Character Literacy

[brainszine]

As a linguistics nerd and English teacher, I felt I had to develop some semi-realistic rules around character literacy for our campaign. To do this properly, a whole new Appendix L would be needed (I would eliminate Alignment Languages for starters), but I decided to keep it simple and not change anything in the rulebook. Here's what I've come up with so far:

Character Literacy in DCC

In feudal society, most people are illiterate because books are rare and of little use to farmers and tradesmen. Certain occupations and character classes confer automatic literacy, but everyone else must make a Literacy Check to learn to read and write. If your Intelligence is 5 or less, you can never become literate. Sorry, too dumb.

Automatic Literacy:
All Elves
Dwarven Apothecarists
Halfling Moneylenders
Merchants
Nobles
Scribes
Tax Collectors
Wizard's Apprentices
1st Level Clerics
1st Level Thieves
1st Level Wizards


If you're not automatically literate, you can make a Literacy Check in order to learn. Roll unmodified 1d20. If you get less than or equal to your Intelligence, you are literate in all languages that you know or learn. If you fail, you can make another Literacy Check each time you increase character level.

Elves live to be a thousand years old, so a 0 Level Elf is probably already 200 years old, which is more than enough time to learn to read and write. Likewise, all Clerics, Thieves, and Wizards must be literate for professional reasons, just as surely as the Wizard's Apprentice and the other occupations listed above. The only one I'm unsure of is the Noble. I bet there could be lazy nobles and royal cousins that never bothered to learn, but they are the most likely to receive formal education so I let 'em have it unless their Intelligence is 5 or less.

Any thoughts?

[finarvyn]

Great first post, and welcome to the boards!

I'll confess that literacy isn't a topic that I think about much with my fantasy RPGs, which is a bit strange since so many games focus on languages known (spoken) so why not literacy? Also, this makes one more reason why intellegence isn't a "dump stat" in the game.

[Weisenwolf]

I think the assumption that the number of languages a character speaks is related to intelligence is a larger problem. There are plenty of multi-lingual idiots and plenty of clever monolinguists; it makes no sense at all.