Time for a Hero's Feast

You've just slain a massive hydra, its corpse lying in front of you awaiting its decay. It has to be loaded with meat, right? Hydra eyes have to be good for something! It sure would be a shame to let all those hydra parts go to waste.

In the Player's Handbook there are rules for eating that say if a character doesn't eat at least one pound of food per day they'll gain a level of exhaustion. This point of exhaustion can only be removed by consuming the required amount of food. One of the coolest parts of D&D is the way the game strives for realism, even in a world full of magic spells and giant, flying, fire-breathing lizards. However, even though I enjoy the idea of requiring food, I rarely impose it on my players. It's just one more thing for them to worry about. After all, I'm the Dungeon Master, not a parent in the player's ear saying "remember to eat a healthy breakfast!"

One of my players asked about eating food a little while ago. "Do we even need to eat food? Why do we pay gold every morning in the inn to eat when there's no reason to?" That got me thinking. Thinking about ways to make food seem necessary without imposing rules on my players that might slow the pace of our game. I started thinking about other games, games like World of Warcraft or Skyrim. Cooking can be a really important part of those games. Food can mean the difference between life or death. In those games, you're even sort of rewarded for eating because food will replenish stats like health and stamina.

After thinking about this for a little while I stumbled upon a tweet from Cecilia D'Anastasio spreading the word about her homebrew rules for cooking in D&D 5th edition (they're available on DM's Guild, go check them out here: https://www.dmsguild.com/product/228042/How-To-Cook). Her rules here are so fun and so inventive that they inspired me to take it to the next step.

Now that you have the food, what can you do with it? In my rules for consuming food, I break food up into different categories that I call levels. The more complex it the meal is will determine which level it is. The higher level a food is, the more health or mana it can restore. I left the rules intentionally open ended so that DMs could tweak and add to them as they see fit. Check out my complete rules here: https://www.dmsguild.com/product/266774/Consuming

Essentially, each meal is assigned a level. The more complex the meal (how many ingredients it has, how it's prepared, etc.), the higher level it receives. The higher level the food it, the more health it replenishes when consumed. With this system, it's easy to encourage players to prepare and eat food. Within the rules on DM's Guild I also detail what spoiled food might do to a player, as well ways to sell the food created.

Hopefully these rules are interesting and add some fun and realism to your game!