Cost of living and Create Food
 

Hi, would you allow a reduced cost of living for a Cleric with Create Food?
If not, why?
If yes, why?

Is there any social or practical consideration to be made?

Me and my player have agreed to reduce the cost of living to 100$ per week, assuming that he consumes a nice meal per day in the inn (to avoid social issues, and also to make a more believable character that still enjoys "real" food now and then), and the other two he creates himself.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

Part of our social contract is that Create Food doesn't taste that good and that when they can they eat real food so I don't reduce it at all. At the same time, their down time often comes at the end of saving whatever city they happen to be in so they often get free room and board. But I don't do a lot of dungeon crawl so ymmv.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

I would definitely allow as complimentary to the Survival or Urban Surivial roll to avoid Starvation.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

Depends. How much am I veering away from running DF/RPG by the RAW?

RAW:
No. The 150$ is part and parcel with the cost of living in town. The rules spell out how to get by without paying 150$ per week, and Create Food isn't among them.

You can just say that the room and board they're paying for is just that, room and board. He can prefer to eat Created Food, but the bed and breakfast they're staying at doesn't give rebates to skinflint clerics.

Now, might I give them it as a Complimentary Skill as sir_pudding suggests, because even the rules don't always spell out every situation. But the 150$ per week is pretty clear that it's not for anything in specific, it's for "everything and anything", so it's explicitly set-up to stop "but we brought back more than a week's food and water, why do I have to 'pay' to at in town". You pay to eat in town, or you roll versus Survival or Urban Survival.

Veering from RAW:
Do as though wilt shall be the whole of the law. In this case since fresh food costs less, roughly usually half of what preserved food costs, I'd cut their weekly costs by $20 (because it's both pentaphiliac and rounder than 21$).

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

Had a similar discussion with a scout with the 'avoids crowds' disadvantage and so tended to set up a little tent camp outside of town to satisfy that need, and hunt rabbits and collect wild lettuce for food, that sort of thing.

Our conclusion was that the $150/week still applies even when they're gathering their own food and sleeping in a farmer's field or copse of trees because it's covering all the other incidental costs of living. Incidental bits of equipment that need repair or replacement, spares, consumables, and a little somethin' somethin' for the farmer to look the other way regarding the weirdo camping out by the north pasture.

It rather became a fun little aside to justify the $150 expenses against the traits of the character that would seemingly lower the cost. It was fun to figure out that they're leaving a little pile of cash by the farmer's door for their trouble! This cleric of yours, it'd be a good character building question to ask 'You're feeding yourself using Create Food, so if that money isn't being spent on food what is it being spent on?' As a cleric there are tithes, charitable donations, expensive unguents and oils to conduct their prayers, etc.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

This is a very nice way of looking at this issue.

I propose this ruling:

"Downtime" in the city: abstract $150 per week and roleplay however you like how do you spend them. You obtain no advantages nor disadvantages in any case. You have only the option to forego the sum entirely by using the "raw" options.

"Adventure" in the city. Go day by the day with the level of detail you prefer, as far as you want, but if you choose to do so, there is no "abstract" discount for anything. You must puy separately for each and every object and service.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

I'm very confused, why not?

Sometimes you have to put the RAW aside when the "rule of common sense" is bigger. In this case, a spell that let you create food from thin air obviously has a noticeable impact on the cost of living considering that food, by RAW, is the biggest expense in a day. I'd say 100$/week is even too high, but acceptable if one good meal per day is included.

Justifying this arbitrary player abuse with "oh, but what about tithes, charitable donations, expensive unguents and oils to conduct your prayers?" would make me pretty mad as a player, since you can use the same argument with every class: A warrior will need to sharpen his sword, clean and polish his armor, then waste more money on training equipment that wear out faster and so on.
At this point you might as well say that the Survival skill doesn't help to reduce the cost for food too, since I literally see no difference between this skill and Create Food.

And as a player, hearing that since I don't spend that money for food I HAVE TO spend that money for the other things mentioned I would expect that since all the other players spend all their money for food and a place to sleep, they are just just surviving in conditions barely suitable for living, with absolutely nothing extra.

Also this is supposed to be a roleplay adventure game, who cares about the RAW of the cost of living, creating a credible and immersive environment is more important, while also I see no need to deny a negligible money advantage to someone that invested points to have that advantage.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

This is for DF/RPG. So, therefore, it's per the social contract of playing DF/RPG where 'verisimilitude' is a dirty word and town living is literally abstracted to a few rolls, marking off money, and then heading out to the next dungeon.

If your group does not play that way, cool. But it isn't "arbitrary player abuse" or any other nonsense. There are ways in the rules to avoid the "living in town tax", that's it.

