[Basic] Advantage of the Week: Language Talent and Omnilingual

[Anders]

Originally Posted by malloyd

When?

The Ewoks? I don't think anyone knew they existed before the Empire decided to make their moon the center of their plan to destroy the rebellion.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Anders

The Ewoks? I don't think anyone knew they existed before the Empire decided to make their moon the center of their plan to destroy the rebellion.

Nothing in the films seems to suggest that, and various Extended Universe stuff has assigned several species seen elsewhere as native to Endor as well, which suggests quite a lot of interaction with the place. And anyway 3PO actually as a line at this point:

LUKE: Do you understand anything they're saying?
THREEPIO: Oh, yes, Master Luke! Remember that I am fluent in over six million forms of communication.

which certainly implies this is one of them he's got preloaded, not something he's somehow translating for the first time here.

[kirbwarrior]

For me personally, I find [50] to be a perfect price for "I know all languages", "I can translate all languages", "I can understand all languages", "I know enough languages to easily figure out the last few I don't", etc. As a power block, it seems perfectly in line with the rest. That's a combination of Language Talent and Omnilingual 1, and I really don't get the reasoning for the 80pt version. The trait basically says "I can communicate with anybody in the setting" and that sounds like it would have a flat price with possibly an Unusual Background in certain settings.

Of course, now that I right that all out, I remember that Omnilingual is technically a type of Unusual Background. Mind, it goes against what I see UB being as an advantage, so on my personal level I think my point still stands.

I also explicitly disallow Omnilingual in any setting where I know there will be at max ten languages the pcs will ever worry about, and Language Talent when there are less than five.

Mind, if I were to make languages from scratch, I'd probably give "I can communicate with anyone in the setting" a flat price (say, 50pts) and then figure out what percentage of that is a given language to price that language. For instance, if Common is the assumed language and you can easily converse with 60% of people you come across (basically, anyone in cities), then you'd have a base 30pt trait for free and it would cost 20pts to cover the rest.

That's simplistic and requires more work, though. If someone doesn't know Common, do they have a -30pt trait? That's not unreasonable, it's still less than Deaf+Mute and if the assumption is that there's a mental block like Dyslexia then the question of "but it's not hard to gain a language!" is avoided. But also I find the base rules to be mostly good enough so this thought experiment doesn't go anywhere.

Note that I think of language as "mundane communication tools". Computing language would fall under specific skills, and exotic types of communication are exotic traits (Speak with Plants, Telesend, etc). However, as has come up with other gms I'm around, if there actually just is a language that plants use and you can learn it as you would any other language, then it's no longer exotic.

Also, generally speaking, I find language to be a 'barrier' in the same way a mounting or a prison or an army or a door is. It's a tool for the GM to make things harder for the PCs. And like any barrier, it can make things more interesting or it can make things boring.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Language Talent [10] is a mundane mental advantage. You have a significant talent for languages, and when you learn one, you get a discount on the cost. You can learn a language at Accented for [2], or at Native for [4]. This advantage appeared in this form at GURPS 4e, when languages became advantages, rather than skills.

Omnilingual [40 or 80] is an Unusual Background, originally from Supers, and expanded in Pyramid #3/54 Social Engineering. You don’t know all languages, just lots of them, and every one that comes up in the game is one you conveniently happen to have studied. You know them at Accented, or Native if you also have Language Talent. Applying this to a planet like Earth, with thousands of languages, is [40], and having it for a setting with many inhabited planets and alien species is [80]. You can take Cosmic, +50%, to make this into a super-power that translates all languages automatically, even if you had no way to learn them, or Aspected, ‑10% (or more), to limit it by geography or language family.

Under 3e, languages were IQ-based skills, and literacy was an advantage. Language Talent added to IQ like a standard 4e Talent. This sounds good, in that it gives a wider range of language skill levels, but there was a problem with deciding what skill level was necessary to pass as a native. If it was IQ level, smart characters with Language Talent could pass as low-IQ natives far too easily; if it was higher, ordinary people had large numbers of points in their native language.

The 4e approach to languages is not perfect, but it works better. It defines the level necessary to pass as a native, although adding Cultural Familiarity and skills such as Area Knowledge makes impersonation more reliable. 4e also fits very well with the CEFR system for describing language proficiency. That’s useful for dealing with language divergence, over time or between worlds, as described on p. 175 of Infinite Worlds.

Language Talent is invaluable if a wide range of languages are in use in the setting. While it’s a reasonable starting purchase for characters with a social focus, I’ve played in and run long-term campaigns where it becomes worthwhile for all the characters. Social Engineering: Back to School has a rule for acquiring this advantage in play, which I originally invented for the Infinite Cabal campaign. Applying the Accessibility limitation from Omnilingual to it seems plausible, as would informal benefits to Linguistics when trying to get to grips with an unknown language.

