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) .
I’d call it Profession (chef), and although I am not a chef myself, I am guilty of watching a lot of cooking shows, including Iron Chef, and it looks like there are a lot of planning, management, and supervisory skills involved in addition to knowing what to do when faced with an ingredient and the challenge of preparing it under certain conditions. What really separates the chefs from the cooks is their ability to manage a kitchen and all the resources, including human resources, tools, and space in a kitchen.
That’s pretty much the conclusion we reached in our game. A Chef, i.e. someone who can cook for crowds in a production environment takes profession, someone who only cooks at home would take craft.
BTW, love the email address. Old Gaelic for Gawain as I recall! Nice one!
I’ve always use the Craft skills as the actual creation of something (e.g. cooking a meal or creating a dish), while Profession skills cover the stuff _around_ that creation, like (for Pr[Chef]) running a kitchen & restaurant and presenting a meal artistically. Thus Prof [Chef] covers one set of skills (a restaurant chef), while Prof [cook] represents another (someone who regularly cooks for large groups, which is a different kettle of fish from making meals for a single family); Craft [Cook] is just how well they make the food itself. Likewise, a smith might have 4 different Craft skills, but still have Prof [Smith], which covers other things like handling horses to shoe (using the space he works in to help, rather than trying to win over an animal he’s never seen before & won’t see again), marketing his wares, and knowing when to adjust his prices to ensure future profit. By the same token, you can Profession performance styles (street performer vs. opera singer). Just about any Secondary Skill (for those who remember 1st ed) could be used as a Profession option. This really works if you have a lot of skill points or want to keep PCs from driving your town’s tradesmen out of business with ‘high quality items’ they make in down time. The Guild (whichever guild) doesn’t care if you can make the best swords in five kingdoms; if you can’t present them properly, you’re still an apprentice who has to sell his wares to an approved tradesman or merchant at Guild-approved prices.