Do fantasy people use arabic numbers or do they have something esoteric of their own?

It won't really come up when playing an RPG, unless there's a player-interactive puzzle to solve.

Whatever the number system use, the characters will know it, whether the players themselves do or not.
Thus whatever system they use, it will almost certainly be translatable into whatever system the players use IRL.

You could of course make any strange numbers be an ancient system found in the ruins they are exploring. That perhaps the wizard has heard of but isn't sure how it works.

Exactly. It's usually just fluff-realm to employ different math systems.

Like in Lovecraft-RPs, the characters probably know some non-euclidean math to cast certain spells. But unless I have some puzzle about the number 6 representing the sun because it's written as an asterisk, there may not be much to do with it.

That's nice to hear, but then it isn't truly workable though.

What other systems are you comparing it to though? I'd love to see some more. I thought it up after a few days of reading about other unusual numbers like incan and such.

That system would be abandoned pretty quick in real life too. It doesn't look economical for numbers larger than 2 concentric squares.

Ok I actually meant mayan numerals. They're both south american after all.

Of course. But even with two squares you can get up to 65535 which is a pretty large number. Even more so in simpler societies.

Also it's just a possibility to use concentric squares. Roman numerals add some lines around numbers to specify large numbers. The white space in the middle of the square would work perfectly for similar notation.
It's mostly been something fun to ponder every now and then so far.
As I said, not really a workable/usable system as it exists right now.

>be /co/
>see OP image
>immediately this

I assure you these numbers are not based on loss user.

Marginally related, but have any of you ever managed to create a language? One that wasn't just a cypher of English or some such?

I haven't actually tried yet. Language is harder than numbers. Instead of just showing numbers one way or another. Language just plain works in different ways entirely at times.

Interesting alien languages are pretty hard to come up with unless you are a linguist, and even then making it believable would take work.

Come to think of it, creating languages is probably something a computer or neural net could do these days, train it with basic language features and then let it mutate the language to mimic drift over time and it would probably come up with something convincingly alien.

Creating a language is not as difficult as it may appear. You just start from the beginning and make different words for things.

"Cup"="Lel".
Then you can add screwy things to it like:
The suffix "-i" means "light", and "-o" means "dark".
"Leli"="light cup", "lelo"="dark cup".

It's real simple to do a 'first order' pass, but most people don't consider where language comes from, the physical universe, so they get hung up.

Remember when some user made his own number system for a homebrew game and i turned out it was the most complicated shit ever devised?

and some operations to go with it

>turned out it was the most complicated shit ever devised

It is actually real easy to make complex new systems. You just do shit that has an effect. Like turn the number right to indicate it gets multiplied with the one next to it.

The real challenge in life is making things simple, efficient, optimal. Man even professional physicists forget this and it annoys the crap out of me when they do.

It looks similar because of the perpendicular lines. But I don't really get it. I kinda get why 6 is 6, 10 is 10. But what the fuck is going on at say 9 or 16?

the visual representation of 9 is the visual representation for 3 to the 2nd degree

After looking it over. Despite the overdone complexity. I actually appreciate that it's fairly compact.

As much as I'd love to think up a number system for my setting simply for world building purposes, just can't wrap my head around anything beyond something that just steals from Roman numerals.

Have you tried sitting down and reading about unfamiliar systems user? It's a good start.

A neat "simple" change could be how they split up large numbers, even if they're still using a system based on tens. We tend to use thousands, and have terms for the first few powers of a thousand, but there's no reason another civilisation couldn't express everything in ten-thousands or hundreds.

e.g. 10,000,000 could be "ten hundred hundred hundred" or "one hundred blahs" (where "blah" is their term for 10000)

Can't say I have, Friend. Any suggestions?

When you say thousands do you mean 1/1000's?

So that when I have in decimal. One apple. I have one thousand, thousands of an apple equaling one whole apple?

The easiest place to start is of course wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_numeral_systems

I think he means he means how we count like so, 10,000 is ten thousand(s), 100,000 is one hundred thousand(s).

That makes a lot more sense user. Thank you.

He's referring to the words for large numbers.
Our powers of ten:
One, ten, hundred, thousand, ten-thousand, hundred-thousand, million, ten-million, etc.
Proposed alien powers of ten:
One, ten, hundred, thousand, foo, tenfoo, hundredfoo, thousandfoo, footwo, tenfootwo, etc.

I think the edge tallies should be moved in from the corner to reduce morphological ambiguity.

