Monday, July 4, 2011

Butcher's Shop



Just some ordinary foodstuffs for players to choose among, including some things which would be unfamiliar to many North American palates: rabbit & goat sausage, or cicitt and salsiccia de coniglio, for example.  I will eventually add more things like this ... any kind of different and unusual food is a bonus in my book.

The daily portions for dogs, leopards and hippogriffs are included because these animals are available for purchase in my world ... though I wouldn't recommend the leopard or the hippogriff at low levels.  The meat for these animals is cheaper as it is based upon the abattoir meat price, which is the cost of the slaughtered animal without the various niceties of separating the meat for human consumption.  In other words, the collection of animal body parts we associate with supermarket hot dogs.  The amount of consumption is based upon the carnivorous creature's body weight: 35 lbs. for dogs, 133 lbs. for leopards and 400 lbs. for a hippogriff (which, although the size of a horse, doesn't weigh nearly as much).

The reader will please note the difference between an ordinary pates and pates de foie gras.  The latter, of course, makes an interesting treasure possibility.  While I think of it, the weights are based on the best specific gravity numbers I could find on the web.  If you don't think it is hard to find the specific gravity of pates de foie gras, you haven't lived.  With my luck, though, someone has posted the number since I spent considerable time trying to find it a year ago.

We live in a wonderful age of information, you know.  When you consider the above list in terms of player caloric intake and nutrition, it's interesting to note that we have all the information we could ever want.  Consider the table on this site, describing how many calories a player could obtain from various wild birds taken from hunting.  Or this breakdown of calories and nutritional content available in chicken.  That popular post I wrote about nutrition only needs someone (me, perhaps someday), to sit down with all the various foods and build up the necessary database to identify character health.

But then, "It requires a crap-ton of energy on the DM’s part to keep the campaign world living/breathing/evolving/resolving as the PCs podunk around the imaginary country-side."  As people involved in a game intended to take a world and put it in a bottle, the last thing we'd want to do is expend any energy.  Ah, hem, excuse me ... that is, expend any 'calories.'

6 comments:

  1. Just going through all your food posts pretending I'm a broke first-level adventurer.... partridges look to be really, really cheap. Nine copper buys one half-pound lump of hardtack or three partridges weighing almost two pounds. Beef offal is about 10x more expensive than partridges.

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  2. Most low-level characters do not buy their food at the grocer. They go to the town market, which is late being posted because I am doing this alphabetically; the town market is where the farmer's sell their wares.

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  3. OK, "going through the food shop posts looking for things that are unusually cheap" or "looking for a nice cheap diet that would be palatable to me and nutritious." Let me try again: why should I feed 2 gold of beef offal to my hippogriff when I can get the same weight of partridges for 33 copper? That's not even considering that the hippogriff will happily eat feathers and bird guts, if its dietary habits are anything like the eagles I've seen.

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  4. "post I wrote about nutrition only needs someone (me, perhaps someday), to sit down with all the various foods and build up the necessary database to identify character health." Fat/protein/carbs/salt/water soluble vitamins/common fat soluble/rare fat soluble* might do - that's just one more category than proposed in the original post.

    For diseases,
    Starve/Starve/Starve/Hyponatremia/scurvy/night blindness/rickets, correspondingly.

    Paprika looks like the cheapest way to stave off scurvy and night blindness on a budget, but you simply need to get some fish every now and again.

    http://www.healthaliciousness.com/nutritionfacts/nutrition-comparison.php?o=2028&t=9152&h=102&s=100&e=100&r=

    I'm pretty busy through the end of August, but after that this might be something I could work on on the Same Campaign Wiki.

    * Vitamin D and essential fatty acids; both are richly available in liver and fish, but not many other sources.

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  5. Eric, I may pay to have you stand over my shoulder and watch me.

    First answer, the partridges had an issue in that there was no modifier to separate them pound for pound as the same price as chicken. That's fixed.

    The cost is still low enough that the weight of partridges is less than the weight of a day's food for a hippogriff. So there's nothing, really, to stop you from feeding your hippogriff on partridges, so long as the number available holds out (its less than before on account of the price change). 10 partridges is 180 c.p., or about 15 s.p. Heck, go nuts.

    I could argue that a bird eating bird meat is the road to mad bird disease, but I wouldn't as a DM. I could argue that not plucking the partridges (they are still feathered) might lead to some other kind of problem, but I probably still wouldn't as a DM. Fact is, if partridges are common enough in the area that beef is more expensive, so be it. If I start changing prices because they don't "seem right," then I might as well quit the system right here and now.

    Keep on keeping me honest though. You've found three errors in one day, which I've fixed, and I love having glitches out of the system.

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  6. Regarding the nutrition, Eric. Sounds brilliant.

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