¤, §, $, or ⟡?
The Struggle between Specificity and Comprehensibility
As I try to wrap up the first draft of Thousand Suns 2e — sadly, it will not be done before I leave for Rome — I continue to wrestle with the question of specificity. I touched upon this topic in my last post and will likely continue to discuss it here for some time to come, because it’s vexing question. How do I provide Thousand Suns with a solid enough setting that it feels distinct without, at the same time, stymieing the creativity of individual Game Masters and players? Put another way: how specific should the details of the Thousand Suns setting be?
My concern here is twofold. First, there’s the matter of comprehensibility. I want Thousand Suns to be easily accessible and understandable by a wide variety of gamers, not merely those steeped in the minutiae of the imperial science fiction tradition. Second, there’s the related matter of brevity. I want to choose the most straightforward way to convey a sense of place through the game’s text and presentation. I have no interest in a rulebook that runs 500 or more pages, so I need to be economical in my attempts to achieve this.
Here’s an example of what I mean. In Thousand Suns, the currency of the Ekumeno is known as the sol, after the Latin word for “sun.” In previous versions of the rulebook, a sol was represented by a dollar sign ($), albeit placed after the amount. Thus, an item valued at 1000 sols is written as 1000$. I chose the dollar sign, because it’s a widely recognized and understood symbol and because it looks like a capital letter S with lines through it and the word “sol” begins with S. It’s nothing fancy but it works well enough.
However, like the term “Terran State,” it’s rather bland and does very little to convey that sense of place I’m looking for. That’s why I’ve been pondering three options.
¤ is the generic Unicode currency symbol and looks a bit like a star.
§ is made up of the letter S stacked on another letter S.
⟡ is a diamond, but it also looks a little a star as well.
All three of these options have the advantage of being readily available in most common typefaces and, while none of them are as recognizable as the dollar sign, none of them is so bizarre that they’d be hard to decipher. Likewise, all of them have some connection to the word “sol,” whether because of a similarity to the letter S or to the representation of a sun/star.
In principle, any of these symbols could serve as a replacement for the dollar sign and, I hope, as a small but strong way to present the setting without the need for a wall of background information. I like that, but I also worry that using a weird symbol might be a barrier for some players.
Is that a reasonable concern or am seeing a problem where there isn’t one? I tend toward overthinking left to my own devices, which is why I’d appreciate a reality check from my readers. Thanks!
My strong instinct is that you ought to err on the side of comprehensibility. This may mean "$" but it could mean you just write out "credits" every time.
That said, If it's it just "¤" for money, I can keep track of that, especially if the equipment tables all have a "cost" column and then each entry doesn't just say "50" or "1200" but "50¤" or "1200¤." But if I have to remember that "¤" means money and "bruteborns" means space orcs and "Lixua Engine" means FTL drive and a dozen other bits of reskinned jargon, then that adds a big layer to my comprehension.
You can get away with neologisms if they are self-explanatory. For instance, you could have never read the Stars Without Number and see "vacc suit" in an adventure written for that system and instantly know it's a space suit. "Shear rifle" is slightly less obvious, but I would be surprised if you read that term and thought anything other than "some kind of really gnarly directed energy small arms." But a single character can't be self-explanatory unless it's already in wide use, which means it lacks the unfamiliarity you're trying to convey. Most of us know the symbols for dollars, pounds, euros, pesos, and yen, but not the generic symbol for currency.
Incidentally, one issue with the term "sols" is I would hear that and assume it's a unit of time, not a currency. think it means "a 24 hour unit of time used by people who need to know the time and date on Earth but are either in space or on another planet that has days of a different length." Your meaning as currency would be clear in a context like "the salvage is worth a paltry 300 sols" but it would be ambiguous in a context like "passage on the freighter is 30 sols" as that could refer to the length or the cost of the journey.
I don’t like the “§” symbol for the same reason Wilhelm Fitzpatrick doesn’t much like the $ symbol. The § symbol means “section” in U.S. legal notation when referring to statutes, rules, regulations, and so on. (So, 11 U.S.C. § 101 means “Section 101 of Title 11 of the United States Code”.) For most U.S. lawyers or other people familiar with legal writing, they will see § and probably think that—at least momentarily. You want to immerse them in your setting. You do not want to give them another reason to think about work.