I’ve seen a lot of people complaining about how food is too overpowered, or it makes healing potions worthless, or that it shatters their delicate and fragile suspense of belief in a game with literal immortal bardwizards and elves, but this is maybe the first RPG in which I have ever cared about the food items.
In most RPGs that include food, I fully ignore it, because it is basically worthless. The usual pattern is that it will give you a ludicrously short term, mostly ineffectual buff, and one extra STR or CON for two minutes is just not worth the effort. It makes virtually no difference and becomes just another bit of clutter in bags that I have to pick around to conserve inventory slots and weight.
No, it is not a 5E rule, but it gives an otherwise useless clutter item a reason for existing, which I assume the in-development crafting system will add on to by letting us combine those food items into better food.
The fact they are sometimes “as good as potions” is only a negative if you are ascribing some arbitrary sanctity to the role of potions in general. People need to remember that this is not a pen and paper, purist interpretation and it never will be, and if we kept with the traditional model wherein potions were absurdly expensive and rare, they’d have to scale back the combat so much that it would be extremely dull. The only alternative option would be to flood the game with EVEN MORE potions, and then people would complain about how that was “not accurate”.
I am not interested in the “but it makes no sense” or the “it’s not realistic” arguments either because there is absolutely no logical reason that a potion should let you speak to animals, or heal external wounds either, other then it’s a random bit of handwaving we’ve just agreed to ignore.
The food system is fine.
