Languages Revisted

As it is now, I find it painfully obnoxious how quickly a character can fluently learn another language. It’d be nice to have something to remedy this, like when researching a language, the action should take as long as a roster request. This would cut down on the instances where people are like, "brb, learning a language." Also, I believe language trainers should be taken out of the game, aside from the newbie academy.

Also, as an addition, it’d be nice if we could get partial translations. I’ve heard people say there’s already chances for it to be translated or not, but I’ve never experienced it. Anyway, how I think it should work is pretty simple: Loop through each character in the string spoken, and make a probability check equal to the listener’s percentage in the language. If it succeeds, translate that letter. If it doesn’t, change the letter to a random one, like it already does. I think this should be relatively easy to modify, seeing as how I’m sure the current ‘unfamiliar dialect’ code parses through each character anyway, in order to change it to a random one.

Partial translation is already coded the problem is it only kicks in between 50 and 99% of the language at 99% translation is guaranteed. But if you know it at say 60% (lang learn 6 times only) You will only make out every 3rd word or so. Its really quite good. I personally beleave leave langs alone its a game and a line has to be drawn between realism and gameplay. We already have coded limites 1 lang per 5 int without feats. How ever if we wanted to support this limit researching a lang or using the lang learn command to say 2 times a day so if you apply yourself you could learn 1 language over 5 days.

What we’re really talking about here is sacrificing gameplay for realism (As you’ve said, so you understand). You want things to take longer, so that it’s more realistic. But we want people to play, and forcing them to study a language for 3 hours in order to understand the antics of one alien character will probably just result in that character being ignored. Not to mention having a droid pretty much obsoletes languages.

It really comes down to the player. If a player wants to devote time and roleplay through learning a language, more power to them. I’ve had a character who learned an alien language word by word back in the day, and as he got closer to the aliens it was then that he began to speak it better and better, until he was fluent.

Not everyone has the patience for this, and not everyone WANTS to roleplay this.

Another thing to consider is that it IS the -future-! Who’s to say they don’t have cybernetic implants that instantly install the alien language into your brain? Who’s to say that this person, should they be a forcer, didn’t rip the language straight from the aliens head and copy it into their own?

I think what you’re asking for are better roleplay opportunities, and that depends on who you’re roleplaying with.

My two creds:

These days, if someone really cares to understand what someone else is saying, they’ll just go buy a translation droid. Same with people who can’t or refuse to speak Basic, but to a lesser extent.