicken carcass on the bone.

But the point of that is that a microwave isn't a robot with Cooking (or even merely Housekeeping) skill, and in and of itself doesn't give any more a skill bonus than other usual heat sources.

It also takes specific training to use, beyond "Here's how to set the heat, here's how to set the time". A experienced, professionally trained chef had no damn clue what to do with a microwave, had 10 minutes to cook chicken (he didn't even need the entire chicken, he needed two chicken breast cuts), and stuffed the whole damn thing in the microwave. Other chefs repeatedly made "rookie" errors with the microwave because they had no clue how to cook with it.

It's an interesting thing, because given totally bizarre heat sources, most chefs adapt. Ultimately, cooking on a 500-watt halogen lamp is inconvenient because it only has one setting (super hot) and it's hard to put a frying pan on it - but they look at it, recognize that it's a direct heat source like an electric stove top element, and that it's just totally non-ergonomic. They've had to make convection ovens out of tinfoil and a heat gun, and the errors there were construction problems, not "I don't know the basics on how to cook with this kind of heat". Those were Improvised tools (-5 penalty) to use with their training. Or that coffee machine that they keep making them cook on - they hate it because it's stupid, but they know what to do with it.

Apparently the microwave just isn't taught wherever these chefs get their training.

The people who did know what to do with the microwave were e.g. the Grandmas from the Grandma special, the bakers[1], and people who got training outside of the formal chefs training (including the over achievers who got all the training everywhere).

[1] Microwaves are great at certain kinds of cake baking.
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Old 04-21-2017, 04:24 PM   #170
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Default Re: [Basic] Skill of the week: Housekeeping

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"Put non-plastic object in box, push buttons to heat, take out object, and eat" is exactly how an oven works, but being a baker is freeking wizardry.
Alchemy surely.
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