The Food College Bothers Me

[David Johnston2]

It has one effective attack spell, Thirst. I would kind of prefer it if it had a better Hunger spell. Doing one point of Fatigue per second just doesn't do it for me. Maybe a leveled Hunger spell? Hunger can be really debilitating.

Apart from that, the Food College is just so...utilitarian. When I think of magic chefs I think of Circe who could transform men into animals with the food she served, or that movie about the chef who could put her emotions into her food, or the Wicked Queen's "poison" apple that puts Snow White into hibernation.

[AlexanderHowl]

The Food College was probably developed to deal with the problem of adventures running out of provisions. As for 'attack' spells, there are actually four of them. You have Poison Food, Hunger, Thirst, and Foul Water. Hunger is annoying, Poison Food and Foul Water are quite nasty, and Thirst is absolute horrible (4 FP and 1 HP, with two or more castings making the target unable to speak).

[Refplace]

Not all colleges have to be combat useful. I loved the utilitarian spells in that book. Makes sense in a high magic world that spells would be used for more than adventuring.

[Anders]

Note that Create Food allows you to eat through dungeon walls, shackles, etc.

[Tyneras]

Originally Posted by Anders

Note that Create Food allows you to eat through dungeon walls, shackles, etc.

I've never liked the idea that you can turn a portion of a larger object into food to wear it down. A entire single chain link, fine. The wall? Unless you have the mana to turn the entire wall, and thus the entire dungeon, into food at one go I'm not allowing it.

[adm]

Originally Posted by Anders

Note that Create Food allows you to eat through dungeon walls, shackles, etc.

Originally Posted by Tyneras

I've never liked the idea that you can turn a portion of a larger object into food to wear it down. A entire single chain link, fine. The wall? Unless you have the mana to turn the entire wall, and thus the entire dungeon, into food at one go I'm not allowing it.

Depends on how the wall is made, a brick at a time? Sure, turn that into food. A solid stone wall? All, or none.

[Prince Charon]

Originally Posted by transmetahuman

Why in the world would someone who regularly gets into fights specialize exclusively in the food college? Well, someone with the bad luck to be born with One College Magery: Food College and a frankly insane stubborn refusal to just focus on weapon skills instead, I guess. I'm sure there was someone like that born somewhere in the infinite multiverse - but I doubt he found adventuring companions.

OK, now you're tempting me to write up a specialist mage like that, possibly focusing mainly on Thirst, or inventing a new Starvation spell that has Hunger as a prerequisite and does more damage. I'm not sure that I'm going to, I have other things to work on, but the idea is in my head, now.

Originally Posted by Anders

Too bad Create Food has 30 seconds casting time or you could use it on your foe's weapons and armor.

IIRC, GURPS Technomancer had a spell called Guns To Butter that might have been faster. *goes looking* Yeah, page 22, it takes two seconds to cast; prerequisites are Create Food and Reshape, so it's got a prereq count of, um... 16 (Ouch!). Good justification for it being so much faster than Create Food, which has a prereq count of 5. Another thing to do with Create Food is to develop a version that can transform part of an object, either as a new spell, or a perk-plus-technique of the old one. For anyone able to use the Earth college, though, it would probably be much easier to just learn a few Earth spells if you think you might need to tunnel out of a dungeon one day.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by adm

Depends on how the wall is made, a brick at a time? Sure, turn that into food. A solid stone wall? All, or none.

How the GM handles the setting's metaphysics matters quite a bit here as well. In The Stormlight Archives, the military has slaves gather stones from the surrounding environment to transmute into food, rather than just making it from the ground (or breaking up chunks of the ground and using those). This is because how large an object is identified as (initially by people, but they gain their own identity over time) dictates how hard it is to transmute. A stone considers itself a distinct entity, while a chunk of broken-off ground will still identify as part of the ground, at least for a while. Similarly, in such a setting, individual bricks from a brick wall are likely to be nearly as difficult to transmute as a similar-sized part of a solid wall, as it will largely identify as being the wall, rather than an independent part of it.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Refplace

Not all colleges have to be combat useful. I loved the utilitarian spells in that book. Makes sense in a high magic world that spells would be used for more than adventuring.

The spells in themselves don't bother me. Utilitarian magic certainly has it's place. it's the college that bothers me. I find myself wanting to either see it expanded with more fantastic spells or incorporated into a more expansive college.

[Anders]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

The spells in themselves don't bother me. Utilitarian magic certainly has it's place. it's the college that bothers me. I find myself wanting to either see it expanded with more fantastic spells or incorporated into a more expansive college.

Something like Heroes' Feast from D&D?