Expanding Linquist

[Xeran Van Houten]

heheh.
It was the "cavilish" in the statement that threw me there.

I find the idea of a Templar speaking tatlum in a rinthi accent amusing though, just thought I'd share.

EDIT:
And whle I find the idea of more languages for the Linguist appealing... I think it'd be too much.
Being able to definitely pick up new languages instead of the chance thing would be good though.

[jmordetsky]

I'm still against the idea of the Linguist subguild giving Cavilish. There's a reason the language is called the Merchant's Tongue. It, rather like Tatlum, is spoken almost exclusively by a narrow subset of people. Bendune is a little more reasonable, perhaps, since its use spans a number of nomadic groups and tribes.

In theory every merchant in the bazaar speaks cavilish, many of whom are most likely ranger/hunters. I don't think comparing it to Tatlum is legit. Tatlum is a very special case.

[Qzzrbl]

I'm still against the idea of the Linguist subguild giving Cavilish. There's a reason the language is called the Merchant's Tongue. It, rather like Tatlum, is spoken almost exclusively by a narrow subset of people. Bendune is a little more reasonable, perhaps, since its use spans a number of nomadic groups and tribes.

In theory every merchant in the bazaar speaks cavilish, many of whom are most likely ranger/hunters. I don't think comparing it to Tatlum is legit. Tatlum is a very special case.

Mostly those belonging to a merchant house though, so say the helpfiles.

[jmordetsky]

I'm still against the idea of the Linguist subguild giving Cavilish. There's a reason the language is called the Merchant's Tongue. It, rather like Tatlum, is spoken almost exclusively by a narrow subset of people. Bendune is a little more reasonable, perhaps, since its use spans a number of nomadic groups and tribes.

In theory every merchant in the bazaar speaks cavilish, many of whom are most likely ranger/hunters. I don't think comparing it to Tatlum is legit. Tatlum is a very special case.

Mostly those belonging to a merchant house though, so say the helpfiles.

While I can't deny that, if Cav was restricted to those, why would any pc merchant have it?

[Aaron Goulet]

Like,. not tribal accent, but get bendune. Speak it like a crazy city person. ;-)

Caravan Guides can do this, actually.

[Erythil]

I don't feel like the linguist subguild needs to be expanded.  It seems to me that linguists already learn languages and accents much faster than others, and when most characters don't live into the double-digits of days played, learning languages is an extremely difficult prospect for non-linguists.  It seems like it gives a sufficient advantage.

[FiveDisgruntledMonkeysWit]

I'd be in favor of expanding it a little. I like people's ideas about letting linguists select which languages they learn. Cavilish should be one of these, possibly Bendune. Yeah, yeah, I get that Cavilish is kind of an elite language. But the idea of a character seeking out and learning Cavilish makes better sense to me than somebody seeking out and learning Mirrukim.
Also, I hate guild-sniffing. Hate it, hate it, hate it. Anything that will throw those damn guild-sniffers off their trail will make me happy.

[AmandaGreathouse]

Truthfully, I like the idea of keeping their bump to learning where it is, but having it take you into a menu of sorts where you can select 2 languages. You could have Cavalish, Bendune, Allundean, and Mirrukim alike in there. I think, after all, that it's entirely possible that in a place like, say, Tuluk, your (ranger/linguist, as a possible example) trader who's dealt extensively in the tribal markets and freil's alike, who's studied the tongues used in those places to help them with their work, would be just as likely as someone who'd willingly spend enough time with scamming elves or thick-skulled dwarves to learn 'their' languages.

[path]

Truthfully, I like the idea of keeping their bump to learning where it is, but having it take you into a menu of sorts where you can select 2 languages. You could have Cavalish, Bendune, Allundean, and Mirrukim alike in there. I think, after all, that it's entirely possible that in a place like, say, Tuluk, your (ranger/linguist, as a possible example) trader who's dealt extensively in the tribal markets and freil's alike, who's studied the tongues used in those places to help them with their work, would be just as likely as someone who'd willingly spend enough time with scamming elves or thick-skulled dwarves to learn 'their' languages.

