Translation conventions

How does your party/setting handle languages? Are there regional and/or racial-ofshoot variations akin to dialects or just mere accents?

Does one of your party members actually specialize in one specific common or uncommon language or even going for "basic travel vocabulary" in a lot of them? Can you actually buy dictionaries? Did you actually manage to communicate with hands and feet once when encountering some (not outright hostile) Gnoll/Orc/etc tribe?

Obviously "everyone knows [Insert generic Lingua Franca here]" or Babelfish spells are just lazy/boring; and while they make sense for encountering for example elven or dwarven traders, that becomes increasingly unlikely for those of their race not in (regular) contact with other races or more primitive/tribal ones or those deeming themselves superior.

Excuse the image, only one I had fitting to "miscommunication", not a lot of pics for such abstract topics even in my generous collection

Other urls found in this thread:

shia-art.tumblr.com/post/130288729940/have-a-quick-one-page-comic-i-got-commissioned-to
youtube.com/watch?v=Ccoj5lhLmSQ
youtube.com/watch?v=N-8YpqidjjQ
twitter.com/AnonBabble

I hope this comic continues and gets busy.

yes, very

what comic?

shia-art.tumblr.com/post/130288729940/have-a-quick-one-page-comic-i-got-commissioned-to

classic blunder OP

I would like to see more comics about the cute night elf getting shut down though

>classic blunder OP
O come on, it's just cowtits.

Its a small niche of people who find discussing the nuances of fictional language more appealing than comic boobs.

Now what if we instead discussed the nuances and fictional languages of comic boobs

boooooooooooooooooooooo

That Tauren chick clearly wants the D way more than the night elf.

Given the artist, it's more likely she's trying to find somewhere to stick her D.

I tried making a straight up constructed language for naming conventions. I thought it would add flavor. A couple tones, minimal affixes, SVO word order, nothing super exotic in terms of consonants, easy peasy right? It turns out my players don't like non-English sounds and don't care about the cohesion. Augh.

>no tauren amazon to give you headpats while she forces another load out of your quivering cock

Played in a Star Wars campaign full of Jawas once. The only one who spoke Basic was a decommissioned battle droid hotwired as a makeshift protocol droid. We had our own little salvage ship. Imagine Firefly if everyone was a Jawa and couldn't talk to anybody else. Was surprisingly fun.

>Jawas
>The only one who spoke Basic was a decommissioned battle droid

Jawas are robots? The robed desert trader guys with black faces/darkness in their hoods or whatever?

>Imagine Firefly if everyone was a Jawa
Wait, they don't have a shared language as a species?

Poor your reading comprehension is.

>Played in a Star Wars campaign full of Jawas
Full of, I take that as 'comprising solely of'. It didn't say 'lots of'. You can see why I'd take it as a party comprising entirely of Jawas.

No, if that was the case user would have said "all-Jawa party".

Oh good. I'm glad you can peer into minds of others and clear up his intentions. Maybe you can try to read my thoughts as see why I would read 'full of' as meaning comprising entirely of.

I've seen modern setting games where one character in the party has six non-english languages fluent and we still managed to twice over get in situations where we couldn't understand anyone.

Running sci-fi I just went for the idea that you need to be a skilled translator to operate a universal translator, it's actually an intensely technical process.

Otherwise the Nights Black Agents approach where the language skill just gives you X number of retcons per campaign as a function of your skill level about what languages you can speak seems much more emergently functional.

I did actually run a fantasy setting once where my response to the problem was "fuck you languages don't diverge from each other in isolation in this setting", and the only times that something could be impossible to understand was if a society independently invented writing, or if they had literally no shared ancestors with your people.

The southern fishing tribe who didn't know there were other humans in the world? Same language, fuck you.

>sci-fi setting
>there is a "translator device" that is never seen but always works

>the purple elf has the smallest tits in the comic
No wonder she got rejected.

I just handwave it. I have never found language barriers to add anything interesting to a game.

Obviously troll is best girl.

>sci-fi setting
>Russian is the 2nd most common language on every planet
>no explanation given

>it's more likely she's trying to find somewhere to stick her D.
Those look more like DDD to me.