Can you elaborate on the ambiguity?
Because the center square or at least the square's edge is required as well as the clockwise rule. You can't really draw an "almost number" which could be interpreted to be a number.

honestly I kinda like this
It appeals to my inner programmer
as the divisions make it easily to turn into binary or hex

Kind of like the Roman system, except in the opposite direction and as so:
>1 = I
>5 = O (one circle)
>25 = 8 (Either two concentric circles or a circle inside a circle)
>125 = [] (Box)
>625 = [+] (Box split in 4 by a cross)
>3125 = [#] (Box inside a box)
So 3800 = [#][+]88.
This is how numbers are written in general use.
How this actually ends up being written in most cases is you have 'calculation paper' specifically for the purpose. It consists of a series of boxes you place dots in to represent quintinary values. The first box is the ones box and is split in four through corners, like [X]. This has the neat benefit of indicating the end of a line as well.
So [ * ][ ][ * ][ * ] [ + ] is (5^5)+(5^2)+(5^1), or 3155.

I'm not sure I like the potential ambiguity between
[+]
and
[ + ]

never mind It's late and I see it now

is this how qr codes work

No, QR codes work through an ancient and mysterious pact with the Omnissiah.

QR codes have far more efficient and compact encoding. You basically just have lots of bytes ordered around the corner "crosshair" things.
Meaning that a few pixels making a byte of QR code can encode a fully marked square in the system detailed here.

Unlike QR codes however, this is meant to be somewhat human readable.

...3155 would be written [*][_][_][*][_][X].
I guess it's not such a good system if I screw it up this easily.

>We tend to use thousands, and have terms for the first few powers of a thousand

Please excuse this rant about the "-illion" terminology:
>A million is 10^6, a billion 10^9, trillion 10^12
> n-illion is 10^3(n+1)
Fuck that "+1", it makes everything difficult.

Just for fun I've been sitting here scribbling on a notepad trying to come up with a visual system for multiplication. It's hard because I actually don't know much about math and because the numbers move up in power so quickly. 2 times 3 is visually very similar to 8 times 12 but their results are not. Well, 6 and 96 have the same number of "digits" so to speak. Huh and 32 times 48 follows the same patterns as well. No idea if that's meaningful though.

Went ahead and drew a picture. You can see the repeating "F" pattern.

I honestly don't even see where the [*] comes from.

The explanation itself in doesn't use it. It just uses I, O, 8, [], [+] and [#] as far as I can tell.

I'm feeling really stupid here.

Oh also, it might be better to write higher powers like so. You know, in case these people ever need to count up to 4^255 or something.

I don't really follow where this one is different from my own example actually. How is this square in a square different?

I hadn't really come up with a pattern for multiplication. I noticed you only used the same sides in your examples though. In most general use I find it pretty hard to calculate. I absolutely have to convert to decimal instead of just adding/removing tally marks.

>2 times 3 is visually very similar to 8 times 12 but their results are not
but they are. The results have the same orientation, the only difference is rotation and how much of the square is written.

Also man, it really shows it's 3 am and I should be asleep. I can't even count in decimal right now. This should be the correct answer.

I've made a number of different numbering and counting systems for a variety of peoples and races while worldbuilding. In the end I never end up using them with players to save time on mathematics in already math-heavy games. Though one player did figure out that a specific culture used base four when all the gold they got was in lots divisible by four. Just doing similar to how people tend to round to the nearest ten with large enough numbers.

Do you perhaps have any lying around on notes or in memory to show us user?

Yeah you're right. I wrote that then went back to drawing and saw it followed a pattern, just rotated an additional 90 degrees. What I meant was more that the rudimentary visual method I used to calculate 2 times 3 didn't work.

For 2 times 3 the F is rotated an additional 0 sides from the starting corner.
For 8 times 12 the F is rotated an additional 1 side from the starting corner.
For 32 times 48 the F is rotated an additional 2 sides from the starting corner.

"Starting corner" in this case being the first non-zero digit. This has something to do with each side being an additional power of 4.

It also occurs to me that you can write these numbers as a modified form of binary. 1 = 1, 0001 = 4, 00001 = 8, 10001 = 9, and so forth.

This way you never need more than one square inside the "counting" square. Pic related is 1,048,576.

Wait nah that idea for higher powers is obviously dumb. It can't count in smaller increments.

FUCK, I was looking for this! Thank you user!

