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Khi'Khi
2017-11-23, 07:58 PM
Anybody have advice on how to deal with a language barrier outside of magic?

Some context: We're playing a complete homebrew system, with a first-contact scenario between two different peoples who obviously they have no way to understand one another. This is also a VERY low magic setting where good 'ol "Comprehend Languages" will not work. The explorers will speak "common," whereas the natives have their own language along with a fairly well-developed form of sign-language.

I know many systems have the "linguistic" skill, but this takes time and concentrated effort. Plus, it will be interesting to see how people get around this obstacle when the quick and easy solution is not available. Has anyone ever played this way, or have any advice on how players might navigate this?

Anxe
2017-11-23, 08:08 PM
My group hasn't done this but we've talked about. Or final decision was that language barriers are rarely fun. They tend to detract from the game more than add to it. If it's just one adventure where part of the challenge is communicating nonverbally... maybe? I would never have language barriers be a consistent part of my game though. Realism or not.

That's just what my group decided though. This type of challenge could be engaging for a different set of people.

Actual advice: pantomime or illusion spells are the way to go.

Mr Beer
2017-11-23, 08:14 PM
Not fun for me, but some groups would probably enjoy being forced to communicate via 'iron age charades', at least for an hour or two. Once they stop enjoying it, let them talk in some kind of pidgin.

LibraryOgre
2017-11-23, 11:13 PM
A lot depends on system. D&D generally models this poorly... knowing a language is pretty binary. You either know East Felendian or you don't. If you know it, you know it, and the language works. If you don't know it, you can't say anything in it, except wrong.

More nuanced game systems tend to have some degree of acquirable ability with languages, with a 1 in a language representing something different than a higher score (Ars Magica uses a 1-5 scale; Hackmaster uses tiers for their % skill system). A beginner might only be able to communicate a few common concepts (hunger, bathroom, danger... but not what type of danger), while someone with more experience can communicate a lot more. The very basic level is usually easy to acquire, but greater facility requires more effort (or, in the case of Hackmaster, might happen if you're REALLY lucky).

So, I'd start by looking at what constitutes tiers of ability in your system, and crib some notes about what that means from different sources. Ars Magica 4 is free from Atlas Games (http://www.atlas-games.com/product_tables/AG0204.php), and might be a good starting point.T

Vitruviansquid
2017-11-24, 02:19 AM
Anybody have advice on how to deal with a language barrier outside of magic?

Some context: We're playing a complete homebrew system, with a first-contact scenario between two different peoples who obviously they have no way to understand one another. This is also a VERY low magic setting where good 'ol "Comprehend Languages" will not work. The explorers will speak "common," whereas the natives have their own language along with a fairly well-developed form of sign-language.

I know many systems have the "linguistic" skill, but this takes time and concentrated effort. Plus, it will be interesting to see how people get around this obstacle when the quick and easy solution is not available. Has anyone ever played this way, or have any advice on how players might navigate this?

As others have said, having a language barrier problem might be a fun and immersive way to spend a scene or maybe a session... but the novelty will wear off quickly and your players won't want to play charades for an entire campaign.

I'd quickly introduce an interpreter character, like a fellow explorer or an adventurous native who can pick up on the basics of the other side's language. If you see potential for fun in it, you can give this interpreter a clear conflict of interests with the player party or a "colorful" negative personality trait, like being unreasonably surly, or duplicitous, and so on.

dps
2017-11-24, 03:17 PM
My group hasn't done this but we've talked about. Or final decision was that language barriers are rarely fun. They tend to detract from the game more than add to it. If it's just one adventure where part of the challenge is communicating nonverbally... maybe? I would never have language barriers be a consistent part of my game though. Realism or not.

That's just what my group decided though. This type of challenge could be engaging for a different set of people.



I tend to agree. Unless the players have a particular interest in linguistics, they'll probably find dealing with a language barrier boring and/or frustrating. OTOH, if they're really into linguistics, you might have to actually design a complete, plausible fictional language for them to decipher to keep them happy. Do you have the skill and patience to do that?

Jay R
2017-11-24, 03:29 PM
You want to role-play something that's difficult in real life. OK, then, accept that it's difficult.

Simple things can be done easily, or course. I heard of one game in which a character washed up on a foreign shore with his pouch but no weapon. He found a village, and bought a hunting spear with the simple expedient of pointing to the spear and pulling coins out of his pouch until the villager nodded.

