Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

Sorry but that table is very "swingy" and the results seem very OUT OF LINE for what the spell costs and does.

I'd think it would be far more reasonable to use a 3d6 table and most of the middle of the chart (where the rolls should mostly land) will be more minor.

3d6:

3. Horrible smell produced which lasts 1d hours, food is inedible
4. Raw material turns to mush and is unusable
5. Food is hard as a rock and inedible
6. Food created is spoiled and smells bad
7. Food created is spoiled and smells bad
8. Food created smells fine but causes illness in anyone failing HT roll
9. You lose the ability to cast Create Food for 1d days
10. No food is created and you lose sense of taste and smell for 1d days
11. Food created looks/smells fine but causes illness in anyone failing HT roll
12. Food created looks/smells fine but causes illness in anyone failing HT roll
13. You lose the ability to cast Create Food for 1d days
14. No food is created and you lose sense of taste and smell for 1d days
15. You lose the ability to cast Create Food for 1d days
16. Lose 1d extra fatigue and lose ability to cast Create Food for 1d+2 days
17. A noxious fire breaks out emitting smoke, inhaling it causes 1d6 dmg
18. A monster related to food you are creating is appears, e.g. demon

NOTE: In order for some of these to work you need to make Create Food roll for the player in secret. Maybe only do so if they are using Create Food in Town.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

One thing I might consider allowing though is that if you have Create Food, or some other way to mitigate expenses, is to just let you buy an appropriate level of Independent Income - you get to pay less, it doesn't waste any more of our time doing stuff like rolling for the Create Food spells, and, importantly, it's generalizable to any other excuse somebody might have for a lower CoL, without being unfair to the players that don't get the cost break for "free" because the can come up with a story why their powers should stretch to it.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

Honestly, the reason an adventuring wizard doesn't use create food for meals is "I want better food than this and I can afford it", possibly with a side order of "I have better uses for magical energy". DF doesn't have any real incentives for the PCs to go out and live the high life (nor did D&D), but that's the realistic likely money drain on adventurers.

A house rule I've considered is something like
Easy Come, Easy Go
If your net worth (including items and cash) exceeds your base wealth (from wealth and points for cash), you're inclined to go out and live the high life. Add 1% of the difference to your weekly cost of living.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

I do something similar, but I use Claim to Hospitality. I understand the simplicity of Independent Income, but I was looking for an Advantage that was already in DF and wanted to avoid "importing more monetary Advantages", just to avoid the headache of that (I show the 'behind the scenes' work on created Advantages for my games so my Players can see my methodology, so if they want to create their own Ads and Dis, they'll have an idea of what I'd be doing).

I split the "weekly upkeep" into 3 things of $50 each: Food, Shelter, and Gear Upkeep.

Side note, I start handing out penalties for eating terrible food, having terrible sleeping and/or shelter conditions, consistently having improper, substandard, or damaged tools/equipment, etc. Above and beyond the standard FP/HP losses and incidentals like "your rope breaks as you swing across the ravine" type stuff. I have "Accidental Equipment Damage" entries on my Wandering Damage Chart.

This goes for the Hirelings as well...

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

Hm. It might be reasonable to import some sort of status into DF. For example:

Adventurer Status
Delvers have status like everyone else... it just works differently. For delvers, this is a measure of fame and reputation, and its concrete effect is that it determines what quests you are offered; a status-0 adventurer doesn't get offered more than status-0 quests, and so on. In general, higher status quests have larger rewards (but more dangerous opposition); multiply rewards by a wealth level that matches your status. The drawback is that higher-ranked adventurers are expected to live like it; multiply cost of living by the same value.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

To avoid confusion, instead of calling it "Adventurer Status", we could call it "Adventurer Level". Maybe tie some other stats and ability packages to the Adventurer Level so we could just look them up on a table rather than having to work out the details point-by-point. Completing an adventure bumps up your Adventurer Levels, the players go look up their new abilities, and you're off again!

Could lead to a great new RPG system design.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

Just to follow up on this comment, it can be helpful to recall that the inspirations for tuning and subsetting GURPS into DFRPG included not just D&D, but also the "roguelikes" computer games. Rogue, Nethack, Moria... kids these days don't even know what it's like to be menaced by an advancing capital Q... let's skip ahead to Diablo. Actions, dungeons, kill things and take their stuff, town is just the place to dump loot and buy more gear.

"Credible and immersive environment" wasn't high on the list of priorities for DF. Making it easier to run games in that particular and very popular style was.

In passing, I note that even the most modern editions of D&D and Pathfinder just throw out a single cost-of-living number for various lifestyles, with a couple of exceptions for the survivalists like rangers, while not having paragraphs on how the cleric's Create Food spell can reduce that CoL. You pay it and get on with the adventuring -- and for most, hoping to be successful enough that the food is chump change anyway. We're after priceless unique artifacts and entire castles, not scraping coppers for an apple and maybe a pasty.


Obligatory OOTS: Adventurers Are Coming!

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

Heh. Yes, that works, though I was thinking more about the model I've seen from JRPG-inspired things (does this actually happen in JRPG?) where you might have a quest board, and you have C-ranked quests, and B-ranked, and A-ranked, and S-ranked.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

Or the PCs can make it clear that they would rather invest their money with stuff that is useful to dungeon crawling (e.g.: potions, better weapons, recharging all Power Items, etc) instead of spending it in a Inn. I'm pretty sure the merchants won't refuse to sell their products and services to outsiders, because their gold and gems are as shiny as anyone's else.

And even if the GM wants to enforce some kind of social consequences, there will be some quest to be done because in the end of the day, this is the goal of the game: some monsters to be killed, someone to be rescued, something to be recovered and so on.

Yes, but they don't walk around with big swords and cool armor, they don't fly or throw a lightning bolt from their hands, among other larger-than-life things, in a TL 3 world where most people are boring, nameless peasants.

The only reason for delvers to be treated differently is if they have the Social Stigma disadvantage.

I think it's odd to impose negative reactions because a delver (or delvers) don't want to spend money with Inns. Barbarians and Scouts could even prefer to stay out of the town as much as possible, as they are comfortable living in the wild. Similarly, spell casters can reshape reality to a certain degree, so I think it's quite reasonable that they would rather spend $135 with a Paut or $120 with Minor Healing potion than spending $150 with something that they can create themselves (After all, isn't magic all about solving problems?).

Ultimately, the delvers will be pouring gold in merchant's pockets in some way.

What spell is that?

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

Except that it's not I who is making any assumption. I was just replying to sir_pudding response about Inns food being better than rations.

Why not?

The topic is about Create Food spell. So the question is that if you can get food from somewhere, you don't need to buy it.

Besides, DF/DFRPG makes it crystal clear that the $150/week is for food and logging. Anything besides that is an additional service or good that is outside of the scope of the cost of living in a town.

"Special snowflake cheapskate"? Seriously??

Why waste money with something that you can provide to yourself, when you can spend that same money on another resource?

You're making this sound as if we were talking about an economics dissertation, when instead it's something that can be easily done in 1 minute. Rations give an idea about how much food costs; decide if a meal in a Inn would cost more or less and voilà. That's all.

And I don't think it's fair for the reasons stated above, but as usual, the GM can always say whatever he/she wants.

The only assumption here is that at least one of the PCs have the spell (as it was implied by the OP), because there would be not even a reason to talk about this subject otherwise. And in that case, the only cost is in energy (and if he has Create Food 20 and organic matter, not even that).