I merely jest...

>Russian is the 2nd most common language on every planet
>no explanation given
>every planet

>land on New Uganda
>get greeted by local Welcoming Officer Matumbe
>"Davai, tovarishe!"

>exchanging kaldorei for a tauren
200% mad, I say

Kind of a necessity of the setting, like fantasy worlds actualyl having drinkable water and forms of government not ruled by a magetocracy.

>shi'a art
So haram.

He has good taste in girls

Why does this "magocracy is inevitable" idea keep cropping up? Like, our RL governments aren't ruled by the most personally physically powerful. There is no reason spellpower would translate to personal political power.

Vodka is the root cause of it all. Where is vodka there is Russians.

> Sci-fi setting
> USSR doesn't fall to shitty reformism
> Papa Joe's work is completed
> Eventually, the union extends worldwide. Russia remains a political and economic centre and as a result Russian is widely spoken.
> Achieve FALGSC
> Spread to the stars and beyond

My character was secretly Domon Kasshu, and since the rest were weebs but didn't learn moon runes, and my dad's family's from Kyoto, I tried to see if could fuck with them with a Kensai Magus screaming the speech every time he used Shocking Grasp.

They didn't figure it out even after I had him transliterate the speech after he learned more Common, just because I omitted him calling out "Shining Finger!" because they're all a bunch of moeblob fans. US English speakers are dumb as shit

Bump

>FALGSC

I'm a filthy commie, and this triggers me beyond measure.

I love how the bartender's cleavage swallows her tie.

its very classy

I studied linguistics at uni, so... Languages in my games tend to have at least a moderate level of detail. Granted, I generally don't go full realistic because no one (but me) really cares about having fourteen distinct langues d'oïl in Northern France. (Instead I would just go with French, Occitan, Catalan, Basque, Breton, German, and Italian or something like that. Sufficient languages but distinct enough to be noticeable.)

I also usually make languages harder to learn if I decide they are too easy.

...

youtube.com/watch?v=Ccoj5lhLmSQ

I read that post like 5 times now and still have no clue what the hell you're saying...

>tfw no Dark Elf girl who wants to fuck me

Because you're retarded and/or ESL.

edjmakate you are self, that's from one of the most well known gandamu.

sauce?

user........

Full of doesn't always mean comprising solely of, and colquiely more often means "largely comprised of"

For example: this glass is full of water (still has some air) vs this glass is completely full of water

This room is full of Asians (there could be some other races vs. there are only Asians in here

I'm full of Pizza vs. I have only eaten pizza today (and haven't even drunk anything, my recent consumption has seen me become a monstrous pizza-man hybrid, my external shell is still man-flesh, but inside I writh with pepperoni and cheese. I am more pizza than man, more murder than pizza. You must destroy me! Before I lose all control!) etc.

I think it can be useful depending on your group. I try and encourage diversity, and it means if one player wants to role play but is struggling, I can give them more focus by using language as an excuse.

>How does your party/setting handle languages?

Sure.

-Common is a trade language invented by changelings. It isn't perfect, noone is "fluent" in it, but you can use it to talk to almost anyone and any species.

-The largest language barrier isn't "language", but the shape of a persons mouth; which either limits or can flat out restrict certain other fantasy races from speaking another's language. There are three archetypes: Muzzled, Tusked, and Flat.

>Are there regional and/or racial-ofshoot variations akin to dialects or just mere accents?
-See picture for a general idea, but mostly just accents. I tried enforcing regional dialects, but it wasn't FUN, so I STOPPED.

-The most commonly spoken languages are: Dwarven, Orcish, and Minoan.

Magic isn't physical power. It's power over energy, deadly force and magic weapons are generally the most expensive, so power over wealth. Who is in power here? Those in control of energy (big oil and energysuppliers), deadly force (militaristic nations) and wealth (capitalism). That's why.

lol, loser

The President of the United States used to be on professional wrestling and the President of Russia wrote a book on judo.

>I tried enforcing regional dialects, but it wasn't FUN, so I STOPPED.
You absolute madman.

...

