Cooking - Crafting or Scholarship?

[Discipol]

Hi, I am working on a plate-mancer, who basically uses Spirit or Air to spin plates and focus on zone wide/spray attacks.

He is an Italian chef in New York, 2 generations down. Not a guido, thank you. And is has "Cooking is an art" as Background.

Now, he is a chef, a very good one. He uses his catering service for social events, everybody is nice to the chef or suffer stomach pains in his hellish revenge. The problem is that I am unsure if cooking is Crafting or Scholarship.

If its Crafting, he should also be good at fixing a car, which is not really obligatory.
If its Scholarship, I can assume he went to some sort of a cooking college, but it would mean he knows about Rembrandt and astrophysics & stuff which is again, not obligatory for a chef.

I assume that using a stunt based on a low level Scholarship, similar to the Doctor stunt, but I would like more suggestions, as I would not want to spend too many refresh points since he is a caster, he will eat most of them.

His name is Luigi 

[Masurao]

Craftsmanship has a stunt "Junkyard Artiste" to use it instead of Performance for creating art with junk. Perhaps you could use a stunt attached to either Craftsmanship or Scholarship that gives you a bonus to cooking things. Because you are right, it seems strange to have a high Craftsmanship/Scholarship, just to cook well. Perhaps Performance would be an alternative too, with a Shadowrun-like specializations, so it is +1 for most rolls, but +3 or more for cooking.

[EdgeOfDreams]

I would lean toward craftsmanship or performance depending on whether you want the flavor to be more chef-as-professional or chef-as-artist.  Considering the aspect 'Cooking is an Art' on him, I'd go with performance.  Those two skills recommend, IIRC, that you specify your character's specialty, and areas outside your specialty might be higher difficulty.  The groups I've played with use that rule to help represent someone who's very crafty/artistic in one area but not others.  You could also consider asking the GM to compel you on an appropriate aspect to fail the skill check when it falls too far outside what the character knows.

[braincraft]

Craftsmanship for bachelor chow, or catering for a hundred. Scholarship for being a chef at a five star restaurant. Survival for gutting a fish and grilling it over a campfire. Lore for making unicorn steaks. Deceit for making it taste like butter. Resources for having imported cheeses and wines and truffle oil. Empathy for comfort food. Performance for exotic plating.

[Sanctaphrax]

It's all Performance, in my humble opinion. It's an art, after all.

And Performance is limited by field, so a great chef is not necessarily a great sculptor.

[admiralducksauce]

Craftsmanship for bachelor chow, or catering for a hundred. Scholarship for being a chef at a five star restaurant. Survival for gutting a fish and grilling it over a campfire. Lore for making unicorn steaks. Deceit for making it taste like butter. Resources for having imported cheeses and wines and truffle oil. Empathy for comfort food. Performance for exotic plating.

If you need to pick just one skill, I'd side with Performance for what Sanctaphrax says, but braincraft has a good point here.

[devonapple]

If his cooking is never going to come up as a factor in a game (and when it does, it needs to succeed) you could just stick with an Aspect and throw Fate Points at it when it needs to impact an outcome. Not everything needs a skill.

That said, using that trait in a Social Conflict for Maneuvers to help other players' rolls (Empathy/Deceit/etc.) may require a skill to roll if you won't want to spend the Fate Points to activate the Aspect.

If a skill was required, I would also vote for Performance. Or a Modified skill roll between Performance and Resources (changing the primary skill based on whether expensive ingredients are a requirement or simply a bonus).

[Discipol]

I find it terribly useful to have a flavor aspect. One of my friends in a game has Local rock-star legend. Another is a heavyweight amateur boxer(were-bear).

But this guy is into cooking as an art so much, his latent talent came out as...platemancery? not important.

I think Performance is appropriate indeed, and is such an overlooked skill, most go for combat skills.
I could invest a refresh point to use Performance instead of Discipline for his spellcasting at least for the attack rolls.

[newtinmpls]

"Hi, I am working on a plate-mancer, who basically uses Spirit or Air to spin plates and focus on zone wide/spray attacks."

If that's a main, important thing (the spinning) for me I'd either dump the chef idea and go with a juggler theme or go with pizza, because it's the only actual food item I have seen associated with actual spinnage. Domino's guy discovers his magic when defending his late night store (he was the only one working, and he was playing around) with abruptly incindiary mozzerella. Of course he did get fired when the place burned down.


Granted, neither of those seem to be where you want to go. Just speculating.

[SunlessNick]

Because of this - "he is a chef, a very good one. He uses his catering service for social events" - I would surmise that social situations are the ones where it's most likely to matter whether this meal is up to his usual standard.  So I'd go with the people advocating a social or artistic skill - Performance is a good one, but even Rapport might be suitable - the sharing of food relaxes people and makes other dealings go more smoothly in the atmosphere of safety.