GM Mistakes #1

When playing recently with my coworkers, they received draft papers and were summoned to a meeting with the King. He sent them on their quest and gave them a letter with the royal seal to verify their business. After leaving town, the players wanted to read the letter. And that's where I made a mistake.

There were two things that I wanted for this session: 1) the world to feel real, and 2) the players backgrounds to be important. At the table we had a mercenary, ranger, servant, and pickpocket. I decided only one of those backgrounds^[1] would be able to read in this medieval-fantasy world. In the moment the players accepted it and even thought it was a neat level of realism. But what I failed to anticipate was the effect that this ruling would have on the later game.

Reading came up in two situations later in the session.

The first was in a chapel in the woods where they encountered a message written in Latin (or "Classical" as I styled it). I ruled that none of the players could read Classical so the message was undecipherable. I think this was a good ruling. It made message mysterious and the world feel more real (I wouldn't be able to read a message in Latin in real life). And importantly the meaning wasn't crucial to the story–just some embellishment.

The second was in a Wizard's chamber when they discovered scrolls. These were written in Common, but I had previously ruled that only one of the players could read. That ruling prevented everyone else in the party from using the scrolls–from casting magic–for the rest of the session. Thankfully it was a one-shot because otherwise those characters would have been barred from using magic until they first learned to read.

Realism is good. It makes the world immersive and nudges the players into role playing. But when running a game we need to make sure that players are able to play the game. And that might require us to break realism a bit to facilitate a good time. I should have ruled that all players could read Common^[2], just maybe with different levels of fluency.

Is that true to medieval history? No. But it let's the players play, which is why we're all there in the first place.