I've got questions to you, but first I've got to ask a simple one;

Are you serious, or are you making a crazy-idiot devils advocate argument ?

I'm asking because you're literally contradicting yourself (physical power =/= magical power) at least three times in few words.

>muh languages are so cool WOW look at this spreadsheet i made of the 999 regional dialects . . .

>0 acting ability, 0 talent with voices, 0 NPC creativity.

Oh, you again.

You're that guy that overthinks everything and loves to "solo DM" in your head and wants your players to "lose themselves" in your world but you can't translate ANYTHING of your 1000's of pages into ROLEPLAYING.

Let's play monopoly instead.

Nigga he appeared on one episode and has never enjoyed a physically fit build a single day of his life. I like Trump as much as the next brainless faggot but let's not conflate here.

Putin on the other hand, is a motherfucker. He will fuck you up.

Hey, it's you again. I'm the user that said he liked your thing and then you posted like a small side-by-side of your art awhile back. What are you up to now?

He also sells the worst stunner ever next to Linda Mcmahon

Russians wrote the technical manuals/free ware version for all the interstellar drives.

People don't know how to speak orc, orcs understand getting cut with a sword and that is enough.
Maybe some ranger player or whatever has picked up a few orc words if he wants to, so he can listen in on what they're saying sometimes.

Beyond that people don't travel far enough for languages to change usually.
I suppose that is unrealistic, since only like 200 years ago I think only like 20% of mainland france actually spoke the language we know as french. So there'd actually be more variance in shorter distances in a medieval setting.

How do your players handle Basque? I use an erg-abs lang for fairies in my setting and my players have taken to bribing pixies into translating because they can't grasp it very well.

>So there'd actually be more variance in shorter distances in a medieval setting
That's true. In some cases people living even just a mile apart in different villages would have different dialects or even different languages

...

eh, he was probably pretty fit in high school and college

Why is his face always so doughy...

Communism was bound to collapse eventually because that shitty fucking ideology does not fucking work because it goes against human nature and does not motivate anyone to be anything other than a mediocre leeching worthless piece of shit.

>tfw when no girl who wants to fuck me or even be around me

I made pretty much all the races the pcs meet in my new campaign speak alien languages, some of which don't even use voice at all but mimicry or colour and signs.

I then realised in not Tolkein, suck at translating and working out how languages would be conveyed and find myself endlessly frustrated that I couldn't accurately communicate Information to.the players or roleplay the NPC's very well .

So I've slowly just introduced more characters that have learned common or coincidentally speak languages the players know.. Or just given players easy rolls to understand the new languages.

Total cop out but I realised I was way in over my head and the players don't seem to mind that much.

K-F, you already get to bang wood elf women and lahmians, quit bitching.

Karl Frankenfurterz is ded

By you're image, I'm guessing it's the bard's job.
Probably via the Tamaranan way.

I was doing foreign languages & regional dialects like that episode of spongebob where he goes to rock bottom: I was still speaking english, but I'd refuse to understand you, the player, IC unless you spoke in the appropriate accent.
It was fun at first, but I could see it was exhausting to my players, so I quietly phased it out for future games.

>What are you up to now?

I'm preparing and getting material ready to host my first quest/campaign on /qst/ since quests were removed from Veeky Forums.
In the mean time, I'm also idly working on making little Race Cards of all the playable 'fantasy races' in the setting, for both my own records and because it's good to keep drawing.
Thanks for asking!

That was mainly just an example (I usually prefer northern France or Germanic to southern France or Iberian games), but I'd probably run it the same way I run literacy in logographic languages - it costs more to gain fluency in that language. I usually use D&D 3.5, where languages are gained via skill points. I usually make it so that it's harder to learn languages, usually costing three points (1 for broken, 1 for accented, 1 for fluent) plus another if you have to learn a new script. But if mind flayers have a logographic script or whatever, you have to spend 4 points for that script. Or something like that. Similarly if it's a language that takes more effort to learn, it might cost more. Basque I'd probably have 2-1-1 or 1-2-1 if that (erg-abs isn't particularly hard, comparatively, and once you understand how it works you understand how it works), but something like Ithkuil would be more like 4-4-4. Fantasy and sci-fi languages can be a little more relaxed about what types of languages are possible, too, and that might affect learning them.

