An interesting discussion came up during our Pathfinder game the other night. Is cooking a craft skill or a profession skill?
Now our gaming group has a mix of pros from different fields in it – insurance, graphic design, web producer, and the one that made this talk most fruitful – a chef. After much discussion it was decided that for our game the logic is as follows:
- Craft: Cooking – denotes skill at cooking on a small scale such as in the home.
- Profession: Cook – denotes one skill at and used to cooking for large numbers of people, such as in a tavern setting.
It’s a minor distinction, and one that most gamers would not bother with, but our games already have more skills available than usual so it fits right in. Its also one of those rulings made during a vibrant and interesting discussion, and those are the most memorable one.
I’d have called the profession “chef” not “cook”, as one is professional and the other is more tradesmanlike.
Ah, but only the rare few are Chefs. The majority cook on ships, spelljammers, taverns, etc. Chef’s really only turn up in the employ of the rich and can be represented by the title and a lot of sill ranks in Prof: Cook. At least that is my logic.
So is there a Profession: Chef that indicates better training and income potential or is it more like “once you hit five ranks in the skill you can go ahead and scratch that name out…”?
ah, I left this as a G+ comment…I’d see “chef de cuisine” as a promotion path from “cook,” making the pool of “chefs” much more limited. But that’s probably unnecessarily granular for this game situation.
I’d say it’s skill rank dependent.
I’ve always treated it as a profession skill and called it Profession: Chef. Most people who have more than a single rank in the skill are going to be considered Chefs, it’s just the more ranks you have the better the establishment you cook at.
That’s about right, but I still like having it as a Craft option as well. To be fair we get a lot more granular with the skills than many other games do. I’ve condensed a lot of them in the move to Pathfinder RPG, but we stil tend to have a lot more than most simply because of the scope of the setting (Planescape/Spelljammer) .