how much money can you make via a cooking skill?

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Warshield73
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Re: how much money can you make via a cooking skill?

Unread post by Warshield73 »

Candy wrote:Page 97 of Rifts Ultimate has Vagabonds get +10% for Domestic skills like cooking so I was wondering how it would work if you were trying to bake your own candies and sell them to earn credits.

If you read the skill description it says a failed roll is still edible, but tastes awful. So this means if you are trying to sell the food then the ingredients are wasted as no one will buy it but you can eat it for survival.

All you would need is to work out with your GM how much the ingredients would cost and then try to sell them.

Rifts Ultimate Edition, Pg. 307 wrote:Cook. Skilled in selecting, planning, and preparing meals. A cooking roll failure means that the food is not properly prepared. It is edible but tastes lousy (greasy, too spicy, sickeningly sweet, sour, burnt, leaves a bad aftertaste in the mouth, etc.). Base Skill: 3S% +S% per level of experience.

Candy wrote:I'm not sure if there is rules related to skill rolls to see how good the stuff you make is, if you waste ingredients, etc.

As for how good the food is, RUE Pg.298-300 describes the difference between scholastic skills (OCC and Related) vs. secondary skills. If you take a skill like writing, sewing or cooking as an OCC and Related skills then it is of superior or professional quality while if it is a secondary skill then it would be talented amateur.

Now you would need to sell thousands of candies just to buy an e-clip so not sure it will help much that way. However, it sounds like a great cover when visiting a new place.

Hope this helps
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Re: how much money can you make via a cooking skill?

Unread post by guardiandashi »

Warshield73 wrote:
Candy wrote:Page 97 of Rifts Ultimate has Vagabonds get +10% for Domestic skills like cooking so I was wondering how it would work if you were trying to bake your own candies and sell them to earn credits.

If you read the skill description it says a failed roll is still edible, but tastes awful. So this means if you are trying to sell the food then the ingredients are wasted as no one will buy it but you can eat it for survival.

All you would need is to work out with your GM how much the ingredients would cost and then try to sell them.

Rifts Ultimate Edition, Pg. 307 wrote:Cook. Skilled in selecting, planning, and preparing meals. A cooking roll failure means that the food is not properly prepared. It is edible but tastes lousy (greasy, too spicy, sickeningly sweet, sour, burnt, leaves a bad aftertaste in the mouth, etc.). Base Skill: 3S% +S% per level of experience.

Candy wrote:I'm not sure if there is rules related to skill rolls to see how good the stuff you make is, if you waste ingredients, etc.

As for how good the food is, RUE Pg.298-300 describes the difference between scholastic skills (OCC and Related) vs. secondary skills. If you take a skill like writing, sewing or cooking as an OCC and Related skills then it is of superior or professional quality while if it is a secondary skill then it would be talented amateur.

Now you would need to sell thousands of candies just to buy an e-clip so not sure it will help much that way. However, it sounds like a great cover when visiting a new place.

Hope this helps

if you take cooking singing tailor, musical instrument, or the like as an occ skill you are skilled at it.
if you take it as a secondary skill you usually don't as much of a bonus but its somewhere between a hobby and a career skill.
if you take a domestic skill 2x you get an additional 10% I believe AND it is upgraded to professional quality
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Re: how much money can you make via a cooking skill?

Unread post by Warshield73 »

guardiandashi wrote:if you take a domestic skill 2x you get an additional 10% I believe AND it is upgraded to professional quality

I forgot about that part, good catch.
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Re: how much money can you make via a cooking skill?