Lastly, food doesn't cost that much, deciding that Create Food will cut your town Living Expenses by a third when even Rations cost less 50$ for a week? That's an abuse of logic.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

Then just say "cost of living is an abstraction and create food is not on the list of things that by RAW helps you with it". And it's fine. But creating excuses to justify it is just gonna make people mad, because there is no logic in not giving a little cut to the expenses (maybe 50$ is too much after all, ok, but like a symbolic -20$ just to feel the player rewarded, it would not break the campaign) considering that food is part of the expenses and this spell literally creates free food.

I repeat: the only real argument against it is "it's not in the RAW", everything else is nonsense. And there's nothing wrong in just accepting the abstraction as is it and move on.
HOWEVER, the moment you wanna ARGUE IT and start making excuses like "it does work, and you don't pay for your food, but when you use the spell during the downtime, all the other expenses magically raise, so you pay the same thing as everyone else" I AM gonna call it arbitrary player abuse, because you are arbitrairly raising the cost of living of his character just to not give him those few $ that will change absolutely nothing in the game, creating a feeling that players choises don't matter: the DM can just alter the reality to make them irrelevant just because he wants.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

I'd go this route myself: anyone who doesn't have to buy food due to magic or stockpiled food or daily hunts in the forest or whatever gets a minor discount on cost of living, just as anyone who dwells in the wilderness doesn't have to pay cost of living at all.

A $30 discount sounds fine. (There may be other consequences depending on why you don't need to buy food. In the case of Create Food, "you have to eat blah tasting food regularly" is enough of a consequence IMO.)

If players want more detail I'll calculate town expenses more precisely, but if 7 days of rations costs $42 then earmarking $30 for town food seems a reasonable abstraction.

I entirely agree with the bold. Creating new rules as needed is my job as GM.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

Okay. You spend a week in town. Roll to cast Create Food 21 times. If you fail, roll again until you succeed. If you critically fail, I'll roll 1d on the following critical spell failure table:

1. You set the inn on fire.
2. The spell spoils all the grain in the village's storage.
3. A giant made of marshmallows is summoned in the town square.
4. The local noble's 15-course banquet has every course replaced by Created Food.
5. You immediately lose 2d FP to hunger. These FP recover at the rate of 3/day so long as you get three meals.
6. You take 1d HP of injury as the meal creates itself from your own flesh.

As others have said, if you're running by DFRPG RAW then 'whether you get your food from the inn's stewpot or by praying for it' is below the game's resolution; pay your $150/wk upkeep and move on. If you want the extra resolution, keep in mind that you're rolling for this spell three times per day per person you're feeding, and critical failures suck.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

7 rolls at most. Even the base df cleric can spend 9 fat to create 3 meals out of rocks or dirt. 8 with 15 skill. Granted, this is per pc.

Most of your crit examples sound more like revenge for trying to use abilities to mitigate some game-mandated costs than reasonable crit failure results. Do you commonly set off explosions in a dungeon for 1 crit failure?

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

Given how rarely critfails actually happen? Yes. I mean, two of those are directly off of the official spell critfail table - "summon a monster" and "take 1d hp of injury" - but in general my policy is to treat spell critfails seriously, because the groups I play in very much tend to lean in favor of metagame currency to never critically fail in the first place.

Maybe as general advice I'd go a little less hard, but only a little. I like memorable spell critfails.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

I also think that a Cleric of Good that exploits his divine gifts for pure selfish reasons actually DESERVES such critical fails.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

Everything else are RULINGS made by the DM. If you think that rulings are "nonsensical" because you don't have a book telling you what to do or not do, then maybe you've got the wrong mindset and you should reconsider.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

You forget two HUGE DISADVANTAGES that comes from "living in the wilderness".

1) the risk of starting the next crawl with 1d damage.
2) no access to "in-town" activities.

The RAW is quite binary. Either you are in town and then YOU PAY FOR THE PRIVILEGE, or you aren't.

Any shade of "gray" here really stretches the DFRPG abstraction, and it's easily handled by some kind of ruling/justification that still allow to keep create food AND the verisimilitude together.

The worst possible approach, IMO, is just say "it's RAW". And by the way, even if we decide for a more realistic approach, critical spell failure and the moral responsability implied by a Power Investiture in a God of Good are very realistic reasons to why I won't discount even a single dime without the possibility of severe consequences.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

I didn't forget. See the following paragraph, re-quoted below. Emphasis not in original.