That level of communication is easy. So is asking for food or shelter. But negotiating a treaty would take much longer to learn enough of the language.

Like any other skill, determine for each specific attempt what the DC should be.

Jaelommiss
2017-11-24, 05:03 PM
As a player, I found the best way to overcome language difficulties is to devour the heart of their deity and convince them to worship me instead.

As a DM, I accept that some challenges require thought and effort to overcome and allow my players to choose whether they wish to engage that challenge or not.

LibraryOgre
2017-11-24, 08:36 PM
You want to role-play something that's difficult in real life. OK, then, accept that it's difficult.

Simple things can be done easily, or course. I heard of one game in which a character washed up on a foreign shore with his pouch but no weapon. He found a village, and bought a hunting spear with the simple expedient of pointing to the spear and pulling coins out of his pouch until the villager nodded.

That level of communication is easy. So is asking for food or shelter. But negotiating a treaty would take much longer to learn enough of the language.

Like any other skill, determine for each specific attempt what the DC should be.

In Hackmaster, if you have less than a certain threshold of language ability (I think it is under a 51% in the language), then all of your social skills are capped at your language ability.

Khi'Khi
2017-11-24, 09:25 PM
In Hackmaster, if you have less than a certain threshold of language ability (I think it is under a 51% in the language), then all of your social skills are capped at your language ability.

I like the idea of percentages determining the amount of a language one knows. Despite being very heavy on specified skills, I did like the ranking system of Pathfinder in this regard. If a character bothered to put ranks in linguistics they could pick up on a language far quicker than someone else.

I dislike the idea of having a straight skill check vs DC in this regard, because it does make it "binary" as someone else suggested. You could instead have a spectrum of comprehension, say 16-20 means success, 10-15 means minor flaws, etc.

Knightofvictory
2017-11-25, 01:29 AM
Best way is always roleplay, combined with a skill check to guess and communicate intent. Learning a language you have just been exposed to recently stretches credibility unless the character has massive intelligence, or a lot skill with linguistics. I would have characters do 'sense motive' or 'persuasion' type skills to understand or show roughly what they are trying to say. Ideas communicated must be simple. "Come with me" "Stop" We are friendly" "Do you want food?".... along these lines. Of course, bad roles mean miscommunication, and that is where the fun begins...

You can have a lot of different checks so that all the party can get involved. High Charisma type characters might be really good at being disarming and showing you aren't hostile, or scaring people away. High Wisdom types can express and read ideas intuitively through hand motions and facial cues. High Intelligence characters might learn the words that are repeated often, and start to figure out common words.

Communicating complex ideas like "Go to the cave to the northeast, find the diamond on the alter and bring it back here" should be impossible without months of learning.

Anxe
2017-11-25, 01:42 AM
The Kenzer&Co folks who designed Hackmaster also came up with a decent language system for 3.0 in Kalamar with ranks and DCs. I don't remember which book described it though. Anyone else?

Anonymouswizard
2017-11-25, 05:36 AM
First off, it's a very difficult thing to do. I've considered running games where players begin with a certain number of languages at various levels of fluency, and then throwing them at people who are speaking a variety of languages and aren't always fluent in theirs.

As a general rule I give everybody two languages for free in all games, to stop both the 'we're all from here so we don't have to spend skill points' method and the occasions where there's a language barrier in the party (I saw it once, not fun and was sorted out quickly). I personally often buy multiple languages just in case a GM throws this at me, unless we meet somebody speaking a completely unrelated language and nothing else speaking a bunch will make communication easier even if we don't share one. At the very least I'll take two languages, and have often made the 'party language' my nonnative one.

For how to run a thing with a completely unrelated language? It'll take at least years for effective high level comminication, but a check or two to learn enough for basic politeness and communication should be fine.

LibraryOgre
2017-11-25, 08:06 AM
As a general rule I give everybody two languages for free in all games, to stop both the 'we're all from here so we don't have to spend skill points' method and the occasions where there's a language barrier in the party (I saw it once, not fun and was sorted out quickly).

