Racial Languages - what to do with them
Posted: Thu Jun 13, 2002 11:03 pm
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)
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)