Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Shapeshifting full dragons might be a little bit too high-power. A hack-and-slash campaign is usually about accumulating wealth, power and influence (this is why in classic D&D, experience was tied to the acquisition of treasure.) If you start out as strong as a full dragon, you wouldn't really get that sense of escalation.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

I actually don't really like that sense of escalation. I like character advancement to be more in terms of achieving goals, acquiring indirect power, and defeating obstacles than acquiring personal combat prowess in an exponential fashion. I like for there to be a "Top" you can't really pass, and the players to start out close to it.



This is probably why we'd run this campaign the way each of us is suggesting.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Shapeshifting jjuvenile dragons. In their dragon form they might not be much more than lizard men with wings.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

This escalation can be more than just combat prowess! Remember that in early editions of D&D, "You get a fort" is literally a class feature for fighters.

Also remember that personal goals for a simple hack and slash game are often as simple as "acquire treasure (and with it, the power and influence that wealth brings)"

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Second Babel

Due to... something... everyone loses the ability to understand any existing language. Effectively, there are now 7.4 billion mutually incomprehensible languages, and every bit of text is reduced to gibberish. On the other hand, nothing prevents anyone from learning any of these other languages, or developing a pidgin. Any non-linguistic symbols would remain understandable (red octagon still means stop, even when the text has changed to XYKÄ).

Obviously, this would be a tremendous disaster immediately. Air traffic control basically stops. Computers become nearly useless, as even graphical user interfaces are still mostly used to access data presented as text. Checklists (such as power grid monitoring) have to be rebuilt from memory. Every organization would be thrown into utter chaos.

What would the near and long term consequences be?

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

The US Foreign Services Institute has a ranking of world languages in terms of how difficult they are to learn for native English speakers, ranging from about 600 hours (Romance languages, Dutch, Scandanavian) to 2200 hours (Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin) for proficiency. (That is, rank 3 on their scale of 1-5, "professional working capability" in between "basic travel and courtesy" (1) and "native" (5).) Maybe 1/3rd of that time for rank 1.

Does anything prevent people from re-learning pre-existing languages? Same question for the concept of an alphabet and how writing can be used to stand in for verbal language sounds. That conceptual hurdle may be the biggest one.

The value to reusing previous languages would be the quantity of existing learning materials (all the way down to pre-K levels) for those languages, as well as avoiding inventing a new one. (It's possible someone will invent a completely regular language and alphabet that actually makes sense from the ground up, which could become popular if it weren't merely a good idea, but didn't have to work to supplant existing languages with their historical debris.)

If you still have the concept of a written language, or better yet, remember that you used to speak one, then just head off to your local kindergarten and elementary school. Crank up a copy of Rosetta Stone or some old Sesame Street clips on YouTube. Use the language that matches all the signs and books around you, which is probably the same one all those kids' materials are for. You could get basic conversational fluency in a few months, at most.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

I agree with Anaraxes - it seems to me the smart thing is to learn the language that most of your local text is written in, and your local audio recordings are spoken in - i.e. whatever the majority language was before. There'll be a profound dislocation, but everyone's in the same boat.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Could people learn the language fast enough to keep critical infrastructure running? Imagine the Northeast blackout of 2003, except the consoles are all in what might as well be ancient Sumerian and the operators only know how to ask one another where the library is.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

Do the operators forget their skills, or just their language? "Keep this dial in the middle" and "flip that switch to make that light come on" don't need to be translated to be valid. I think the only actual words on the dashboard of my car are "cruise" and "brake", and the meaning of the second one will be obvious as soon as I pull the handle that I know is the parking brake. I might forget the names of the glyphs on the tach and speedometer, but if I remember how to count and add, they'll be pretty obvious as well. (Per the original scenario, even this is worse than the actual situation -- those numbers are all perfectly usable to me in my own private language. I just make different sounds to verbalize them.)

Given that it takes two months (or more) to get back to working proficiency, they won't be consulting manuals early enough to handle non-routine problems. But they might well be able to keep things going, or safely shut down things like hydro power that could damage itself. The inability to coordinate teams is going to be an efficiency problem, but not an absolute block for all those teams that have been working together for months or years. (Plus, you get the bonus of no longer having to file TPS reports or go to a meeting about the cover changes for them.)

A two-month blackout is certainly going to have an effect, but it's also not a civilization-ending catastrophe of the sort we usually get in post-apoc fiction. The bad guys can't organize their crime family or dictatorial warlord state any better than the police can hunt them down. If you have a sufficiently jaundiced view of human nature, perhaps you'll think civilization immediately collapses into people strangling each other to get that last can of beans. But the farmers might just keep growing beans, getting what they need from the coop by pointing at the bags and holding up fingers or making tally marks on paper.

Also, most people are going to realize that the disaster is temporary.

Re: Ideas Are Easy
 

I have a sufficiently jaundiced view of human nature to be sure, but not to the degree that I think we will all start killing each other over beans-though it is frightful what humans will do when they are scared enough. However we are social creatures and being struck with what is something like universal autism is going to cause a lot of trouble.