Omnilingual makes most language details irrelevant, but is expensive and highly cinematic. Language Talent is somewhat realistic.

Language Talent is a moderately common option on published templates. Bio-Tech can engineer it at TL10, and DF9 points out that mediums need to speak the same language as the spirits they converse with. Infinite Worlds gives informal benefits when dealing with divergent languages for this trait, and Mars Attacks adds wildcard languages, for language groups within a family, simplified from Pyramid #3/54. MH Power-Ups 1 adds Master Linguist, built on Modular Abilities, and Power-Ups 2, at the other end of the scale, has a perk that allows you to understand, but not speak, a language, or vice-versa.

Omnilingual appears only in Supers and Pyramid articles. There is no published language anti-talent, and I suspect it would simply be the quirk “doesn’t learn other languages.”

Learning languages is something that takes time: just buying them with bonus points in the course of a game stretches believability. For Infinite Cabal, where the characters were hugely intelligent and had lots of points to spend after one long expedition, I required 50 hours of training per point they were spending, simply to acquire vocabulary. For lesser minds, at TLs where books and teaching were well-developed, a method that has worked well for me is to spend 200 hours being taught a level of spoken language, and spending a bonus point to acquire the corresponding level of written language along with it. That allowed reasonably fast learning without excessive suspension of disbelief.

How have Language Talent, Omnilingual, and languages in general played in your games?

Yuri Slezkine says that trading clans often use the language of the outsiders to negotiate while using their own language to discuss matters secretly. That could be a nice effect.

Possibly they only teach above language to outsiders they trust. That is what Tolkien did with Dwarves and it would have a nice effect too.

[Joseph Paul]

When the mode of a language is not shared by one or more of the participant species in a conversation there should be some modifiers. Anyone got any thoughts on that and the intersection with Language Talent and Omnilingual?

Examples:

Some of a spoken language happens at a frequency that can't be heard by the other species.

The language requires the use of a sensory mode that only the native speakers have. Visual or olfactory signals, complex gestures or body motions (ASL or complex dance where every position of an appendage has a meaning), use of an object to communicate - alone or in conjunction with another mode (fans in some cultures?)

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

When the mode of a language is not shared by one or more of the participant species in a conversation there should be some modifiers. Anyone got any thoughts on that and the intersection with Language Talent and Omnilingual?

Examples:

Some of a spoken language happens at a frequency that can't be heard by the other species.

The language requires the use of a sensory mode that only the native speakers have. Visual or olfactory signals, complex gestures or body motions (ASL or complex dance where every position of an appendage has a meaning), use of an object to communicate - alone or in conjunction with another mode (fans in some cultures?)

Some aspects of this are discussed in GURPS Template Toolkit 2: Races, in the new advantage Signals.

[kirbwarrior]

Originally Posted by Joseph Paul

Some of a spoken language happens at a frequency that can't be heard by the other species.

The language requires the use of a sensory mode that only the native speakers have. Visual or olfactory signals, complex gestures or body motions (ASL or complex dance where every position of an appendage has a meaning), use of an object to communicate - alone or in conjunction with another mode (fans in some cultures?)

That just sounds like the requirement for certain languages are certain traits, such as needing Ultrasonic Speech.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Nothing in the films seems to suggest that, and various Extended Universe stuff has assigned several species seen elsewhere as native to Endor as well, which suggests quite a lot of interaction with the place. And anyway 3PO actually as a line at this point:

LUKE: Do you understand anything they're saying?
THREEPIO: Oh, yes, Master Luke! Remember that I am fluent in over six million forms of communication.

which certainly implies this is one of them he's got preloaded, not something he's somehow translating for the first time here.

3PO is translating for neolithic primitives who would react to anthropologists trying to learn their language by eating them. 3PO knows all the languages. Even the ones he would have no way of knowing. Which also explains why he knows Sith even though he's programmed never to translate it.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

3PO is translating for neolithic primitives who would react to anthropologists trying to learn their language by eating them.

.....and quite possibly have already.

Nobody reacts to the naming of "The Forrest Moon of Endor" with "Never heard of it" or "Where's that?" Endor and the Ewoks may very well be deemed to be utterly unimportant by the average galactic cosmopolitan but nothing suggests that they were utterly unknown.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

.....and quite possibly have already.

Nobody reacts to the naming of "The Forrest Moon of Endor" with "Never heard of it" or "Where's that?" Endor and the Ewoks may very well be deemed to be utterly unimportant by the average galactic cosmopolitan but nothing suggests that they were utterly unknown.

Nobody said anything that indicated they'd ever heard of it before the briefing either. In any case it is still unbelievable that that the languages of the Ewoks would be in a standard linguistic database that didn't include all of the languages everywhere and would therefore be represented as Omnilingual. 3P0 knows all of the languages. He's Omnilingual. Six million languages would cost quite a bit bought individually with points. That's what Omnilingual exists for.