The possibility of dying messily while everyone else is in town is one possible consequence of living in the wilderness.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

I'm starting to think that some people here are just trolling.
"the moral responsabilities" of creating food? To eat? Because you're hungry?
And using a divine spell that creates food to create food is now "exploiting your divine gifts".
you guys must be trolling lmao

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

I was searching about this subject and found this topic.

Dungeon Fantasy 2 says:

p. 4:
"Starving: If nobody succeeds, the GM can say “A week passes,” dock everyone $150 for cost of living, and let them try again."

p. 15:
"each week the party stays in town (at $150 apiece for food and lodging)" (emphasis added)

So food is clearly part of the $150/week cost to live in a town. So if a delver can use magic to create his own food (and it doesn't matter if it's delicious like Essential Food or just edible like Create Food), he won't spend as much as the other delver who needs to buy food.

The question is: How much of that $150/week is for food (the 3 meals per day) and how much is for lodging? The book doesn't say, but we can have an idea because DF1 (p. 23) says that Rations cost $2. That's a total of $6 per day and $42 per week.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

If you are going to do it this way, and going to GURPS, the costs for eating out are probably better than for field rations. Since this a DFRPG thread I won't go into detail, but this works at out to $84 (for three Status -1 meals over seven days).

But this is, IMO, way too much detail for DFRPG. I would just either:

1. Treat this as Crafting, reducing it to $120 on a success and increasing it to $165 on a failure.
2. Allow Create Food as a Complimentary roll on Urban Survival and allow you to just pay nothing.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

Dungeon Fantasy RPG is just like Dungeon Fantasy regarding the cost of living in town per week ($150; DFRPG Exploits, p. 14) and the cost of Ration ($2; DFRPG Adventurers, p. 111).

In any case, if you assume that the Inn meals are better than field rations and that, therefore, they cost more than the $2 rations, that means you can save more than $42/week if you create your own food through spells, forage or if you don't need to eat at all.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

I don't really see how $12 is that big of deal, but YMMV.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

It might be a big of deal for cheapskate Innkeeper.

Anyway, I was just making a comparison to rations in order to have an idea of how much food would cost out of that $150. As I said, if you assume that Inn meals are better/more expensive than rations, than the reduction would be greater than $42/week.

Is there any spell in GURPS that can provide magical shelter or protection for a good night of sleep, like D&D's Tiny Hut? The only spell I can think is Sanctuary, but that spell is complicated.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

Sanctuary does nearly exactly the same thing as the D&D spell, so I'm not sure what's "complicated" about it.

Weather Dome will keep the weather off.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

One of the other possibilities is the assumption that lodgings provide the required food (and bathing facilities, and stables, and cleaning and mending maintenance, &c.) for their level of quality/class and if some patron declines to partake, instead consuming conjured foods, that is just more profit for the innkeeper or an extra scoop for the other patrons.
If a PC declines to forego the lodging, food, and amenities package deal then the Urban Survival rules come into play. Let the Scout and Barbarian live like beggars, wash in rainwater and scavenge their meals while the more civilized PCs spend loot to not be cold/hungry/stinky.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

• Sanctuary duration is not 8 hours like Tiny Hut; it's 1 hour. So the caster can't use it and sleep after, like it can be done with Tiny Hut;
• You have to create air to stay there for long term;
• This pocket dimension is a low-mana zone, so all spells are cast with a -5 penalty;
• Recover Energy spell doesn't work there.

So if your goal is to take a safe place to sleep (like if it was a sanctuary), this spell is not very good for that purpose.

Indeed, it's a nice spell for a utility Wizard to use in stormy or freezing environments. The requirement for 2 spells of each element is not that big.

You mean: Let the Scout and Barbarian "live off the land", finding safe food and water and washing when necessary in a nearby river or in rainwater.

The Wizard can also create food and water out of thin air. And with the right spells (like Shape Earth, Create Fire for a campfire or even full weather protection from Weather Dome), he can create a reasonably comfortable place to sleep, specially with a Blanket or Sleeping Fur.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

The primary reason is to avoid dealing with a "credible and immersive" environment. Town costs $150/week, Town is safe, Town doesn't need to deal with fiddly stuff when adventure awaits!

If you and your players want to make living in town (no capitalization) a focus of your game and enjoy the fiddly stuff then do that instead.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

I mean, if PCs want to risk standing out as 'weird outsiders who are too good for our town' they can certainly find a way to do that and still live, but there are likely to be social consequences to the rejection of the norms of a society.

There are probably (some very small number of) people living on the street today who have plenty of money somewhere to afford a more typical living arrangement. I expect strangers view and treat them (rightly, wrongly, or indifferently) as they view and treat other street people, rather than as they view and treat people who live in apartments or houses.

