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Reading and writing

Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2012 9:52 am
by Skyscraper
How do you play reading and writing for PCs in your campaigns? Are they able to? How do you handle that at character creation?

Is there a rule about this, such as random determination? I don't recall seeing one.

Presently, I'm leaning towards letting anyone with intelligence 11 or over decide whether his PC is able to read and write, and those below need to roll an INT check (d20, roll bewlo INT value).

The background is a world where most people cannot read or write. However, one idea behind my somewhat generous offer for PCs that are intelligent enough, is to let them in on the fun of being able to actually benefit from written information they find: documents, books, maps. In a Warhammer game I played last spring, we had a single PC out of five that could read, and honestly it kinda sucked. My PC for example foraged through an NPC's room and found papers, only I forgot about them altogether and the DM had to prod me to ask the PC capable of reading to decipher the papers for my PC. Then, there were tons of papers we found, we kept forgetting the complicated German-sounding (i.e. unfamiliar) names in the papers and after some time stopped asking the player with the litterate PC to read, we read them ourselves because it really became tedious.

Re: Reading and writing

Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2012 10:33 am
by TheNobleDrake
The book says that only characters with a 5 or lower Intelligence are illiterate - so that's what I go with. I do only apply it to PC characters though - NPCs can read, or not, as is needed for their role as an NPC.

Re: Reading and writing

Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2012 1:24 pm
by Skyscraper
TheNobleDrake wrote:The book says that only characters with a 5 or lower Intelligence are illiterate - so that's what I go with.
It does? I have forgotten that then. I was under the impression that the book suggested a world where most people were not able to read, and I thought this was inclusive of PCs.

Hmm. I'll have to rethink my approach then.

Thanks for your reply.

Re: Reading and writing

Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2012 4:13 pm
by TheNobleDrake
Skyscraper wrote:It does? I have forgotten that then.
It is the last sentence regarding Intelligence on page 18, in case you wanted to know where it says that

Re: Reading and writing

Posted: Wed Oct 24, 2012 1:16 pm
by Skyscraper
TheNobleDrake wrote:
Skyscraper wrote:It does? I have forgotten that then.
It is the last sentence regarding Intelligence on page 18, in case you wanted to know where it says that
Thank you.

Re: Reading and writing

Posted: Fri Oct 26, 2012 12:33 pm
by finarvyn
I typically assume that basic people can read and write the common language of the realm, which I know wouldn't be true in a true ancient culture but seems to work in the literature.

If it's written in an obscure language I make a roll based on the intelligence of the character, then a second roll to see how familiar with the language the character might be. Players keep track of this stuff for later reference if they find another place to read the same language.