(An aside, here: While I appreciate the world design idea that "There is no Common", I find every in-party language barrier arises from one of two sources... someone deliberately not playing along, or a GM who insists that there is no Common, then refuses to tell us what the most common local language is, leaving us to select in the dark, usually based on a cool world overview, not an idea of where we actually ARE)

Anonymouswizard
2017-11-25, 08:40 AM
(An aside, here: While I appreciate the world design idea that "There is no Common", I find every in-party language barrier arises from one of two sources... someone deliberately not playing along, or a GM who insists that there is no Common, then refuses to tell us what the most common local language is, leaving us to select in the dark, usually based on a cool world overview, not an idea of where we actually ARE)

(Yeah, I tend to include a big, economically powerful empire somewhere in my settings, to encourage the idea that their tongue is used as a business language. I also once made a setting where there was no equivalent to common, but the PCs began close enough to a national border that they probably spoke the language of at least one country and could pick the other one up fast in downtime. That fell through during character creation because one member of the group refused to believe I'd run a setting with no white people, but the idea was I'd send them on a quest or two to get used to the GURPS system, then they could adventure anywhere in those two countries.)

Jay R
2017-11-25, 11:55 AM
(An aside, here: While I appreciate the world design idea that "There is no Common", I find every in-party language barrier arises from one of two sources... someone deliberately not playing along, or a GM who insists that there is no Common, then refuses to tell us what the most common local language is, leaving us to select in the dark, usually based on a cool world overview, not an idea of where we actually ARE)

This makes me want to design a world with several closed empires with almost nobody who learns other peoples' languages, so the only viable trade language is the pirate patois.

Nifft
2017-11-25, 11:42 PM
This makes me want to design a world with several closed empires with almost nobody who learns other peoples' languages, so the only viable trade language is the pirate patois.

I did that.

It was a renaissance world, where there had been an apocalypse ~1k years ago and several isolated pockets of humanity developed in relative isolation since then.

Before the event, the major world-spanning empire had been not-Rome, and had spoken Latin, so the four major human pockets developed into the not-French Kingdom, the not-Italian Republic, the not-Spanish Confederation of Islands, and the secret not-Portuguese people who turned out to be unnecessary to the plot.


What I told the players: "There is no Common. You're all from the not-French Kingdom, so if your character speaks Common, instead you get Luxorian (which is not-French). NPCs who would speak Common instead speak the language of whatever major powers is nearby, or their biggest trade partner, or both."

What happened as the game went on: PCs tended to invest more heavily in planar languages, and use those languages for communication with foreigners. This was both reasonable and flavorful -- for example, two Wizards would probably use the arcane language of dragons to communicate, while two summoners (who might be a Cleric and a Sorcerer) would probably use the language of angels or fiends.

This also gave Druids a reason to actually use their class language.

Nargrakhan
2017-11-26, 12:03 AM
I don't really have a constructive answer to provide, other than my own experience that a "no Common" gaming session was one of my worst experiences.

It wasn't for a DnD campaign, but had a GM who knew German and Greek. During a certain part of the game we got lost in a location that didn't know this game's equivalent to Common. NPC responses at this part were spoken in German. Signs we "read" saw were written in Greek on paper. No one in the group knew either. We had to play charades to muck through NPC interactions, and had ZERO way to figure out the Greek alphabet (very intentional on the GM's part I'm sure).

While the GM seemed like he was having a blast, we players were frustrated beyond words. One player began only speaking to the GM in Spanish. Got ugly for awhile, I was about ready to quit because it was so annoying. Fortunately the GM relented and we moved on from that nightmare.

All I can say: If you're going to do this, make sure it will be fun for your players too... not just the GM and making a (in the GM's mind) awesome campaign.

Mechalich
2017-11-26, 02:04 AM
Communicating with people whose language you do not speak is extremely frustrating in real life even for highly limited interactions, but you can get across at least simple ideas and concepts with some effort.

It's worth noting that, in a historically based fantasy world, there is likely to be both a measure of linguistic overlap (being able to catch even a few words due to cognates between langauges makes a big difference) and some level of trade languages, scholarly languages (for instance classical Chinese allowed people with no spoken language in common to communicate via writing), or other means to facilitate communication. Prior to the Age of Sail it was relatively rare for people to encounter others who did not share at least some linguistic roots with them.

From a GMing perspective, I would avoid making people actually try to communicate without a common language, but instead keep the players to simple concepts and emphasize that getting the point across takes a very long time and has some non-zero chance of catastrophic error.

Nifft
2017-11-26, 02:36 AM
From a GMing perspective, I would avoid making people actually try to communicate without a common language, but instead keep the players to simple concepts and emphasize that getting the point across takes a very long time and has some non-zero chance of catastrophic error.