I let my players try almost anything and many of the PCs I play are up for trying to be economical too. None of us is surprised by some NPC reacting to that behavior as though the PC is being cheap.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

DF has a Cleric spell that allows you to stay up all night with no fatigue consequences so that would allow Sanctuary as long as you can afford to maintain it.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

Then you would be making a very strange assumption. Stuff that will keep well and can be prepared quickly with field equipment (you really don't have time to wait the several hours per meal for traditional home cooking) has always sold at something of a premium. It's certainly not discounted relative to anything made in mass batches for the sort of cheap inn adventurers cash strapped enough to be all that concerned about this level of savings can afford.

I do think that if you insist on calculating your food prices separately, then you have to calculate all your [other] prices separately, including all the ones rolled into that cost of living that aren't even defined. You don't want to buy into the simplification, that's fine, but you can't pick and choose which parts you opt out of. And now you're asking the GM to do a lot more work (to determine what all those little components are, how much they cost, where in Town you'd need to go to buy them, how much time that would take...) so you can be a special snowflake cheapskate. I think it's entirely fair for him to tell you no, we aren't going there.

For that matter, why are you assuming Create Food is free? If you hired an NPC to cast it for you, there'd be a cost, a much higher one that for regular food even. Are you sure none of that cost is inherent and simply abstracted away for regular adventuring use?

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).

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

What if he has Essential Food, which is just 1 point away from Create Food?

Which seems to be as good as any fancy food.

Energy is trivial when the delver is in his/her downtime, specially with things like Energy Reserve and Recover Energy.

Because the goal of dungeon crawling games - whether it's Dungeon Fantasy or D&D - are the adventures, not parties. It's all about killing monsters, getting better items, becoming more powerful and killing stronger monsters.

Yet, GURPS has disadvantages like Compulsive Carousing that can cover that part.

Sounds like you're giving your players a free disadvantage.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

Nope, that's called "making Wealth worth its cost".

GURPS has always had a confused attitude towards money; either the wealth advantage shouldn't exist, or it should reflect your actual wealth. The latter means that if you gain money in play, you have to either raise your wealth level, or expect the money to go away.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

Wealth is worth its cost. Better Wealth means you're better equipped, which can make the difference between life and death in dungeon crawling.

And the money will go away with better weapons, armor, potions, grimoires, scrolls, magical items, dungeon equipment of very fine quality, etc. A group of delvers can carry huge fortunes with themselves, even if they have a few gold coins in their pockets.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

In case it is useful to those of you who use the unofficial GURPS Discord, in 2022 we had a discussion about how one might break down cost of living (linked here).

Based on some of the numbers in Taverns, we ended up with food being the bulk of the $150 weekly cost of living. The breakdown was something like $30 for room, $100 for board, $5 for clothing, and $15 for miscellaneous expenses. One could adjust the numbers to fit with your sense of historical/fantasy verisimilitude, of course.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

That's not the money going away, that's the money being converted into assets. The money going away means... it's gone to no benefit.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

Fine. It's still an example about how money can be used by delvers, which means that your dichotomy ("...you have to either raise your wealth level, or expect the money to go away") is not true.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

Go away does not mean "used". It means "lost without benefit".

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

Ok. As I said, delvers can use money without falling in one of the two cases that you mentioned, so you don't have to either raise your wealth level or expect to lose money without benefit. You can use that money to buy expensive delver stuff. This is why I said that your dichotomy is not true.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

If they use the money to buy expensive delver stuff, they should raise their wealth level.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

Vigil, Spells pg 56. It's a Mind Control spell, PI 4. It's not cheap but it'll do the job.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

That's a terrible price for food and will immediately be gamed into "I save 58$ a week by buying and eating Trail Rations".

Preserve foods should be more expensive, no less. When I've broken things down for more "economics intensive" fantasy games I had meals costing roughly 1$/meal, just to keep preserved food as the "you buy this because it will last, not because it's cheap" fare.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

I agree that the prices are wonky. I haven't looked back into Taverns to see why its food numbers are so high. I was going with their cheapest options and assuming some sort of bulk discount. (Not buying in bulk, but being a regular customer.)

I must be spoiled by players who don't tend to "game" the cost of living system. Most of them spend more money whenever they get the chance on better lodgings, better food, etc. (This is across many dozens of players since DFRPG was published.) I have one group that pays a standing fee to keep a locked chest at an inn in town where they keep their fancier "town clothes," backup instrument for the bard, and other items that they don't want to bring on their adventures.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

Compared to home prepped food, yes. Compared to tavern fare? Not so sure.

