Back after a while. I went on vacation for a bit in a decidedly pre-apocalyptic place and it definitely took my head somewhere else. Which is nice and all but I’ve got a BLOG to maintain here, don’t I?
So, let’s get back into the travel rules, eh??
LOL. Just kidding! I’ve lost the plot entirely with that (in no small part due to not playing our campaign for over a month now) — I will have to review all of my notes and ideas and come at it again from another direction soon. But, my experiences traveling and some recent forum posts have moved my head in another direction. So, let’s talk about languages in T2K.
At its default setting, Twilight: 2000 is a game about servicemen who are far from home in a hostile land. It is a modern, realistic system. It stands to reason that communicating with people of all sorts of nationalities you may run across may present interesting and trying challenges to the party. Maybe you’ve picked up enough basic Polish to get by — have you picked up enough to communicate a detailed tactical plan? But first, a more important question:
Is roleplaying this any fun?
4th Edition T2K seems to take the default approach that no, this is not fun. And so it ignores it. There are no language skills. There isn’t a language chart. There may be some GM advice but I really don’t remember. There is a single specialty, Linguist, which allows you to pick any single language and potentially pass as native in that language. You can take this multiple times for multiple languages, if you want. Which, hey, pretty useful — and it has definitely come up in my games.
Other than that, Free League’s game doesn’t care. It just assumes you can communicate with whoever you come across. Or, perhaps, that the GM will make that decision. But it provides no framework for doing so within the rules. Your group may vary, but I think this is fine — dealing with language skills can get quite tedious quite fast. Especially when members of the party may not speak the same languages. In my own game I have ruled that everyone in the party speaks enough Polish to communicate easily with each other most of the time (even if Polish is not some characters’ native language). All of these people have survived in Poland for a few years now at least. I doubt they could have without picking up the language. In some cases where another character is trying to communicate something very complex, or very rapidly, or simply doesn’t want to be understood, I provide these characters with imperfect information or simply say “You can’t follow what he’s saying.” It works okay.
But what if you want more? What if you want a way, within the framework and design intent of the existing rules, to allow characters to definitively know some languages, and not others, or to learn them along the way (without suddenly becoming ultra-fluent via the Linguist specialty)? We can do that. In fact, markyerhardt on the FL forums took a stab at it:
Language is an Int skill. A roll is only ever need with complex communication.
This system used the skill rank system to determine multi lingual communication, all character have a starting points to use on this at character creation …
- Rank D you can basic communication like “where is the post office” “my pencil is yellow”. But no complex or in depth communication
- Rank C you can get around you speak the language and can read basic signs.
- Rank B you can read and write the language
- Rank A you a fluent in the language and understand cultural references
Specialty: Bilingual: available for all childhood and blue collar backgrounds. Character can speak one added “native “ language and get +1 die shift to language. Linguistics: add gets +1 die shift to language
This is a pretty good start. I disagree with pieces of it, which we’ll get into, but I think it essentially gets the job done and it adheres to the core design principles of the game. This cannot be overstated. I see people propose house rules all the time that don’t seem to understand a game’s way of thinking. At best this is a kludge. At worst it starts to break the game. So let’s improve on this starting point within certain principles:
Skills-Light
T2K 4E is a game with a very compact list of skills. 4 attributes, 16 skills, that’s it. Those very broad skills are then augmented with specialties. If you start adding a skill for everything under the sun, you are making much more than a simple change to the game.
Roll Only When It’s Important
What I like most about what markyerhardt posted above is that it almost eliminates the need for dice rolls — it’s pretty clear from the descriptions what you can typically do with each rank of a language skill. This is a very good thing, as T2K 4E is quite explicit that you should roll dice only when it’s important or failure is interesting! If you’re rolling dice 10 times during a conversation to see if the character understood each sentence, you’re doing it wrong.
So, Then…
I think the basic framework there is fine. I think the way the skill ranks play out could use some tweaks. And it does create every language as an individual skill. And I don’t like how it omits the relationships between languages.
Solution #1: languages aren’t skills. Language Families are skills. And languages are specialties within those, in the same way that Rifleman is a specialty within Ranged Combat.
In this way, we can model how someone fairly fluent in Spanish can generally understand Italian well enough to get by. Or someone who knows a little Polish can probably also pick up some Russian when they hear it. (but not read it! For simplicity’s sake I’m not going to dive into written vs spoken languages with different alphabets. If it comes up in a game, it comes up. Pretty easy to make a ruling that since poor Bogumil never invested in his language skills, he simply can’t read Cyrillic moon runes.)
I’m also not going to provide a full list of language families here, but the good news is I don’t need to. Prior editions of T2K (or, indeed, pretty much every GDW RPG ever published) already include functionally complete language trees, along with many other games (GURPS, I assume, etc etc etc). If you want to make a character who speaks some obscure Austronesian language, I’m not going to help you. I suggest, in the spirit of the game, keeping it pretty confined to likely-useful languages for the setting, at a high level.
Solution #2: let’s reframe the skill ranks a bit. My proposal, cribbed more or less from the standard ILR scale for languages:
- Rank D: Limited Proficiency. Can handle basic work commands and social phrases. They can carry on limited casual conversations at the office and discuss their personal life. Someone at this level still needs help with more extensive conversations in the language. They can only operate independently in basic conversations.
- Rank C: Conversational Proficiency. Can communicate at a fairly normal speed, and has a fairly extensive vocabulary. They likely still have an accent at this level and probably require help understanding subtle and nuanced phrasing.
- Rank B: Full Proficiency. Can have advanced discussions on a wide range of topics including cultural and technical matters. People at this level may still have a minor accent and may occasionally misspeak or make minor mistakes. Their vocabulary is extensive and they can carry on conversations with ease.
- Rank A: Fluency. Someone at this language proficiency level was either raised speaking the language as their native tongue or has been speaking it so long that they are completely fluent. They have little or no accent.
Again, the key here is that these descriptions pretty much tell you what you can do under normal circumstances without a dice roll! You should need to roll only when under a lot of stress (say, trying to communicate clearly in a language you barely know while also being shot at) or when what you’re trying to do exceeds your capability. Otherwise, simply use the descriptions as the basis for how it plays out. If there’s a disagreement, take it outside/let the dice decide.
Wait, What About “Languages As Specialties”?
There’s one little gotcha that pops up using this system, which is that nobody sets out in real life to “gain limited proficiency at the Romance languages.” No, you say “I’m going to start learning Spanish.” Or Latin, maybe, you weirdo. And at a most basic level, a few weeks of learning Spanish isn’t going to grant you jack shit when it comes to talking to that Frenchman over there.
We can solve this with a simple hack: to start learning a new language family, you must first take a specific language itself as a specialty. So to begin my Spanish journey, I need to find a teacher or some other way of learning it, spend my XP, and then hey — I’ve got Specialty: Spanish. Once I have the specialty, I can now start putting skill points into the language family (the skill above it). So at first my specialty-only will grant me an effective skill of D.
Is this how people actually learn and use languages? Only sorta. But it should definitely do the trick for our needs. There’s still some work to be done here, but this has gotten pretty long already. Next time I’ll look at fixing the poor Linguist specialty that we’ve now broken, what this means for chargen, and so on.