You could even limit the "concept palette" by way of the most relevant language(s) of power -- determined by whatever powerful forces are relevant to both parties of the communication.

For example:

- If the most relevant language of power is Infernal, then concepts of hierarchy, sin, and suffering can be clearly communicated.

- If the most relevant language of power is Sylvan, then concepts of nature and terms of flattery can be clearly communicated.

- If the most relevant language of power is Celestial, then concepts related to virtue can be clearly communicated.

- If the most relevant language of power is Draconic, then Arcane effects can be clearly communicated.

Jay R
2017-11-26, 10:02 AM
The crucial principle is that any barrier is fun and challenging to face, be overwhelmed by, and eventually overcome. If it represents the same barrier in the tenth session that it did in the first, it will probably become a frustrating game to play.

Anonymouswizard
2017-11-26, 10:29 AM
This makes me want to design a world with several closed empires with almost nobody who learns other peoples' languages, so the only viable trade language is the pirate patois.

I remember once trying to run a setting like that, there was no common but there was a 'trader's tongue' that most people who travelled tended to learn. Never really went through with it as it would have interfered with the PC's ability to discuss tactics, as the language evolved with trade in mind (read: anything else would inflict penalties to your rolls), so I just renamed Common to Imperial and stated that until several generations ago there had been a big Empire that ruled everybody around this place, and a lot of people still learnt the Empire's old language either because their traditional language had been stamped out, they used it as the language of scholars (think Latin), or it was just really useful to understand the language of visiting officials (the PCs rarely dealt with peasants or the like). So there was one city where everybody spoke it as their native language, and then you could find somebody who knew in it every city and most towns.

Because you can justify having a common tongue if you assume that not everybody speaks it, but those who deal with foreigners probably do. Not having a common tongue can be interesting, but either you need the PCs to be polyglots so it's not normally a problem, or have them able to hire translators everywhere.

Jay R
2017-11-26, 10:50 AM
Because you can justify having a common tongue if you assume that not everybody speaks it, but those who deal with foreigners probably do. Not having a common tongue can be interesting, but either you need the PCs to be polyglots so it's not normally a problem, or have them able to hire translators everywhere.

Exactly. 500 years ago, it was Latin. 200 years ago, it was French. Today it's English. Who knows what it will be in 200 years?

Solaris
2017-11-26, 07:27 PM
Oh, hey, I've had fun with this one IRL. It can get... tedious. I was one of the few guys who'd try engaging the locals in conversation, and even with me speaking pidgin Arabic and the locals speaking pidgin English we weren't exactly getting elaborate and philosophical. Charades got used a lot.

The good news is, the natives in the setting have a sign language. Those tend to be born from gestures coupled with facial expressions, which tend to be fairly universal. This works to your game's favor, because the players are probably going to be resorting to charades to start off with until they establish a working vocabulary. If you've a fairly clever native, he should be speaking pidgin Common within an encounter or two. The guy with the equivalent of the high Intelligence score (or whatever attribute covers learning) ought to be not too far behind.

One thing to keep in mind is that few people who speak only English have any talent for learning new languages, and even fewer have the patience to do it for a made-up language in a game. I wouldn't recommend playing too much with forcing the players to learn the vocabulary if they're not all liking it.

Satinavian
2017-11-27, 02:28 AM
I prefer playing it out for a new contact.But when the campaign goes on, either interacting across the barrier is done and then people on both sides will learn the other language or it is not done and the language barrier is not important because people try to avoid interaction.

If the system allows, you could also introduce partial proficiencies with limited vocabulary. Use basic words with somewhat similar meaning instead, offer alternative not really fiiting words to convey a range to guess the meaning, combine words with gestures.

For functional but still far from perfect, wordplays, second meanings of words, slurs and euphemisms should be source of translation problems as well as words referring to concepts unknown to the other group.

You could make communication easier this way for every longer downtime where interaction takes place.

Bulhakov
2017-11-27, 05:07 AM
I wanted to suggest a trick I've used before to translate text using google translator back and forth between two or three languages, to get some nice language barrier simulation, but the automatic translator has gotten so good it no longer produces results as hilarious as before (it does however translate "homebrew" as "homemade beer").

I do recommend getting a "translator" solution as soon as possible (computer, magical or genius/telepath native).

Anonymouswizard
2017-11-27, 06:46 AM
Exactly. 500 years ago, it was Latin. 200 years ago, it was French. Today it's English. Who knows what it will be in 200 years?

