Anna’s RP Friday Five – The Three R’s
- Can your character read and write?
Actually, all of my various characters can to one degree or another. Maybe it’s laziness on my part, but I just can’t seem to work up the energy to play a good illiterate. Moktor is probably the closest I’ll ever get to a functional illiterate, and hers is more just a fifth-grade education than anything else. But it’s not like you really need to read and write so much when you can command the powers of frost, disease, and blood.
- Is he/she good with numbers and business-like things?
Linedan and Moktor, no. They can do normal math if you give them a minute, Lin more so than Moktor. Illithanis is a little better just because she’s brighter and has a formal education from Silvermoon (albeit nothing more than your average elven high school diploma with a 2.8 GPA). Beltar, oddly enough, would be my best numbers guy. He’s smarter than he looks and acts, and has hung around enough merchants and criminals for a century that he’s picked up a nose for numbers and how to manipulate them.
- Does your character have a formal (schooled) education or an informal (apprenticed/learned by experience) education? Or both?
Hard to say with Linedan…I imagine Tauren education is largely informal. Beltar’s basically a ninth-grade dropout with a century of classes in the School of Hard Knocks on top of it. Illithanis, as stated above, has a formal secondary-level education but her “practical” skills with bow, animal, and skinning knife are family-taught. Moktor’s an elementary-school dropout street urchin.
- Has he/she learned another language than the one they grew up speaking (in full or in part)?
Linedan, yes because he knows Orcish in addition to Taurahe; his spoken Orcish is very precise and somewhat formal. Beltar, yes because he knows Common in addition to Dwarven, and has also picked up a very small smattering of expressive cursewords in Darnassian, Thalassian, Orcish, and Tarquinese/Jolstraerian. (His latest project is a Lordaeron-to-Common dictionary, entitled “The Apostrophe, Why It Is Half The Northmen’s Alphabette.”) Illithanis, again, yes because she can speak/read/write in Orcish and Thalassian quite fluently, and in fact rather oddly likes the harsh Orcish language. Moktor, nope, just Orcish for her.
- What does your character’s handwriting look like?
Linedan: Block printing, very slow and precise, because that’s how he learns–not by gift of intelligence, but by sheer bloody-minded hellbent rote persistence. Beltar: Doctor-level semi-intelligible high-speed scribble, but the spelling is usually close to right at least. Illithanis: Small yet flowing, somewhat sloppy because she writes quickly (a Farstrider talent of quickly making scouting notes). Moktor: Ten-year-old all-over-the-page badly misspelled scrawl.