Ever thought about having an npc in the Inn or in
some stores that can, for a price, write whatever you
want on a scroll? Whats the point? Well I would find
it quite usefull ;)

Romanul.

>Ever thought about having an npc in the Inn or in
>some stores that can, for a price, write whatever you
>want on a scroll? Whats the point? Well I would find
>it quite usefull ;)

Good idea. This might even give rise to the pen skill being more useful. Consider, even, an idea of not being able to write notes in-game without pen. Notes to "immortal" could still be written, because you're assuming it's OOG. Even better would be a specific OOG address, like immoog, since that would specify whether the note would be OOG. This way you could have priests with no specific god writing to immortals in-game.

Otherwise, you'd need scribes to do it for you. An example might go like this:

A scribe tells you: "Tell me what you'd like written down, and I'll see what I can do."
You tell him, line by line, since that's how you'd be writing it anyhow.
A scribe tells you: "That'll be X copper, please."

which could be dependent on the size of the letter you're actually writing. A small amount, say, two per line written, but nonetheless, this could add up. Say you want 30 lines written, that's about 60 copper, a relatively small amount but still realistic for the NPCs to want to make money off of it.

However, if you want to do it yourself, you buy the pen and parchment off the scribe, write it yourself. This should save you money but won't always be reliable unless you have the perfected pen skill (who does?). I haven't researched the exact numbers of buying parchment or pens because my current character doesn't really use it.

Another idea is giving the privilege to read and write to only priest and mage classes (including paladins and APs), rangers (since they cast) and bards. If your training is so focused on learning how to fight, why do you need to know how to read and write? Shouldn't it be assumed that you can get a scribe to do this for you? Which leads to my next idea, scribes to allow you to read documents.

If you don't know how to read by default (in-game, how many lumbering fire giant warriors are ever exposed to reading things? Orcs, for that matter, too?) then why should you be assumed to know this? With the same idea, you should be able to purchase a scribe to read that document for you, which would allow you to read a note for 20 copper. You wouldn't know whether notes would be useful or not, but it'd allow you to read the notes.

To conclude this, my major criticism of the current system of reading and writing is that it isn't that realistic, and I believe it should take into account that you've got a lot of IG untrained people wandering around miraculously knowing how to read and write. It might make the game more difficult for some, but in the end, I think it'll contribute even more to a meaningful economy.

Am I missing something, or doesn't everyone get the pen skill?

Not sure whether or not the idea has been kicked around yet. If it hasn't, I'll make sure it does get kicked around a little bit.