^this is AWWWWSOME!!!

Check it out, other than doing this wildly fair thing (see above), we could just remove Cavilish from the merchant guild and have it added by staff during set up for merchant house family members. Then they can teach it to whomever.

[jhunter]

Truthfully, I like the idea of keeping their bump to learning where it is, but having it take you into a menu of sorts where you can select 2 languages. You could have Cavalish, Bendune, Allundean, and Mirrukim alike in there. I think, after all, that it's entirely possible that in a place like, say, Tuluk, your (ranger/linguist, as a possible example) trader who's dealt extensively in the tribal markets and freil's alike, who's studied the tongues used in those places to help them with their work, would be just as likely as someone who'd willingly spend enough time with scamming elves or thick-skulled dwarves to learn 'their' languages.

Just what I was thinking except select two languages in -addition- to whatever your racial language is.

[AmandaGreathouse]

Truthfully, I like the idea of keeping their bump to learning where it is, but having it take you into a menu of sorts where you can select 2 languages. You could have Cavalish, Bendune, Allundean, and Mirrukim alike in there. I think, after all, that it's entirely possible that in a place like, say, Tuluk, your (ranger/linguist, as a possible example) trader who's dealt extensively in the tribal markets and freil's alike, who's studied the tongues used in those places to help them with their work, would be just as likely as someone who'd willingly spend enough time with scamming elves or thick-skulled dwarves to learn 'their' languages.

Just what I was thinking except select two languages in -addition- to whatever your racial language is.

That's sort of what I was thinking, though, out of 23 pcs, I've had 20 humans, so I didn't really think to phrase it for people who don't typically play them.

[Intrepid]

What about accents as an added perk for the budding linguist?

[AmandaGreathouse]

What about accents as an added perk for the budding linguist?

My characters typically have better than average wisdom (ie above average to very good, with a couple extremely goods and exceptionals thrown in), but with them, I've noticed it typically only takes 3-4 days of playtime to pick up a new accent, even with a nonlinguist, so I don't think it would be overly beneficial to make them even easier to learn. (Except, perhaps, for a tribal accent, that typically takes me about 10 days of playing time to pick up).

[Intrepid]

Really?  Huh.  I've never picked up an accent since the code was implemented, and I usually get good wisdom scores.

[AmandaGreathouse]

It depends on how much time you spend socializing, really.

I had a 30 day human pc who was a ranger/nomad that hadn't branched anything skillwise other than tanning, charge, and trample, but managed to pick up tribal, northern, southern, and rinthi accents, as well as bendune and allundean.

Perhaps nomad helps you pick up accents, and linguist helps you pick up languages?

[Zoltan]

Really?  Huh.  I've never picked up an accent since the code was implemented, and I usually get good wisdom scores.

I've branched zero languages and only two accents in my three years of playing. And those two accents were with one character.

[janeshephard]

A weathered, elf stands here.
A gap-toothed, tanned man stands here.

> translate weathered

You begin translating everything the weathered, elf says.

Rubbing his neck, a weathered elf says, in allundean:

"I'll buy it for a sum of one hundred sid."

You say:

"I'll buy it for a sum of one hundred sid."

> cease translate

You stop translating.

Something to consider. It's a useful coded skill to save you some typing which would make translating easier on the fingers.

[Xeran Van Houten]

What the fun in repeating trasnlation verbaitum?

It's always fun to mistranslate things.

[musashi]

What the fun in repeating trasnlation verbaitum?

It's always fun to mistranslate things.

My thoughts exactly on that.

I can think of plenty of circumstances in which having the code auto translate for you would really suck.

[tortall]

Really?  Huh.  I've never picked up an accent since the code was implemented, and I usually get good wisdom scores.