In any case, one of the weird side effects of a game focused on delving is you get lots of players optimizing everything their PC does for better delving, to the extent of living in a ditch and eating hardtack and bugs between delves where they make fat stax to edge out a few more coins to buy special arrows with or whatever.

If this sort of thing is fun for most or all of your players, why not let them eat the bugs? If it's not fun and just a joyless optimization exercise, just ask them to stop.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

I don't know about "fun", but it seems to me it's done because it's "optimal" and there is nothing incentivizing doing anything else.

I had all the PCs doing that in one campaign and then in the next campaign where I imposed morale penalties for not "living a little", I had some PCs who were happy to get morale bonuses for living it up, some went for maximizing $$ by scrounging and either taking a few penalties or buying (very low cost) Advantages to ignore those penalties, and some who spent just enough to avoid penalties but not enough to get benes.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

"What, fish paste sandwiches again?"

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

I consider "having fun" to be my primary incentive when playing a game, but of course many players compulsively optimize everything in reach even if they don't enjoy doing so. (If the players are enjoying the optimization, then that's great!)

I realize there is some onus on the game designer to make fun approaches to playing the game effective as well, but GURPS and DFRPG suffer from too much flexibility. When there are 89 accessible variables someone's gonna try something weird, and balance is overall impossible.

You can also do something like that, of course. It seems clear that the players just moved on to a different optimization, but one that was more palatable to you.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

I didn't care either way. I had Players grumbling that it wasn't "realistic"* to be constantly just eating trail rations with no effect, simply to optimize money. And since 2-3 Players were doing it to scrounge every cent, the other couple of Players (who'd have not bothered otherwise) did so as well so they wouldn't be slowly, by nickel and dime, left behind ont eh monetary curve.


* Magic, elf ears, who cares, but everyone has their verisimilitude levels at which point their suspenders of disbelief stop holding things up and give way. That was theirs.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

If you need an excuse to keep min-maxers from living exclusively on trail rations, you could say that said rations don't have a complete nutritional profile, so that, while they can keep body and soul together for weeks or even months, using them as a sole nutritional source will eventually lead to scurvy or other such interesting problems, which can be avoided by occasionally partaking of more wholesome fare.

Another point is that, given how heavily Dungeon Fantasy leans into the tropes of the genre, quest hooks will frequently be given out in taverns, and I imagine that the owners frown on people hanging out there without occasionally buying something.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

Thanks. Being a Mind Control spell, it means the Wizard can have it as well.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

Alas, by RAW, it's only for clerics. If wizards could cast it, it would have a "Wizardly" prerequisite, even if only Magery 0.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

The constipation may make you change your mind. I wouldn't suggest you try this in real life, the results are unpleasant.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

It's in Exploits right after reaction checks: the Constipation Check table.

🤪

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

Well some things don't really need rules. I suppose you could give a -1 HT after a couple of weeks.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

This is DFRPG, all that was handwaved away... so yes, yes if you're going to act like "that's common sense" it really does need the rules 'added back in'*. And Rations aren't hardtack, it's "Rations. One meal of dried meat, cheese, etc. $2, 0.5 lb." and it lasts indefinitely†. I eat meat and cheese all the time, I don't suffer from it (okay, it's not dried meat, beef jerky is expensive).




* What rules someone asks? I don't know, they aren't in Basic Set either...
† Yes, you can decide that the Rations they bought 6 months ago at campaign start that they've never eaten and have left to molder in the bottom of their backpack went bad, but that's rather against the RAI of DFRPG.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

This. Let's compare to the Dwarven Rations (DFRPG Adventurers, p. 113):

"Dwarven Rations. One meal of nasty, hard bread. A steady diet (a month or more) gives Resistant to Poison 3 while continued. $5, 1 lb."

Here is an example of the effect of a continued use clearly stated in the rules, something that is not present in the basic ration.

So as you said, the fact that the author didn't include in the rules any side effect for continued use of rations clearly demonstrate that whatever nutritional impact that could possibly exist in the real world don't apply here. The game is Dungeon Fantasy RPG, not Real Life RPG (note that even the effect for prolonged use of the Dwarven Rations is a fantastic one).

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

Yes, so cost of living is $150/week and it doesn't matter if you say you are eating rations. Trying to de-abstract town actions is also against the RAI.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

In my games, accomadations come with food and drink three times a day, the guests don't get to just pick a bed.

If the players would rather live outside or on the streets they can use Survival or Urban Survival. If a player has Create Food, can make shelter, and can find or purify water, that is fine too.

I would probably allow Create Food to offset a penalty survival in an area, where the foraging modifier gives a penalty to survival.

Re: Cost of living and Create Food
 

I've had constipation; that's at least Severe Pain.