Re: Languages and Learning Curves. -- FA3D Forum

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Date Posted: 11:57:23 11/17/00 Fri
Author: Greenstorm
Subject: Re: Languages and Learning Curves.
In reply to: Jona 's message, "Languages and Learning Curves." on 16:42:40 09/24/00 Sun

> For each cultural group, a unique language (basically
> we just take english and code it into nonsensical
> lettering unique to each group..)
>
> This would allow you to have the % of the words
> translated based on how much your character has
> learned/been exposed to the language, and would make
> translators and make rosseta stone-type things not
> only useful but interesting. It would also make you
> have to spend time learning the language before you
> could do anything useful in said culture.
>
>
> Any thoughts?

Well, yes, some thoughts. Not all positive, and almost all at a practical level that ths hasn't reached yet, so bear with me. :)

Okay, a big question that I haven't seen the answer to yet is: What's the point of the game? Is it to roleplay, to socialise, to get stats higher? A mixture of all three? What percentages of each are we aiming for?

I'm assuming (hoping?) for an emphasis on roleplay.

Seperate languages add a lot to roleplay. You get to play out all the misunderstandings, the inability to communicate, etc. That's fun. It stops being fun, though, if there's no one at all you can speak with 'in character'. It sounds as if you're going for a wide range of cultures, which means there'd be a large number of languages (?). If you impliment a language system, you're gambling on having enough people on at any one time that can talk to each other that the players won't get bored.

This leads to another thing to be thought about if you have a very large map, and relatively few players. If there are several societies that you can start in on the map, and you're enforcing travel times (ie no teleporting) then you're going to tend to go a long time before meeting another player character. The obvious solution is to have one starting place until the playerbase is large enough to spport more...

That's enough babbling for now. Am I way off base with any of this?

-Greenstorm

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