Yep, at an educated guess I'd say it might be Mandarin, but there's no way to know for sure.

I wish my country had begun teaching us languages earlier now. I'm struggling to learn French so I can visit a friend and/or flee before this country decides it's really not part of Europe.

LibraryOgre
2017-11-27, 04:56 PM
Another thing from Ars Magica, since there's just so much neat design stuff in there.

One thing you get every season is "Exposure XP"... XP just for the stuff you did that season. Spend a season as a blacksmith? You get XP for Blacksmithing. You spend a season surrounded by people speaking Russian, you get XP in Russian. You only get one lot of exposure XP a season, and there's a degree of diminishing returns and some other restrictions... but you can mimic learning a language by being surrounded by it.

Algeh
2017-12-01, 10:13 PM
Not overly helpful to the OP, but I'm reminded of a GURPS game I ran quite a while back.

The basic character-building instructions were "modern day Europe, 100 point characters, nothing supernatural, give me a reason why your character is in Starting City (which I no longer remember, but I think was in Switzerland) but make sure it's one where it's also ok if they leave that city, and you'll probably be spending a lot of time traveling around to various places in Europe". (Game ended up being about a chihuahua one of the PCs was dog-sitting getting dog-napped by the Pirate Illuminati, who left a series of strange clues to allow the PCs to find them again as an elaborate test. There was a sequence where they ended up having to use public transit to get around Paris to find assorted costume props they realized they needed to wear. This was, to put it lightly, a low-combat game.)

My players were the kind of people to take a bunch of random skills that "sounded interesting" rather than min-maxers, so I ended up with such character concepts as "vacationing American intellectual property lawyer", "traveling folk musician", and so on. Most of them had at least 3 or 4 languages, and they all happened to take French at a high enough level that I initially just let them all talk to each other without rolling, and gave them all little signs to hold up with language names to let me know what language they were speaking at the moment if it wasn't French.

Then, a new player decided to play a character whose native language was Basque and had a 9 in French. (GURPS uses a system where you roll 3d6 and want to roll under your skill, so a 9 is not a particularly...competent score to have.) He definitely knew what he was getting into, and we had a blast with him sort of nodding along while everyone discussed strategy and then doing odd things as it became clear that he'd missed the memo at least some of the time.

This would not have worked well with a group that was trying to "win" or that would get upset when things weren't "efficient", but it worked for the players I had. They just all needed to buy into the idea of coming up with suitable miscues and being ok with it.

I guess the useful advice I have is that language barriers need both an in-game system (we used paper signs to show what language everyone was speaking and people knew which languages were "automatic" versus rolled for their characters) and a lot of player buy-in to honor the results of those rolls and make them part of the fun rather than an annoying obstacle to overcome on the way to the fun.

Guizonde
2017-12-02, 08:45 AM
for the first time i dm'd, i kinda sorta fell into that trap. the party came from a very insular village. they spoke their language, which i described as a mix of latin and germanic (latin for the nuances, germanic for the freeform structure). then along came the sixth player. he was from outside the village and spoke the evolved form of the language (basically, he spoke spanglish to the latino-germanic of the rest of the team). we skipped ahead a few weeks in the span of 2 hours regularly doing intelligence checks so they could learn each other's languages. the "face" character picked it up the fastest. the dice gods decreed that as a shady character, she would have the most ease of learning new dialects (seriously, in 4 rolls, she had 12 degrees of success, to the rest of the team's average 2). for the rest of the team, it was a mix of charades, body language, and pictograms. out of all 7 of us, 5 had done improv theater and were at least moderately proficient in that. i don't know how it would have worked out with people not used to doing that.

we dropped that quickly, thank goodness, although the veterans of that session unwittingly created a "player code" of nonverbal and memetic cues to slip hints and tactics past the dm. "catching the 32" still means "attack from above" to them.

being an interpreter by training, i picked up castillan spanish because i understand occitan. cousin languages are a great way to pick up new dialects (occitan -> catalan -> castillan). a portuguese friend of mine learned castillan thanks to gallician with the same principle. wish it could work in my case for arabic and russian, but alas i'm not familiar at all with any parts of those languages.