Unread post by glitterboy2098 »

was about to mention the fact that domestic skills can be taken twice for an extra +10% to the skill and elevation of the result in quality. (though IMO it should not be counted as "professional level" if any of the skill selections used was a secondary. but it would still be a lot better cooking ability than a non-doubled skill.)

for a vagabond, i would honestly encourage players to invest in such doubled domestic skills, since most of them are very useful for Roleplay based survival. a doubled dance, play instrument, or singing skill would let your vagabond survive as a street performer. double cooking skill would let themselves hire out as a cook to travelling groups. doubled sewing would let you earn money repairing people's clothing.

plus in RUE you have stuff like Brewing (always a useful skill, since it lets you make beer, moonshine, etc. though less immediately applicable to a wandering character. but shoudl also allow you to know the good stuff from the bad and thus know what to obtain for sale in another place) Fishing (useful in surviving in the wild), gardening (lets you grow your own food, would let you work as a farmhand easily enough), recycling (lets you pick over old ruins and battlefierlds and find valuable stuff), and so on.

heck even wardrobe and grooming is a useful skill for a vagabond, since it lets you pass yourself off as something other than a vagabond, or at least appear a lot more respectable, which will make it easier to find work and avoid being run out of town.
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Re: how much money can you make via a cooking skill?

Unread post by guardiandashi »

glitterboy2098 wrote:was about to mention the fact that domestic skills can be taken twice for an extra +10% to the skill and elevation of the result in quality. (though IMO it should not be counted as "professional level" if any of the skill selections used was a secondary. but it would still be a lot better cooking ability than a non-doubled skill.)

for a vagabond, i would honestly encourage players to invest in such doubled domestic skills, since most of them are very useful for Roleplay based survival. a doubled dance, play instrument, or singing skill would let your vagabond survive as a street performer. double cooking skill would let themselves hire out as a cook to travelling groups. doubled sewing would let you earn money repairing people's clothing.

plus in RUE you have stuff like Brewing (always a useful skill, since it lets you make beer, moonshine, etc. though less immediately applicable to a wandering character. but shoudl also allow you to know the good stuff from the bad and thus know what to obtain for sale in another place) Fishing (useful in surviving in the wild), gardening (lets you grow your own food, would let you work as a farmhand easily enough), recycling (lets you pick over old ruins and battlefierlds and find valuable stuff), and so on.

heck even wardrobe and grooming is a useful skill for a vagabond, since it lets you pass yourself off as something other than a vagabond, or at least appear a lot more respectable, which will make it easier to find work and avoid being run out of town.


I can understand the argument that secondary skills are not "professional" but if you look at it another way secondary skills are skills you typically picked up without a lot of formal training but they may have many hours, or years invested, if you take the skill 2x then you have invested a LOT more time and effort into the skill.
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Re: how much money can you make via a cooking skill?

Unread post by Prince Artemis »

The world book I've been working on off and on for years actually has an entire section on this kind of thing. The book itself is largely based around the adventurer class and has rules for money generation from skills. Basically, the logic behind it is that yes, they're not as good fighters as men at arms, don't have powers like mages and psychics, but they do have a wide range of skills that allow them to do things during regular adventures that allow them to make money on the side. These can be done passively, or gms can use them as adventure hooks. Things like drawing maps, collecting samples, documenting flora and fauna, writing books, taking pictures healing people they encounter, repairing things from villages and travelers they pass, etc. And yes, cooking. Both developing recipies, discovering new ingredients, teaching others, and making things to sell. Heck, the city the book is based around has specifically a candy shop that makes various candies for the visiting adventuring groups, with the idea of giving said candy away to people they encounter to help make friends.
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Re: how much money can you make via a cooking skill?

Unread post by Blue_Lion »

A traveling sales man hawking candy and food probably would not make much. You would make allot more from combat loot. It might offset traveling cost with a small proffit.

A restaurant in a small town or poor city would pay the bills with money to live on. The issue would be how much traveling people do through the area. This might support a medium life style.

A high end restaurant would require a large population, high quality food and strong economy and connection to major transport lines for food sources. That that means places you could build one would be limited to places like lazlo, Chi town, merc town ect. With few places it might be hard to break in. This could if successful make you thousands of credits a month but one bad skill roll could ruin you.

You would also have expenses of setting up a cooking business.
A traveling barbque would probally only require a few 100 cr to get started.
A high end restraunt you would need to spend hundreds of thousands of credits on the store, then add staff and high end ingredients
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Re: how much money can you make via a cooking skill?

