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Kwyndig posted:When has "Languages Known" ever been anything but a way for a DM to dick a party over?
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Jun 11, 2017 20:28
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Evil Mastermind posted:Duh, yes, 20. Sorry.
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Jun 11, 2017 20:28
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Kwyndig posted:When has "Languages Known" ever been anything but a way for a DM to dick a party over? Trail of Cthulhu handles languages pretty well if I recall correctly.
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Jun 11, 2017 20:28
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Kwyndig posted:When has "Languages Known" ever been anything but a way for a DM to dick a party over? I once played a werewolf game where because all our characters came from different parts of the world the only language we all had in common was Garou.
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Jun 11, 2017 20:37
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Languages are useless outside of the edge case in D&D because nearly everyone speaks
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Jun 11, 2017 20:48
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The only languages I typically bother with are esoteric ones, like Elemental, Draconic, Celestial, etc. Who cares about keeping track of everyday languages?
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Jun 11, 2017 21:05
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The dumbest I've ever seen it is in Eclipse phase. The game where you have a skill for every language and a thing in your head that can translate every language to one you can speak anyways. Like they made a mechanic that is completely invalidated at character creation by another mechanic.
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Jun 11, 2017 21:10
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Covok posted:The dumbest I've ever seen it is in Eclipse phase. The game where you have a skill for every language and a thing in your head that can translate every language to one you can speak anyways. Like they made a mechanic that is completely invalidated at character creation by another mechanic.  Muses can either translate all languages at 30% or you buy skillsoft for individual languages, can't remember which.
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Jun 11, 2017 21:35
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I learned Quenya, Al Bhed and Klingon for several games I GMed and hell if I'm wasting that knowledge instead of using it.
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Jun 11, 2017 21:45
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Kwyndig posted:When has "Languages Known" ever been anything but a way for a DM to dick a party over? It adds a lot of depth and flavor to a campaign if used well. Sure, everyone speaks Common, but that's generally a trade language. Not what's used in royal court, or commonly in backwater towns. And then add monster and ancient languages and there's plenty of good stuff in there.
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Jun 11, 2017 21:50
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Pretty sure it was handled ok in kalamar? I think? I can't remember
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Jun 11, 2017 21:54
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Kwyndig posted:When has "Languages Known" ever been anything but a way for a DM to dick a party over? If you use it to spotlight a particular party member, i.e. the PCs run into a person who only speaks [language that 1 person in the group knows]. Like, if you're running a canned adventure that says you need to
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Jun 11, 2017 22:00
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I've had language barriers come up in investigative games (e.g. we're trying to solve a crime but it's in Uruguay and some people know Spanish but no one knows Guarani) and it's been interesting, and I've also had lots of player-created content about what, say, Elvish is like in our world or whatever. So it's not necessarily total bullshit Gygaxian naturalism stuff. But my group is literally 5 linguistics PhD students and one of their husbands soooo...
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Jun 11, 2017 22:01
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Zurui posted:Languages are useless outside of the edge case in D&D because nearly everyone speaks Reign's rules for languages are pretty good, imo. There's explicitly no 'Common Tongue' in that game and languages and translation are meant to play a big part of it. Literacy is a relatively big deal, too.
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Jun 11, 2017 23:04
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Doodmons posted:Reign's rules for languages are pretty good, imo. There's explicitly no 'Common Tongue' in that game and languages and translation are meant to play a big part of it. Literacy is a relatively big deal, too.
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Jun 11, 2017 23:13
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IME, in your typical long-running fantasy campaign, "what languages your character can speak" can make for an interesting scene about twice, on average. Usually, this takes the form of "Ah, but I took Kuo-Toa at character creation, so I can totes understand the Kuo-Toa general's battle plans" or the equivalent will happen once, and "I'll speak ancient High Elven to the elven king to impress him with my worldliness" or the equivalent will happen once. And that's about it. Not a worthwhile return for the investment, in my opinion. I can see it working in the right system (e.g., Reign, which I've read but never played), but in your typical fantasy game I don't think languages are really worth worrying about or devoting page space to.
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Jun 11, 2017 23:16
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Surely the only interesting thing to do with character languages is when the DM says "it's written in a language none of you speak" and nobody is gonna bother checking what's written down on their character sheet because that'd code for "guys I've got something amusing planned"
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Jun 11, 2017 23:32
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Surely the only interesting thing to do with character languages is when the DM says "it's written in a language none of you speak" and nobody is gonna bother checking what's written down on their character sheet because that'd code for "guys I've got something amusing planned" Nah, I prefer when you can say it's an obscure language and one of the PCs does know it, so their choices are vindicated. This helps if you give PCs guidelines about what kinds of languages are likely to come up first.