I also give a bit of a bonus for linguistic and cultural familiarity. Not much help for Basque, but you'd gain a benefit if you spoke Chickasaw or Choctaw and you wanted to learn Alabama, you might not have the difficulty that a European speaker would. Likewise if you spoke Catalan and you wanted to learn Spanish, you could probably fake broken Spanish pretty easily without a lot of familiarity with the language whatsoever. I'd probably give you the effects of a certain minimum ability to understand, and if you tried to actually learn it you'd learn quicker.

>no continuation
ONE JOB

Fantastic answer. Thanks, user!

He made the right choice.

explain yourself immediately

The POTUS is also a know Mememancer, so we're already one step closer to a magocracy.

not him but
>taller
>bigger tits
>more muscles

only flaw is furry as fuck. If it was an orc, there'd be no question of superiority.

Don't all of the chicks in these comics have huge veiny cocks though?

Not that user but I speak weeb. I will explain.

Domon Kasshu is the protagonist from G Gundam, the gundam series where the Japanese creators basically said "Ok, how fucking CRAZY can we make it?" and came up with a series where all the nations of earth have moved into space on enormous colonies and use Earth as a massive fighting ring for their once-every-several-years Olympics analogy. They send giant robots down to earth to fight, generally wrecking the place for the poor still stuck there. Whichever countries Gundam comes out on top, gets to basically be the boss country of the united space countries until the next tournament. This has replaced conventional war.

Domon is full of hot blood and angst because, while he is the pilot for Space Japan, he's also using the tournament to look for his brother, who stole an experimental FUCKING NANOMACHINES Von Nuemann Gundam and killed his whole family.

What follows is sort of like the plot of Kung Fu, where Domon travels around looking for his brother and also giant robot fighting the giant robot of the week. His 'super move' is 'Shining Finger', where he basically channels all of his rage into his hand and face slaps the enemy, usually destroying their gundams head/upper torso

This is an advanced form of the move
youtube.com/watch?v=N-8YpqidjjQ

The lines he says are his speech/super move callout. "This hand of mine glows with an awesome power! It's loud roar tells me to defeat you! Take this, all of my love, my anger, my sorrow!"

NOW ONTO user

user is happa-jap and native speaks Japanese. Kensai and Magus are Pathfinder classes. By combining them, user made a melee spellcaster that allowed him to channel spells into melee strikes, such as Shocking Grasp. He modeled his character on Domon and even used his iconic call out, but his friends never got the reference so he got away with it.

don't you?

[spoilerino]you dont have to answer, i can smell the big cock stink coming from you. it's delicious[/spoiler]

>spoilerino

Is... Is that a compliment? >NOW ONTO user

You really missed an opportunity to end your post with "Let's get things started! GUNDAM FIGHT ALL SET?! READY? GO!!"

I really need to rewatch this again.

Would a female Tauren even notice a human fucking her? They're evolved for male Tauren after all.

>Does not fucking work
>Ran half the World for the better part of a century, still remains a significant political force in several countries

Pick one.

Fisting

>Communist China
>anything like Marxism or Marxism-Leninism

It's literally just state-supported capitalism.

That's sort of one-sided.

I mean that's not to say I wouldn't fist a tauren. I definitely would.
But on a purely mechanical level, the night elf is quite literally a better fit for both parties.

tyrande your people's time has passed

Okay, so what does "everyone" mean?

>breasts

>fate/grand order is still not playable as it is being prepared for launch

fuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

>Ran half the World for the better part of a century, still remains a significant political force in several countries

Depending on who you ask that "wasn't real communism", but even if it was, when somebody says it "doesn't work" they don't mean it can't be used a system of government. They mean that it didn't work as Marx outlined/advertised it, and became a perversion of his ideal.

Racial and regional differences. Also dialects and accents. Furthermore multiple dead languages only used in certain locations or professions. Each language also has an alphabet, while multiple languages can have the same alphabets there still are local differences.

Player characters can spec into languages and play a pure translator or scriptor.