to mimic the above, i'd throw new players tests on intelligence or linguistics with modifiers based on either languages known or roleplay. in dnd terms, you speak ork, you can try to understand goblinoid. you speak dwarven, you can maybe get a crack at speaking undercommon. things like that. multiple successes over an arbitrary period of time would unlock a proficiency, dispensing from dice rolls. having teams that speak multiple languages helps on occasion. in my pf game, 3 of us speak ork. understandable for the half-ork paladin, but my half-drow and the human that's really a curve ball. we got a lot of hints just listening in dive bars thanks to that, and nobody wants to do a linguistics check mid-combat when we're throwing out strategies in orkish. it usually goes like this:

half-drow: *ooc: i speak ork* aim for the kneecaps!
human: *ooc in orkish* flank him to the left*
paladin: *yelling in ork* protect the oracle!

last time that happened, the necromancer got blitzed by a 3-way attack. had we brainstormed a bit more our character synergies, we'd probably have chosen celestial as our combat cant, but only the support part of the team speaks it. the fighting part of the team had elvish, ork, and common in common, and in pf, none of our classes (except the bard) have "linguistics" as a class skill. hindsight is 20/20.

edit: afaik, basque as a first language is bloody rare (rarer than basque speakers, even)! my brother in law is basque, and can speak it fluently, but he grew up speaking french. that session must have been hilarious! also, that language is a nightmare. whenever i'm over there, i'll either speak french or spanish depending on which side of the pyrénées i'm on. linguists still have no clue how that language was born, it's so alien to indo-european languages.

Bogwoppit
2017-12-02, 02:40 PM
When we have language barriers in our games, we do a thing you might have heard of - it's called roleplaying.

For the uninitiated, what you do is you pretend to not understand, according to whether your character speaks the language.

You guys should try that

Anonymouswizard
2017-12-02, 04:02 PM
When we have language barriers in our games, we do a thing you might have heard of - it's called roleplaying.

For the uninitiated, what you do is you pretend to not understand, according to whether your character speaks the language.

You guys should try that

*sigh* of course somebody would respond to the thread where people are talking about how to roleplay a problem, how to go about including it or avoiding it in a game, and similar topics with 'have you considered roleplaying'. The general idea in this thread has actually been 'roleplaying it session after session is tiresome, and so it should only appear occasionally'.

That's the thing, nobody's saying 'don't roleplay it', but that doing so all the time is tiresome. It's like roleplaying going to be in the inn, sure it's fun/funny the first couple of times but after that you'll just stop because it's been done and you want to move onto new stuff.

Nifft
2017-12-02, 04:05 PM
When we have language barriers in our games, we do a thing you might have heard of - it's called roleplaying.

For the uninitiated, what you do is you pretend to not understand, according to whether your character speaks the language.

You guys should try that
Could someone translate this post for me?

I don't speak sanctimonious trollish.

Anonymouswizard
2017-12-02, 04:33 PM
Could someone translate this post for me?

I don't speak sanctimonious trollish.

Roughly as follows.


No, you guys, you're doing it wrong, you should roleplay it instead of what you're currently doing. I'm going to explain it in extremely patronising terms and pretend that you should be grateful to me for pointing it out. No, I'm not going to read the rest of the thread to check what was actually being discussed.

I mean, at least when I refer to Roleplaying as make believe, it's either because I'm telling people not to take it so seriously or trying to make fun of the fact I still 'play make believe'.

Bogwoppit
2017-12-02, 05:08 PM
If this is what passes for trollish round here, you guys should take a look outside!

Anyway, all I'm saying is that there's no need to make things hard when you want to inject some linguistic realism into games - you just roleplay it.
It amazes me that anyone thinks this is news.

Nifft
2017-12-02, 05:14 PM
Roughly as follows.

I mean, at least when I refer to Roleplaying as make believe, it's either because I'm telling people not to take it so seriously or trying to make fun of the fact I still 'play make believe'. Thank you kindly.



It amazes me that anyone thinks this is news. Nobody thinks that.

Bogwoppit
2017-12-02, 05:23 PM
Oh no - a guy who disagrees with us! Call him a troll till he goes away.

Soz, but no.

Seriously, in visual media, we get subtitles, in books, we just get some note that people are speaking a different language - and we have dramatic irony to work around the fact that we the audience/reader know more than the protagonists.

We're supposed to be smart, we RPers. We can do this. We can pretend to not understand. We're supposed to be keeping player and character knowledge separate, anyway - or otherwise we're adventure gaming, not roleplaying.

So who needs a set of rules, or a noninclusive imposition of some substitute language to simulate language barriers?