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Jun 11, 2017 23:40
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Plutonis posted:I learned Quenya, Al Bhed and Klingon for several games I GMed and hell if I'm wasting that knowledge instead of using it. While Quenya and Klingon are full language, Al Bhed is just a cipher: there are no grammar rules or the such Also, how was it running a FFX game? Decided to test out Cortex+ hacking with a FFX hack (Yes, I know about FFD6, but I'm doing the hack to explore the engine and I'm replaying FFX now so it felt like an good fit).
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Jun 12, 2017 00:44
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It came up in my 5E game this week when we traveled to a foreign country and all but one of the party members (who is a half-orc and very decidedly not the face) does not speak the local language, putting us in a number of very awkward positions. Particularly for my character who has effectively disguised herself as one of the foreigners to get around more easily but can neither speak nor read a word of anything anyone else is speaking.
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Jun 12, 2017 01:22
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I've had it happen that my faceman character couldn't speak the necessary language, so the negotiations had to be done by the guy who could (who wasn't very good at Bluff, Diplomacy, Intimidation, etc.)
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Jun 12, 2017 01:25
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There is definitely story-hay to be made from language barriers but D&D and its derivatives usually do nothing with that and instead opt for the monoculture bullshit. If you were to travel from Lisbon to Moscow in the middle ages you'd have to speak at least a dozen languages to communicate with the locals. Actually, come to think of it, Forgotten Realms is one setting that actually has numerous local languages and acknowledges that Common would be a trade language and not something most people would speak at home. There you go Arivia, your setting has a thing.
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Jun 12, 2017 01:59
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That's true enough, yeah. I'm playing in a homebrew setting where the different countries and provinces of each country actually do have their own languages and dialects. Since our backstories are all already established, whenever it comes up we can just go "I think my character would be able to speak this given XYZ" and that's that. Admittedly the dialects thing is mostly an excuse for our extremely British GM to break out whatever American accent he thinks is funny that day.
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Jun 12, 2017 02:06
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Zurui posted:There is definitely story-hay to be made from language barriers but D&D and its derivatives usually do nothing with that and instead opt for the monoculture bullshit. If you were to travel from Lisbon to Moscow in the middle ages you'd have to speak at least a dozen languages to communicate with the locals. Ars Magica has Latin as the language that all wizards and a bunch of ecclesiestical authorities and maybe some scholars know but otherwise you definitely have a lot of language barrier issues and it's a good way to RP. I remember making in Fool of Sound's game a Companion who was a young Finnish hunter who could only communicate using rudimentary Russian with my playable Magus (She was from Novgorod) and struggled with everyone else.
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Jun 12, 2017 02:12
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Looks like my superhero thread went archived so I'll post this article on how the doom pool auto-balances for play group size, for cortex prime backers.
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Jun 12, 2017 02:13
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The Gates of Firestorm Peak has a Tome of Clear Thought written in illithid Braille, which is kind of an amusing "hope someone can Comprehend Languages!" gently caress-you. (Also apparently Braille is the default illithid written language for some reason? Frankly, I was more amused by that Tome of Clear Thought when I thought it represented a surprisingly progressive attitude towards disability accommodation by the Mind Flayer community.)
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Jun 12, 2017 02:23
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Zurui posted:There is definitely story-hay to be made from language barriers but D&D and its derivatives usually do nothing with that and instead opt for the monoculture bullshit. If you were to travel from Lisbon to Moscow in the middle ages you'd have to speak at least a dozen languages to communicate with the locals. Yeah, a lot of places in the Forgotten Realms have Chondathan pushing out whatever is the native language, which is a really nice touch. There are plenty of dialects in FR, but they were cut down for 3e from Tom Costa's work.
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Jun 12, 2017 02:50
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Covok posted:While Quenya and Klingon are full language, Al Bhed is just a cipher: there are no grammar rules or the such Nah it was for the Strike FFT game, I wanted to use an alien language for some extradimensional badguys and the Al Bhed translator came in like a glove.