>rotate an additional x sides
that's because of how many powers of 4 you're adding to each factor pair, right? If you want to keep the pattern consistent, you should only multiple one of the 2 factors by 4.

>2, 3
>2, 12
>32, 3

multiplying by a side seems to rotate the number
>2*4=8
>7*16 = 112, which is 7 rotated 180
Wih each side being a power of the base 4, maybe multiplication should be thought of as exponentiation rather than adition.

>4* rotates 90
>16 rotates 180
>64 rotates 270

16*16 = 256, 16 rotated 180

16*64= which is 64 rotated 180 or 16 rotated 270

It's odd that it changes how it works specifically for exponents though. The inner square doesn't behave in the usual manner.

It's almost as if decimal suddenly changed the value entirely of the numbers. Like saying "exponential 156" but the 1 = 100000 5=50000 and 6=6000 or whatever. It just changed the rules completely.

Keep in mind that it's a positional notation.

It would make more sense if the inner square acted as the exponent making exponents up to 255 possible like so.

Outer multiplied by inner seems so natural, that's what I thought the first picture was showing

It also seems multiplying by five leaves the number in place while also superimposing it on the next face

>"one hundred blahs" (where "blah" is their term for 10000)
You mean like Chinese?
万, the "blah", called "wan", is 10,000
十万, literally "ten wan" is 10,000
百万, "hundred wan" is 100,000
千万, "thousand wan" is 1,000,000
and then 亿 "yi" is 10,000,000
They have more words for bigger numbers too but fuck that

First as in or ?

In the OP image the inner square is still worth a total of 255. But the next square's left side is worth the previous square's total number +1.
Thus making another cycle of *4's around the full square.

The inner squares are absolutely required to make it possible to write every number in this way. Since you can't make odd numbers out of 256's, 1024's, 4096's and 16384's for example.
It's why it was written as "possibly represented." I never really got past that part on my own. Making the inner squares exponents makes it more possible to go big without huge, spacious numbers.

...

Yeah

I also remember when an user threw an autistic shitfit because people in fantasyland spoke and wrote in English.

I'm not following how you actually make that final transformation. Unless, I think this is the in between step? You end up with 4 lines on the top face so you carry it over to the next empty space. Like 999999 + 1.

...

Rate my system fags/

Before someone points it out, I made a typo in the bottom right, 2nd vowel.

How do you make numbers larger than 20?
In you example for 20. If it's a positional like arabic it seems it would be \\ = 210. You should make a clear rule of what makes a single digit.

Where do you put the numbers in relation to eachother? Are they separate like 123 or connected like the OP and or something else entirely?

Having multiple ways to write the same number seems weird as well since where digits end seems is weird. Pick one and tell us how numbers work past 20.

You Missed a 0.

qr codes are a 2 dimensional barcode

Exactly.

As the guy who posted it, that was the tail to:
>How this actually ends up being written in most cases is you have 'calculation paper' specifically for the purpose. It consists of a series of boxes you place dots in to represent quintinary values. The first box is the ones box and is split in four through corners, like [X]. This has the neat benefit of indicating the end of a line as well.
It was referencing the way numbers are written as a matter of calculation, for easy addition. The bottom bar was a way of spacing [] to make them look more like boxes.
So for writing an epigraph for years 100-150, you'd write
>Life of user: 8888 - [_]8
But the [*] represented placing a dot in the box for adding numbers together.
So if you wanted to add 50 and 30, you'd do related image.

Take this to /co/ when you head back there.

>MFW I realize that barcodes are one-dimensional
And I work in retail

And here's how you would write numbers among non-merchants/academics.

Never played Myst, but I really want to. Pic related is the D'ni numerical sysem in base 25.

*system

That's because anglos have to make everything needlessly difficult. Billion= bi-million, or 10^12. 10^9 is milliard.

I fail to see how that makes it difficult. Groups of 3 are easier to read than two groups of 6

If you write the numbers out, you still use groups of 3, user.

In particular, that's the American system user was complaining about, that has unfortunately become universal in English-speaking places. There used to be a rival system where a billion was a million million and so on, only introducing new words when you'd actually need them.

Fucker

>There used to be a rival system where a billion was a million million and so on, only introducing new words when you'd actually need them.
Not used to. Pretty much every European language other than English still does that.

>Not making up your own number systems
Dwarves use base 12, orcs and goblins use base 6, humans use base 10, elves use base 8.

>Implying I don't

I invented the system in the OP myself user.

I nearly choked

They're call the long and short systems and both are still in use.