Illarion.org

While this thread is fairly old, it has been recently linked, so I'll comment on it.

I'm in the catagory of option a.

Until we have somewhere around 150 players active, I would not like to see this implemented. The game already suffers from division between a real language barrier, and while there is a translation tool, it is still difficult. Why would want to further cause division by speaking in separate languages. Generally the reason a character would do this is to intentionally divide a person away. While this is an element of RP, and understandable, it certainly can make the game uninviting to new players, and isolating to older ones.

I'm for b.3 or b.5 .

Currently you have a lot of people going around doing [liz] or [orc] or whatever.

However you have new players that then have no idea what this means and acts as if they understood it.

Or you have old players who play mary-sues and know every language. Say, a dwarf speaking the lizard language because he's some kind of linguistic genius.

An engine solution rather than just the way it is being RPed right now, would make it easier for players to understand, would avoid unnecessary abuse of ooc knowledge (this is not an ideal world, it happens.) and would make it so that characters can't RP to be know-it-alls that knows all languages when they do not have the language skill (or the language flagged, if that ends up being the case), if they don't play that race or have drunk a language potion.

Oh and that's another thing - Language potions would have a use again.

Sure, GMs could crack down on the people who play mary-sues like that without actually having the language skill or having drunk a potion. And people could inform newbies who don't understand. But why do that when it can be solved with an engine feature that we had in the past? Plus IMO the [liz] ** **** *** is atmospheric.