I've gotten a real kick out of using the Education skill to represent literacy vs. illiteracy. I often use handouts in my game and its a blast to give a character who can't read a handout with a bunch of gobbly **** on it, only to have that character find someone who can read it.

I run multiple games and in all cases, the majority of the party members are illiterate. This adds a nice element as the players try to work around it. I even have some players looking to take Education as a non-career advance, just to be able to read.

Similarly, I've used the economic tiers the same way. For example, if I have a player in the brass tier speaking with someone in the gold tier, I'll throw a misfortune their way during social encounters, and vice versa. I've had a few players spend money of different clothes so this wouldn't occur.

Any other ideas?

That's a cool idea doing handouts with nonsense on them.

jh

Furlong Doug said:

Neat idea. I'd use it if only I had players who talked to NPCs...

I have the Empire use symbols, like tavern signage etc., lots.

At Hugeldal for example, the written proclamation being accompanied by a picture of a white dove in a red circle with a slash though it (this is a no Shallyan zone).

I'm also careful to edit out silling things like in Gathering Storm there being a sign with writing on it approaching the "hillbilly farm" - because yes, illiterate peasants all have nicely lettered signs at their gates.

Literacy-wise, I usually assume that most can read enough to get by in day-to-day life (so they can read tavern signs, see how much a room is, understand the big "no weapons" sign, etc).

If they are handed a written page, though, (or anything using sentences) they are screwed.

And I love pushing the tier angle enough that I've been considering creating "economy cards" for each tier that give a bonus and penalty in appropriate situations.

The other thing that really pushes the difference between tiers is making moneychanging difficult. A crown is not the same as one hundred shillings, and each can be a problem depending on where you spend it. If my party gets their hands on a gold crown, the first reaction is "crap, who is going to take this?" because most of the places they do business at deal in silver or brass. You can't walk into a low end inn, hand them a crown and expect them to break it for you (plus, where would they spend it). Likewise, if you check into the high end inn with a few sacks of shillings to pay the 2g a night, they will turn you away on principle. There are some places that deal in 2 coins (usually brass and silver), but you can't always count on it.

You could always have it changed, but the corrupt Empire moneylenders always charge 20-30% (before haggling comes into effect).

When confounding players "hoo kant reed gud" I have, in my more prepared moments, given them a paper with the easy words on it and then totally mashed the crudzilla out of any multiple syllable or uncommon words. It gives them a chance to peice it together as if they were in an episode of Sesame Street...but I usually get it thrown back at me with rude finger gestures.

Think of it like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AiYy8cKE7s

How do you handle the Forger career, who has no access to the education skill. Does that seem strange to anybody else too?

Relborn said:

This has been brought up before and someone mentioned that it might even be good thing that they cannot, since if someone wants to forge a document for some reason it might be better that the person doing the forging doesn't have a clue what it says. The forger could for example make a copy of someones signature and/or seal, and add it to a document while having no idea what the text is about.

As I see it most of the "important" people, like elector counts, burgomeisters and other people that you want to have a forged signature from dictates their letters to a scribe who writes it in a neat and good looking hand and then they just read through it (to see that the scribe didn't alter the content) and then they sign and seal the letter.

Therefore forgers might not need to be able to read and write, they just have to know how to copy a signature and make a false seal. They might also be good at making paper look old and worn, making (fake) maps, making newly written books look old, forging valuable paintings, making copies of keys might also fall under the forging category, etc. and none of these things really require reading/writing skills, it might even be possible to copy a whole letter without beeing able to read/write just by copying how it looks exactly. Reading and writing skills might help in some cases though and then it might be appropriate to add fortune dice if the forger has the education skill trained.

If on the other hand a forger should write the actual content for some pages, for example forging parts of a book (to alter the content somehow for example, while making it look like part of the book) the forger would need to be literate.

Something I did was give my players a handout written in German. It had the "right look" for the game and since none of my players speak German, and none of the characters are Educated, it worked out great. They managed to sound out some words and guess their meaning which worked out nicely, or at least the way I think it might have worked for the characters in game.