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Jun 12, 2017 03:00
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I'm playing in a WoD Mage game atm where we are currently Eurotripping, but we only have English, German, French, and Russian as languages among the party, so travels to countries where those languages aren't spoken have been interesting excursions in nonverbal communication. No we don't have anyone with Mind enough to just magically speak any language. Most of the time when languages come up in D&D, for me, is when players say "oh I know [appropriate language] can I use that here?", and so I usually give them puzzle or plot hints, or make NPCs slightly friendlier to them. Recent example would probably be when a cult was attempting to shatter an ancient binding by inscribing a giant runic circle in Celestial and Abyssal and then sacrificing an angel - the party member who has a load of languages translated the script, while another worked on the runes using K:Arcane, and they worked together to figure out what the happenings were. The end effect was they knew the stakes during the next setpiece fight, and knowing the details of the ritual gave them an accurate timer for the fight rather than having to roughly guess how long they had to free the angel - 2 rounds, plus an extra round for every 2 cultists killed as they slowed the ritual conclusion. On the round when they couldn't down enough cultists to extend the timer, the Archer left themselves open and took a lightning bolt in order to free the angel, arrow through the hangman's noose style.
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Jun 12, 2017 03:01
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Splicer posted:It's neither. Look at the 0 - 60 range. Look at it gently caress. Why?! If they lumped by 20s for 1-19 and 20-39 before going to 40-49, 50-59, I'd at least understand that. What they have there is just baffling. It defies explanation.
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Jun 12, 2017 03:08
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Splicer posted:It's neither. Look at the 0 - 60 range. Look at it Neat, something they meant to fix made it to the final version because I got a good feeling in my bones something written somewhere else in the tome contradicts it.
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Jun 12, 2017 03:24
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I like how everything outside of direct modifiers to the d20 roll could probably be divided by 5 or 10 and function identically to how it is now. It reminds me of original Eclipse Phase character generation, but far, far worse.
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Jun 12, 2017 03:35
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If you've invested character resources in a language, then you should get to decide what a message in the language says and make it retroactively true.
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Jun 12, 2017 03:55
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Bar Crow posted:If you've invested character resources in a language, then you should get to decide what a message in the language says and make it retroactively true. "The message says there's big piles of gold in the next room with no guards. Also, you owe Throthgar five silvers, Jerry, pay it up."
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Jun 12, 2017 04:05
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Barudak posted:Neat, something they meant to fix made it to the final version because I got a good feeling in my bones something written somewhere else in the tome contradicts it. The book is 450 pages long. It's probably contradicted multiple times.
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Jun 12, 2017 04:35
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Antivehicular posted:Also apparently Braille is the default illithid written language for some reason? Written language that works in pitch darkness. Makes sense as an underground written language to me.
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Jun 12, 2017 06:43
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Ambi posted:I'm playing in a WoD Mage game atm where we are currently Eurotripping, but we only have English, German, French, and Russian as languages among the party, so travels to countries where those languages aren't spoken have been interesting excursions in nonverbal communication. No we don't have anyone with Mind enough to just magically speak any language.
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Jun 12, 2017 07:05
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Antivehicular posted:The Gates of Firestorm Peak has a Tome of Clear Thought written in illithid Braille, which is kind of an amusing "hope someone can Comprehend Languages!" gently caress-you. (Also apparently Braille is the default illithid written language for some reason? Frankly, I was more amused by that Tome of Clear Thought when I thought it represented a surprisingly progressive attitude towards disability accommodation by the Mind Flayer community.) If I recall from the Illithad it is 'Quarilith'. It's almost like the I-ching instead of six bars with broken/unbroken segments there are four. Looks like this: ----- ----- ----------- ----- ----- ----------- Helical Nightmares fucked around with this message at 07:12 on Jun 12, 2017 |
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Jun 12, 2017 07:06
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theironjef posted:Written language that works in pitch darkness. Makes sense as an underground written language to me. Hey System Mastery. Review the Illithiad why don't you guys.  https://www.amazon.com/Illithiad-Advanced-Dungeons-Dragons-2nd/dp/0786912065 There was one for Beholders too. https://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Dun...HK19474RHMSD03F Helical Nightmares fucked around with this message at 07:12 on Jun 12, 2017 |
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Jun 12, 2017 07:07
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Angrymog posted:Euros are a lot better about knowing other languages than native English speakers are... Yeah, with those three languages a person would be able to at least get by pretty much anywhere in Europe. Not hold a conversation with literally anyone off the street, but the language barrier wouldn't be too much of a hindrance.
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Jun 12, 2017 07:12
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