3. Languages

Languages


  • The thing you have to consider is where realism gets in the way to enjoyment. When I pnp in all my long years of pnp'ing, never had the DM take the players that are holding a conversation in another language away from the others. They just know what they can understand and what they can't.

    Personally, if I find a group of elves speaking with the usual <e>I'll stick around to enjoy their conversation from an OOC point of view. If they're speaking gibberish, I'm logging off, or going to hunt some bugbears for gold.

    I'd personally be very sad if we needed to put a wall between east and west germany instead of just asking and trusting that people will be fair about it. If you get what I mean.</e>


  • I like the idea of the tokens if doable…
    As to Lip reading I will try and find out, though I expect it would be a very hard thing to learn..maybe a 4 or 3 point language.


  • I played on a server that used it, and it was great. It added so much atmosphere, and stressed the importance of speaking the local tongue. It's rather nifty to walk by a bunch of half orcs sitting in a circle and speaking –

    "Ur vlig commok!"
    "Va! Iristch vlig pa"
    snicker

    -- and not knowing what they are saying, but then having one of your party members burst out laughing because he does.

    It's like not having the levels of the characters displayed. It makes it far harder to metagame.


  • I played on a server that used it, and it was great. It added so much atmosphere, and stressed the importance of speaking the local tongue. It's rather nifty to walk by a bunch of half orcs sitting in a circle and speaking –

    "Ur vlig commok!"
    "Va! Iristch vlig pa"
    snicker

    -- and not knowing what they are saying, but then having one of your party members burst out laughing because he does.

    It's like not having the levels of the characters displayed. It makes it far harder to metagame.


  • Same as Eluriel. Rith only really knows Celestial besides common, which I use as flavour in some ocassions, and it'd be silly if only I understood it and the rest saw gibberish.

    I trust players to not metagame the information, but at the same time feel part of what is going on.


  • Any word on lip reading?

    As a total aside - if we were giving garbling tokens - in the vast majority of cases I'd use a different sign to denote the language and avoid garbling.

    I usually use a language because people do prefer to communicate using their native tongue. If I'm at the south fire sitting talking to my elven friends there is absolutely no reason for to talk common for strangers to understand. Think of tourists in a city centre, or a group for foreign students at university.

    When I do use language to exclude someone it's to exlude pcs. I don't want to exclude players.

    Unless of course it's secrets, in which case I'd be using whispers anyway.


  • Very cool. Thank you for the response, Will.


  • With regard to language tokens, we hadn't implemented it previously due to the CPU issue - we were trying to avoid adding any additional load.

    Now that the CPU issue is resolved, we have been discussing it. Once we determine a course of action, there will still be some dev time required before we can get it IG.


  • @3da22f5d82=EodenValmer:

    With regards actual language translator type things IG, as I recall they spam the DM channel…. which is not good.

    And again, not necessarily anymore for the same reasons above. 🙂


  • If by tokens you mean ones to give to players to have on their PC so that a DM can quickly check languages known… I think that would be handy.
    With regards actual language translator type things IG, as I recall they spam the DM channel…. which is not good.

    No rules change to TC as I am aware, buy it don’t assume you get it for free rogue types.

    Sign Language: 1pt I would think would allow rudimentary comms, such as those used in military type manoeuvres and to convey basic conversations. 2pts would represent fluent communication.

    Lip Reading…no idea


  • Chiming in on Q3, I spent two points for Danika. I was led to believe that the sign language in use in Narfell was of the same complexity as modern real world sign languages. People at least use it like that's the case (and, my favorite touch, SickFish even has Troff be "bad with names" since he can't read/spell 🙂 ).

    @f25132242d=metagod:

    language tokens require listeners which are a drain of resources and cause a lot of lag

    Not necessarily anymore. 1.68 introduced the OnPlayerChat event and the functions GetPCChatMessage() and SetPCChatMessage(). It shouldn't cause too much lag to check the first character of each chat message for a [ or < or some such. Whether it's worth the dev time is still a good question though.


  • language tokens require listeners which are a drain of resources and cause a lot of lag


  • Speaking of languages. Have the devs ever thought about, or discussed implementing language tokens in Narfell?