New thought having to do with this. When toady adds more teaching and reading stuff in (I think he will because of the new skills in adventurer) how would dyslexia...
Neat. Don't let a dyslexic adventurer read a magical tome.
Bearing in mind the progress of civilization in DF, they probably wouldn't be using up-to-date terms like "dyslexia"....
First off, dwarves don't know what atoms are, yet they use atomsmashers. That's a poor example, but it's entirely possible for us to give some dwarves Asberger's Syndrome or ADHD without them understanding them.
Why do you assume the biochemistry of dwarves is so different from that of humans?
Given the above point, why would dwarves have dwarfism? Dropping that...very short limbs, a bit bigger than a kobold overall.
Another thing that this would require....
This makes sense.
Presumably, dwarves would survive head wounds the same way humans do: Sometimes.
Or maybe dyslexia is an affect of choosing to have a low reading skill from the get-go? Still, it shouldn't be so bad that you can't work around it. There should be a pastern to it, so for example, blue is always switched with purple or something, and have that random for each adventurer so that people would have to figure it out on their own. It really depends on the dwarven alphabet to be honest. If it is letters like ours and some are similar in shape (b d p q, M W, u n, for example) than it would just be letter switches, which wouldn't be that bad unless its something like bog is actually dog. If its more like chinese though, where each character is its own word, or ancient Egyptian where it is pictures, I don't think it would matter all to much. I had Chinese in fourth grade and I was the second highest grade in the class (Under the Chinese girl) and I have dyslexia. I think it is because the words are basically pictures, and they are all different, so even if my mind sees them upside down or whatever it doesn't matter as much as seeing a b instead of a p.
Still there is the other part of dyslexia that I tend to accidentally skip entire lines of text, so it is kind of like:
There is spot. See spot run.
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
And they lived happily ever after.
But I don't know how well that would transfer in game though, and I don't even know if that is a part of dyslexia or not. There would have to be an option to 'check again' or something because sometimes you can tell you misread something. Though you would also then have to be limited on how many times you could use it because people would just spam it otherwise.