I've branched zero languages and only two accents in my three years of playing. And those two accents were with one character.

I've had a character branch 3 languages and 3 accents. Granted, only really spoke one of those languages well. I think I had them all by the time she was.... 30 days?  I had 2 and 2 by the time she was 15.


Not a linguist, and only average wisdom. It's really not that hard to pick up accents/languages. Just gotta be a social player, and tavern RP a LOT. :-D

[a strange shadow]

Branching languages seems really broken to me. I've had lower wisdom characters pop some of the harder ones almost immediately, and some high wisdom characters who, over the course of many, many, many lessons, still never branched, even when it was a language that made a lot of sense for them to have rudimentary skill in due to the other languages they knew.

[palomar]

Branching languages seems really broken to me. I've had lower wisdom characters pop some of the harder ones almost immediately, and some high wisdom characters who, over the course of many, many, many lessons, still never branched, even when it was a language that made a lot of sense for them to have rudimentary skill in due to the other languages they knew.

Could be race related as well. I've been in the same situation.

[FantasyWriter]

Or depending on which languages you already know and their similarities.  The help files on languages are awesome.

[IAmJacksOpinion]

Linguist was good for dwarves, back in the day, because their sirihish was so terrible.

Hehe. Awesome. I remember being in Borsail where 2 dwarves spoke to each other in Mirrukkim, rather than pointless conversations in botched Sirihish. The Lieutenant actually forbade them from speaking in Mirrukim until their Sirihish was spot-on.

Personally, I'm not sure I've ever learned a new language or accent, but as it stands languages are far too easy to learn. I've heard of rangers learning to speak the gith tongue by virtue of the shit NPCs yell at them, and soldiers learning Tatlum just from listening to templars squabble while out on a ride. The truth of the matter is, you don't just pick up languages by watching people BS.

When I took Spanish 1 back in high school, my teacher stated that her goal was to have us all speaking like 3 or 4 year olds by the end of the school year. 9 months, 4 weeks a month, 5 days a week, 1 hour per day. Roughly 180 hours of practice, and all I could say was my name, age, where I'm from, whether it was hot or cold, etc. After all that time, I STILL don't have the foggiest clue what my Mexican friend Maria is saying when she starts blabbing to her mom at 100 mph on her phone.
Look at a baby. My 2 year old nephew can say stuff like "What grampa doing? Where uncle Logan? Red Truck. Etc" That's 2 years of watching people interact in a foreign language. (Observational learning, not teaching.)

So, no, they don't need a bump to learning new languages.

And Calvish isn't elite. There are thousands of merchants on the planet, versus 100-200 templar? Calvish isn't Zalanthas's best kept secret.

I'm all for the idea of deciding the languages you start with. (Though I know almost nothing gets added to the chargen process. Look at how much bitching it took to choose your attribute order. And we still can't start out gemmed. )

Also, starting accents would be sweet. Like if you started with both North and South accents. (Or in the case of a Rinthi, just rinthi and south accent, since not too many northerners come to the rinth, and vice versa I would imagine.)

On a somewhat derailed topic, has anyone seen Inglorious Bastards? SPOILER ALERT!! DONT READ AHEAD IF YOU DON"T WANT A MINOR SPOILER.

The guy f's up his German accent and gets caught trying to pose as a Nazi officer. Wouldn't it be cool if Accents were skills (much like languages, which you can mess up at low levels) If you fail your language check, your tell reads as "So and so says, in an unfamiliar/garbled/phony accent,"  Seriously, everyone can do very basic accents based on what they see on TV. Some of them are pretty good. But none of them would fool the locals for a second.

[Xagon]

I disagree.

I met a friend (and her mother) about six months ago. They often come over just for the hell of it, and sometimes talk to each other in Portuguese.
While I'm not particularly fluent enough to speak it, I have about a 40% success rate in actually understanding them.

Back on topic, I think linguists should keep their languages as is, but have a much higher ability of learning new ones.