Page 1 of 1

Racial Languages - what to do with them

Posted: Thu Jun 13, 2002 11:03 pm
by Sir Turquine
Are the racial languages ever going to be used for anything?  I think it would be neat if a lizardman who only knew lizardish tried to say something to an orc who only knew orcish and all the orc saw on his screen was asdjfoainvie!dksnf8ADLF%dnf;(75jdksajfoidj[.  Or something like that.  I dont really see how this could work with the English/German problem unless a translator is made.  Everybody says this would be a lot of work so I'm guessing it probably won't be integrated anytime soon, if ever.  We can probably forget that idea.
One place we could use the language stats would be in the library.  Right now, when someone clicks on the shelf, the words of the book just appear on their screen.  The library research skill just affects which books are selected.  Why are all the books written in the language that they understand.  Some books can be written in elvish, some in dwarvish, some in lizardish etc.  When a dwarf picks up a book written in elvish which he doesn't know, then he will see gibberish (adnfoidnvoj374908234udfj jkldjsf98jkj4jkdjf84#%sdf(*&[]) instead of words.  Of course then we would need a way to learn other languages.  Certain quests or something.
Perhaps there could also be some ancient languages that no body uses anymore and the runes for certain spells can be written in those languages.  A magician finds the rune but can't understand the language it's written in and is forced to go on a long quest to learn the language.  It would be fun.  The library research skill could still determine the books selected, but whether or not the character understands them would be determined by thier language skill.  For roleplaying purposes, we could all just speak "common"  and only read and write the racial languages.  (I think every RPG on the web uses the excuse that every body speaks "common" to get around using racial languages)

Racial Languages

Posted: Fri Jun 14, 2002 5:58 am
by Hyssena
I really like that idea. It presents a lot of interesting possibilities. For example, it would bring about a new profession; scholars! Of course you can be a scholar now, but that has to do more with roleplaying than game systems. Scholars could study all sorts of languages (would we call them linguists rather than scholars?) in order to translate books and sell them... This would be more practical if the library had more information (which, one day, I'm sure it will.)

If nothing else, the idea of racial languages as written languages (even if not implemented the way described in this topic) is worth taking into account in future updates involving the library (however distant in the future they may be.)

Like all great ideas, it presents problems too... most of which I'm sure are technical, and I'm not much for technics.

Of course, I often see situations in roleplaying where racial language issues arise, so whether or not they become a part of the game system, we'll still have them conceptually.

Says I.

Racial Languages

Posted: Fri Jun 14, 2002 11:01 am
by Ashag
well you could also do it like this that if you read an elf book or eny language book you dont under stand you get a bit of language skill in that language and then you start understanding more like this sentence (too make you need tr4952277234624fg7yrfht864r27yfh23) now you would need quite much i this language skill too understand this much maybe 35procent