languages

[BelDragos]

Would the inclusion of languages over complicate the game? I was wondering because right now every creature on the planet is speaking the same language. I know it could be explained as a side effect of the Cateclysm but that was hundreds of years ago and some tribes and races could have developed their own dialects or languages.

We could have a message telling you when a creature speaks to you in another language.

(Morte speaks to you in Infernal)

But if you had the Infernal Language Skill you would get something like this

(Morte "Don't go over the bridge because there is a troll waiting for his pizza to be delivered.")

Like I said earlier, I am not sure that this would work in an on-line game but it would add something to the game and possibly encourage roll-playing.

[vilk]

That kind of language system is actually a hallmark of MUDS and MUSHes and all sorts of MU*s going back for years. From personal experience I've learned that it's actually a great roleplaying tool provided that there aren't too many languages. Logically, having all these tribes separate and evolving linguistically on their own would leave each town you might come across with a different language altogether. If we limit it to, say, one or two languages per race, I think it would work.

Now, for the system I propose. ;-)

Learning languages can be done in three manners which are, in fact, combinations of two factors: Learning from a teacher and learning from linguistic immersion. If you suddenly move to Poland without having any prior knowledge of Polish, you will probably leave the country after a few months with at least a working knowledge of the language. Also, as most high school graduates know, you can learn the language at a slower rate from a teacher.

Language, as I propose, should be done as just another skill, with a parent skill encompassing skills for all the individual languages. The parent skill is "linguistics," which makes sense. If you have a background in language or as a translator, picking up extra languages is much better than some who has me unilingual his or her entire life. On a hypothetical scale of 0 to 100, the linguistics skill directly affects the rate at which you learn another language from your starting one. This is all based on the (very logical, I think) premise that everyone starts out knowing the language of his or her region. When expanding linguistically, a higher skill in linguistics would lend a multiplier of, say, 1.25 at 100, to your efforts in learning Sanctimonian. Needless to say, a skill of 0 means you progress at the slowest possible rate through the language.

As with other skills, and this is all based on a thread about skills and teaching other players that's still relatively fresh, you may be apprenticed to a teacher with, of course, the prerequisite linguistics, language and teaching skill. Learning a language with just a teacher is difficult because it is rote; the learning curve should be steep and the road long, if you know what I mean. However, another factor to the speed of progress would be how many surrounding players are actively speaking the language with at least a 80% in the corresponding language skill. This is cumulative with the bonus of having a teacher, because the master can point out real-life examples and hold conversations to demonstrate linguistic points. The greatest gain in learning a language would be with a teacher and other speakers, the slowest with just a teacher, and immersion is in the middle.

Now this would all be silly if we didn't have some sort of means to apply the language skill. If someone speaks South Ackazian to you, the conversation is solely dependent on the participants' skill. If the non-native has a skill of 40% in South Ackazian, he or she will be able to understand roughly 40% of what the other player is saying. This is accomplished easily be garbling text. Random words, possibly weighted by the length of the word, are garbled so the results are something like this:

[Vilk is speaking South Ackazi!]
Vilk says, "Greetings, fellow traveler! How does this day find you?"
You hear, "Greetings, fellow asgfijic! How agfd this gfds sdfg you?"

I think this reflects the correspondence of skill to actual understanding found in real world languages. Armed with a knowledge of five years of high school French, I can understand roughly a third of what I hear from native speakers. (This is after two years of stagnation in that language, hehe.)

What say all of ye?

[Talka]

First off, I love languages.

I think there should be one language per 'race.' Humans speak English, Acks speak Ackazian, Lion-Like Creatures speak Lionock, so forth, and so on. Having too many languages, however, gets confusing, and difficult.

The big question with languages is that when you have them, do you also include a 'common' language which everybody understands? Everquest did this, and ruined their language system. Also, to learn a language, you got spammed. Not a very fun process.

Without a common language, however, players can only 'play' with the players that speak their language. Its great to role-play ang all, but it makes the game tedious and annoying at times.

I, myself, think that there should be no common language. Each race has their own language. It should be easy to learn the languages, should take no more then 3 days. Maybe magic-users can 'pool' their energy together (was in a different thread) and create a kind of decoder ring, and whoever holds it understands all languages. I'd go out of my way to buy that ;)

--Talka

[z_man93]

You say it shuldn't take more than 3 days to learn a language and that you'd buy a decoder ring so that you could understand, then why even have the languages in the first place?

I have mixed feeling on this subject. I'm for anything that benefits roleplaying but I do think that this could become tedious. Everyone thats been around for a while will probably know all the languages so this would really only affect newbies, and don't they have enough tedious stuff to deal with?

[Dyson]

I'm inclined to agree with z_man. Languages do sound cool, but I think the novelty would wear off after a week or so, and I don't want to devote large amounts of my hard-earned skill points to understanding everybody (and I'm certainly not going to put up with deciphering scrambled speech every five minutes).

I think Languages is a good idea, and Vilk's provided a great system for it, but I don't know how well it meshes with Arcanity's skill-based system. Perhaps if Languages weren't treated as skills in and of themselves, but could be learned over time even without linguistics (albeit at a slower rate)? What I mean is, we keep Linguistics as a skill; if you have a 0 (no rating), it could take an in-game month of exposure to learn a new language, whereas having a high rating might enable you to learn one in a week or less. Hard-core specialists who want to put every point in their prime skill can deal with the issue of monolingualism, whereas most of use might sink a few points into linguistics just for convienence (and ambassadors or merchants might want to raise their linguistics very high). As for the subject of troubling newbies, new languages would probably be introduced with each new race (which are supposed to keep coming out a while after Arcanity is released), and after a while, the Devs might decide to give the option of learning some monstrous languages (Draconic, etc).
This should help to keep linguistics fairly fresh- also, since it is a skill in and of itself, a newbie who invests points in it will learn faster than a more experianced specialist in some other skill.


That's my take on the subject, anyway.

[Lordosis]

I like the idea of separate languages. If you're ever played on an EQ race war server, you know how exciting it can be to have no idea what your enemies are talking about while they track you down. On the non race war servers, almost nobody uses anything but common tongue, because it's more of a chore to learn languages than fun. You just sit there while your friends flood your screen with hotkeyed text. And once you learn a language, there's really no point. All the NPCs that I know of speak common.

If we can find a way to make languages fun, useful, and fitting with the RP environment we're trying to create, then I'm all for it.

[BelDragos]

The only possible "common" language might be a trade tongue composed of slang terms from the various other languages. This could only be used for bartering.

This is just an idea.

There should not be a complete common language like Talka pointed out. It would ruin the reason for having languages in the first place. The starting characters could chose a couple from the list and attempt to learn the rest later on in the game.