Reading and writing
Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2012 9:52 am
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.
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.