Anonymouswizard
2017-12-02, 06:05 PM
Thank you kindly.

You're welcome.


Oh no - a guy who disagrees with us! Call him a troll till he goes away.

Soz, but no.

Except you're not disagreeing with us, you're either pretending to not understand the discussion or legitimately not understanding it, I honestly can't tell, and being patronising while you're doing it.


Seriously, in visual media, we get subtitles, in books, we just get some note that people are speaking a different language - and we have dramatic irony to work around the fact that we the audience/reader know more than the protagonists.

I don't get the point? In an RPG when we speak a different language we make a note of it. I personally love playing characters with four or five languages, and tend to pick ones where the speakers are less likely to speak the common equivalent if the GM lets me (my favourites in D&D are Goblin and Orc).


We're supposed to be smart, we RPers. We can do this. We can pretend to not understand. We're supposed to be keeping player and character knowledge separate, anyway - or otherwise we're adventure gaming, not roleplaying.

Oh, so much wrong with this paragraph. It's ignoring the fact that there are people of all intelligence levels that enjoy roleplaying, and that people roleplay in vastly different ways. Some people dislike having their roleplaying limited by language barriers, others don't care.

Also, it's worthwhile noting that 'no difference between player and character knowledge' works for some games, even some heavy roleplaying ones. It's a style that some people enjoy. Please don't act like your style is the right one.


So who needs a set of rules, or a noninclusive imposition of some substitute language to simulate language barriers?

Short answer nobody, because nobody's actually said that. We've:

Discussed our approaches to including language barriers in games.
Discussed our approaches to avoiding language barriers in games.
Discussed the realism of our approaches.
Discussed systems for characters learning languages.
Discussed potential mechanical effects for having a poor grasp of the language.


Your post had two problems, it wasn't constructive (telling people that they should just be roleplaying what they're ummm... roleplaying), and it wasn't relevant (the discussion was on the effects of short term and long term language barriers in games, and how to deal with them in ways that aren't annoying or handwavy). It wasn't even relevant to the original post, which was about characters dealing with a language barrier in-game without using magic.

So the reason rules are being provided is partially that we were originally asked about, and partially because having rules makes it easier to adjudicate. We don't need rules for roleplaying at all, there are in fact a lot of people who prefer free form, but we have them because they give a baseline that everybody's agreed on.

Bogwoppit
2017-12-03, 02:11 AM
Jolly good - I'm just trying to say it's ridiculous to try to solve this imagined problem with anything other than RP.

Algeh
2017-12-03, 03:34 AM
0.

edit: afaik, basque as a first language is bloody rare (rarer than basque speakers, even)! my brother in law is basque, and can speak it fluently, but he grew up speaking french. that session must have been hilarious! also, that language is a nightmare. whenever i'm over there, i'll either speak french or spanish depending on which side of the pyrénées i'm on. linguists still have no clue how that language was born, it's so alien to indo-european languages.

Yeah, the character concept was an older person from a rural Basque-speaking area that wasn't overly in touch with larger European society and had more of the practical, do-it-yourself skills that someone from a small community might have. (I'm really fuzzy on specifics now, unfortunately - this game took place about 15-20 years ago now. Woodworker by trade, maybe? I can't remember how/why the character made his way to Paris and met up with the rest of the PCs, but think it was around the point in the campaign where they were taking public transit around Paris trying to figure out where to go to buy a chicken suit.)

It was really great addition to the party, because everyone else was playing these widely-traveled urban intellectual types (lawyer, musician, schoolteacher, etc.), and here came this guy who barely understood them (or what was going on, since he hadn't been there when the dog was initially stolen or when they got the notes and photographs from the Pirate Illuminati that lead them to believe it was part of a larger plot) and had all of these practical skills for accomplishing physical things so they often needed to find ways to explain the nature of the problem they were trying to solve to the person most likely to be able to fix it by some combination of pantomime and broken French...(explaining "we need to dress up in strange costumes because the Pirate Illuminati stole our chihuahua" is...not in the common phrasebook a traveler might use, and even if he knew all of those words he would have assumed he misunderstood because that basically doesn't make any sense).

I think my favorite was the time they all decided to form a band and busk. I really can't remember if that was in some way part of the plot or just a thing that happened because the players decided their characters would go do that (possibly because they just realized how many of them took at least one musical instrument as a skill), but it was definitely a thing that happened.