Emojis?

[CountVanBadger]

In XNPC, dungeons aren't measured in levels like Heroes and monsters are. Instead, they have skull ratings, with the difficulty going up the more skulls it has. That's harder to get across in text than I expected, though. Usually, my character boxes look like this:

LEVEL 25 ECCLESIASTIC VIPER
STATUS: VISANTII'S BLESSING​

But with a more visual representation like skulls, I'm limited to doing it one of two ways: either only let the characters talk about the dungeon and never actually show a system message about it ("This is a four skull dungeon, so we need to be careful") or use emojis.

TEMPLE OF VISANTII, MATRIARCH OF SERPENTS
RATING:????​

What do you guys think? Will people be okay with me using emojis like this, or will they stop taking the story seriously?

 

[Pattable]

I don't mind emojis as long as it matches the theme of the story. Also if they're used where reasonably justified, such as your example.

As an aside, skulls are pretty much all-encompassing genre-wise, and seem as evocative as you can get to signify danger

Another thing to think about is the scale of the rating system: What's the max skull rating? Five, ten? If you're fitting it all into 5 skulls, how much does each additional skull add to the overall difficulty of the dungeon?

Visually, In my opinion, up to 5 skulls (RATING:?????) looks fine like that, but any more and it would be too visually distracting.

(i.e. 10 skulls (RATING:??????????) is practically an ugly linebreak.)

Alternatively, you might show it like this: (RATING:?x10), but that might just end up like a roundabout level system for your dungeons.

 

[CharlesEBrown]

Visantii may be dangerously close to Vishanti, one of the major magical sources in the Marvel Universe.

That said, not a big fan of visual "tricks" in prose writing, but it can work on webnovels and SOMETIMES even works in print. If you've got beta readers, get their input on it with and without the skulls.