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Old 10-07-2017, 03:14 PM   #4
whswhs
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
Default Re: Question on SW Protocol Droids and Languages

1. Modular Abilities, Computer Brain, 2 slots, 6 points each (to cover full fluency in two languages at a time, over and above the base language). Each slot has a base cost of 6 points and 24 more points for the point value of what it holds; so the total base cost is 60 points. Then you take Trait-Limited, Languages only -50%, to get the cost down to 30 points.

2. Omnilingual, only for human languages from the "known world," 40 points.

Both of these will look very much alike, but the underlying rationale is different.
With Omnilingual, you don't actually know an insanely huge number of languages; you might know a dozen, or a score, or fifty. But you JUST HAPPEN to be fluent in whatever language comes up in the script, the way Sidney Bristow was on Alias. On the other hand, with Modular Abilities, you really do have access to millions of languages—but not all at once. They're backed up, and you can bring them online as you need them, fairly quickly, but not quite instantly. (You probably want a high score in Linguistic to identify which language you need!) So at any one time you "know" three languages, but you will "forget" two of them when you need two different languages.

I would actually favor the latter for Threepio, both because it's something that might actually be simplified down to "fluent in over six million forms of communication" (for the naive humans who don't know how droid minds work) and because Computer Brain seems appropriate.
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