Cost of living and Create Food

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Carlos

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

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?