Harsh realism for languages

[Joseph Paul]

So my experience with language in RPGs is that we often gloss over the difficulties that arise when two or more parties do not have a language in common. We do this by conveniently having an NPC that can translate or using magic or Ultratech translation devices or telepathy or ruling that the setting does have a common tongue that everyone knows. We do such things because not being able to communicate in a game effectively stops the pursuit of any mystery or puzzle and that frustrates players and GMs alike.

I want to do a space exploration setting that will have little in the way of common languages or technological means of translating, at least at first.

So has anyone else trod this path of harsh realism for languages?

What did you do and how did it go?

[vicky_molokh]

I'm running a campaign in which a borderline-sapient-borderline-not alien species plays a role, and the establishing of contact and a common communication method took many months of in-game time, and perhaps a few sessions worth of 'at-table' time. Logarithmic progress seems to have been an important part of it - at first it took very long to convey single concepts; by the end it was a matter of expanding the vocabulary by dozens of words per day.

[ak_aramis]

More frustration than fun.

Which, when I did it, I was using a fantasy setting, and lead to just killing them and taking their stuff.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

Originally Posted by ak_aramis

More frustration than fun.

This. Did this in a first contact situation in a SF setting. Worst thing I ever did as a GM, and a fine illustration of why I don't do realism any more than I absolutely must. Lots of reality is boring, and sitting around a table frustrating my friends is not just a waste of time, but a waste of what could have been a good time.

[Black Leviathan]

We don't deal with language a lot but most of our games have some context of it and it's very rarely just dealt with with a spell or gadget. We usually have to figure things out with gestures or pictionary.

[AlexanderHowl]

In general, it is better if it is played for humor (as it is endlessly frustrating in real life). Anyway, some things translate without language, as long as there is Cultural Familiarity (a kiss between a strange man and a strange woman means different things in American culture than it does in Indian culture).

[johndallman]

If you want harsh realism, GURPS makes it too easy to learn a language well enough to pass for a native. In the real world, few can do that without living in the country in question for years, preferably as a child.

I've run a game where communication was one of the major barriers to success, under Call of Cthulhu. It was Return to the Mountains of Madness, a huge scenario pack set in 1933-34 that follows on from Lovecraft's story At the Mountains of Madness.

The PCs get to go to the City of the Elder Things, and my players, who were all SF fans, decided to try to communicate with the Elder Things. They are material beings, with the kinds of basic motivations that implies, so this is a lot more feasible than talking to star-spawn of Cthulhu or other beings that are supernatural as well as inhuman.

The NPCs provided with the scenario include a very capable linguist and an excellent cryptographer, and the original story says that the Elder Thing written language is remarkably easy to figure out, so they succeeded. The Elder Things have strong but spoileriffic, motive to seek help from humans, and contributed a trick I stole from Vernor Vinge.

To species with any reasonable knowledge of science, the Periodic Table of the Elements is a cross-species Rosetta Stone, when there's co-operation. It gives you numbers, many colours, names of substances, ideas like danger, radioactivity, and so on: it really helps. Since vocalising each other's languages was hard for both sides, lots of time was saved by devising gestures that both sides could make. This turned into an excellent game session as the PCs learned a lot of history, came to understand what the Elder Things needed from them and began to make plans to learn advanced technology and take out patents.

First, however, they needed to solve the urgent problem the ETs had, and while doing that, things went rather pear-shaped, the body-count rose exponentially, and SAN levels fell along a similar curve. They got out of Antarctica while they could, but I got a follow-up scenario set in the International Geophysical Year out of it.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by ak_aramis

More frustration than fun.

Yeah, my experience too. You can do a few complications for a part of a session, and maybe bring it back out for a comedy scene every once in a while, but any ongoing application of language problems is never any fun. There's a reason you never see this sort of thing in adventure stories after the first couple set-up chapters - it's a story killer. People you can't communicate with fairly easily aren't *characters* in the story, they're obstacles, and ones there are no real options for dealing with other than force.

[Alden Loveshade]

One of the players in my original GURPS science fiction campaign ran an SF first contact game which was also the first GURPS adventure she ran. In it, the space aliens knew our language, but we didn't know theirs. My human PC was a spy/linguist whose primary job was to translate the alien's language (we had some technology to help).

But in that adventure, we really didn't deal with the aliens much directly even though their ship was docked where we were at. So almost everyone we actually dealt with spoke our language.

I was also in a time-traveler-meets-primitive-humans game where I had to try to communicate, but that was a one- or two-session adventure with just me and the GM.

I think it's really difficult to make a "we can't talk to them and they can't talk to us" playable for more than a session or two.

[Joseph Paul]

And most of our gaming experiences don't even get bizarre such as having to find common ground with methane breathing tentacled blimps.

I may work alien languages into a set of adventures dealing with exploration of ruins and a search for any sort of primer or keys to a species' language. Linguistics works in the background at this stage except for forays to places to get more data. A Champollion will break something free eventually and then we get to test it out. I like the periodic table as a clue to this.

SOP for alien ships showing up is to leave and take a circuitous route home. No sense in making contact in the rough as it were and risk calamitous misunderstandings.

if I need to introduce aliens sooner I might do a rapid progression play where PCs have accidentally had an encounter and aren't leaving anytime soon. Six moths later those working with aliens have some basics down.