Has anyone got any fun GM advice or custom moves for when the players don’t speak the same language as everyone else? I have an idea for a skyrim-style “wall of translation” in the long term but would be interested if anyone else had fun examples of this in play.
Has anyone got any fun GM advice or custom moves for when the players don’t speak the same language as everyone else?
Has anyone got any fun GM advice or custom moves for when the players don’t speak the same language as everyone else?
There is one in planarch codex
it goes like this:
When you interact with someone and don’t share a common way of speaking or doing business, roll+Cha. On a hit, choose options. On a 10+, choose 3. On a 7-9, choose 2. On a miss, choose 1 but they’re clearly not happy with you.
• you make yourself understood
• you grasp more-or-less what they want
• you don’t look like a fool, child, or asshole
• you catch something they didn’t intend you to understand
• you make progress in learning how to interact with these people; start a new countdown or fill in a box of an existing one
I make that roll in real life every time I try to talk to someone over here. I usually fail, too.
Ah, thanks Tim Franzke and Nikitas Thlimmenos – that last page is missing from the print version. Very handy! These countdowns should be interesting.
A bilingual friend of mine has been threatening to run a game for some of us trying to learn French, where we’d be explorers in a new land and all NPCs speak a different language. The game would be all about learning it, starting with the most basic concepts.
There’s also the amazing game Magicians, by Kyle Simons, where it’s a school of young wizards and the spellcasting mechanic is speaking Korean into a smartphone application. It starts with basic syllables, then higher level magic strings words together for sentences.
The players or the player characters?
Wynand Louw the player characters. Everyone at the table speaks english, in theory 😉 Kevin Farnworth Magicians looks really interesting. I remember taking a look when the kickstarter was running and was intrigued.
Try the babel fish. Wikipedia:
The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the universe. It feeds on brain wave energy, absorbing all unconscious frequencies and then excreting telepathically a matrix formed from the conscious frequencies and nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain, the practical upshot of which is that if you stick one in your ear, you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language: the speech you hear decodes the brain wave matrix.”[7]
It is a universal translator that neatly crosses the language divide between any species. The book points out that the Babel fish could not possibly have developed naturally, and therefore it both proves and disproves the existence of God
Meanwhile the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different cultures and races, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.