Unread post by guardiandashi »

Blue_Lion wrote:A traveling sales man hawking candy and food probably would not make much. You would make allot more from combat loot. It might offset traveling cost with a small proffit.

A restaurant in a small town or poor city would pay the bills with money to live on. The issue would be how much traveling people do through the area. This might support a medium life style.

A high end restaurant would require a large population, high quality food and strong economy and connection to major transport lines for food sources. That that means places you could build one would be limited to places like lazlo, Chi town, merc town ect. With few places it might be hard to break in. This could if successful make you thousands of credits a month but one bad skill roll could ruin you.

You would also have expenses of setting up a cooking business.
A traveling barbque would probally only require a few 100 cr to get started.
A high end restraunt you would need to spend hundreds of thousands of credits on the store, then add staff and high end ingredients


to expand on that

1 what are your expenses
2 what can you reasonably charge (consistently)
is 2 more than 1 then you get a profit
yay, but the real question is can you make a small profit on lots of sales, or a larger profit on fewer sales and come out ahead.
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Re: how much money can you make via a cooking skill?

Unread post by ShadowLogan »

Candy wrote:Page 97 of Rifts Ultimate has Vagabonds get +10% for Domestic skills like cooking so I was wondering how it would work if you were trying to bake your own candies and sell them to earn credits.

I'm not sure if there is rules related to skill rolls to see how good the stuff you make is, if you waste ingredients, etc.

I don't know of any rules off hand for this but in terms of using the Cooking Skill to make money you will need to figure some things out:
Total up your Costs
-ingredients
-time/labor
-equipment
-space (ie how much does it cost you to secure the space you are making the candy/food item)
-utilities (fuel, electricity, water)
-supplies (like wrappings, but not ingredients or equipment already covered)
-and probably a few more I'm not thinking of ATM

At this point you need to figure out how many/much of the food stuff was produced (bulk). This will then allow you to determine the cost of each item to produce that gets sold , and then you can mark it up from there for profits.
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Re: how much money can you make via a cooking skill?

Unread post by Library Ogre »

From the RMB, a CS captain makes about 2500cr a month. A grunt makes 1700cr a month. We're going to assume those are reasonable salaries, and ignore inflation.

So, I'd say a low-level junior chef would be about 1500 a month.
High end chef de cuisine are probably 5000k a month, or more.
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Re: how much money can you make via a cooking skill?

Unread post by Blue_Lion »

Candy wrote:
Blue_Lion wrote:A traveling sales man hawking candy and food probably would not make much.
You would make allot more from combat loot.

This assumes one can win/survive combat, of course. Cooking is a lower-risk occupation.

Most PC,s are able to survive lots of combat. IF the PCs can not survive combat something is wrong.
While cooking is lower risk it is also more back ground skill that what a campaign is typically about.


Basically in this sense it is a pointless counter for PCs.
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Re: how much money can you make via a cooking skill?

Unread post by Blue_Lion »

Mark Hall wrote:From the RMB, a CS captain makes about 2500cr a month. A grunt makes 1700cr a month. We're going to assume those are reasonable salaries, and ignore inflation.

So, I'd say a low-level junior chef would be about 1500 a month.
High end chef de cuisine are probably 5000k a month, or more.

Rather than pay scale from a replaced book use the pay scale from world book 11 Coalition war campaign. They have pay scale by rank. PG 50.
A CS captain makes 3500 cr.
Grunts pay would very depending on rank. A brand new recruit would make 1700cr , but a sergeant would make 1900 cr.

We also have civilian worker pay of 1-2 K.(WB11 pg 51) Depending on skill and experience. So that means a low end cook would likely be making about 1k a month.
The Clones are coming you shall all be replaced, but who is to say you have not been replaced already.

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Soon my army oc clones and winged-monkies will rule the world but first, must .......

I may debate canon and RAW, but the games I run are highly house ruled. So I am not debating for how I play but about how the system works as written.
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