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Old 04-23-2021, 11:56 AM   #41
hal
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Buffalo, New York
Default Re: Banestorm language question - english?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
If they wanted to have new banestormees standing out they'd have to do something about Language and Cultural Familiarity (as well as clothes and similar).

Unfortuantely, having the Ministry work out with the RAW of Gurps Magic is actually quite dificult. Geasing people rather than using Permanent Forgetfulness would probably work better. Granting a language would be a multi-hundred pt Ensorcelemnt.
What he said...

In all, if you're going to take people from modern times and insert them into any environment where there is a language they don't speak in - there will be two things to keep in the back of one's mind:

Total immersion in day to day life in theory, helps people to pick up the new language.

Adulthood study of languages can often give the adult an accent that is VERY difficult to remove.

As for my players in campaigns I run, if Magic can move them from point A in one reality to point B in another reality, it is often nicer to gift the characters with understanding of the dominant language they will be interacting with unless being the outsider is the whole point.

While not Yrth in nature per se - one campaign I ran involved having players get transported from ONE time line of Earth to an Earlier time period in a variant Earth. Net result? Three groups of people from the year 1990. One in a World where John F. Kennedy was assassinated, one in which not only was John F not assassinated, neither was Bobby, and in that timeline, a new Amendment was being voted on that limits whether or not a presidential candidate could come from the same family (thereby avoiding dynasties). The THIRD group came from an America that Germany won the war and Invaded the US sucessfully. Now, put those three groups of American in a war between Caesar's legions and Gaulish French in the year 54 BC (in a world where magic works).

I had each player character undergo a dream. Each dream aspect required a choice to be made. Individual rights and philosophies were Gaulish in nature, while "Group survival at the expense of individiual liberties resulted in a Roman nature. Ultimately, the group ended up with characters who could understand both Latin and French Gaelic.
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Old 04-24-2021, 09:52 AM   #42
malloyd
 
Join Date: Jun 2006
Default Re: Banestorm language question - english?

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Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
However, there are Mysterious Forces at work in the IW setting. Centrum English diverged from out timeline almost as far in the past and yet is no worse than Accented. Then there's some reason that the language in the United States of Lizardia is even closer than that.
Yeah, realistically any place with a divergence point more than a couple generations in its past can, and probably usually should, require considerable cultural and language training to genuinely fit in. Agents going to Dixie-1 or Britannica-1 need language lessons (at minimum there's a huge swath of vocabulary for stuff invented since the divergence point that will not be the same), never mind anywhere more divergent.

In a meta sense it's trying to cover a problem that crops up in any narrative that involves serial adventures - that it makes no sense for the same people to go on different ones. If you've become good with the languages and cultures of place A, developed local contacts there etc., any sensible organization will continue to assign you to place A, or at least its near neighbors, or the section at headquarters that deals with place A issues. They don't send you off to unrelated place B where those skills are now worthless, and replace you at A with people who lack them.

But part of the charm of these settings is the agents head off to different world lines, or eras of the past, or other countries, or the same crew does multiple first contacts. Doing something that makes those competencies trivial to get and/or ridiculously transferrable makes that more workable from the agents' standpoint, and look slightly less insane from their organization's.

That's largely what the Yrth case is about to - making the "interesting" plot of person Banestormed in more playable as an *adventure* rather than a realistic but unfun exercise in frustration and suffering.

Accepting this sort of stuff despite the fact it cannot be made logical is just one of the kinds of player buy in to the genre conventions you need to run a game in that genre.
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Old 04-25-2021, 10:21 AM   #43
Fred Brackin
 
Join Date: Aug 2007
Default Re: Banestorm language question - english?

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Originally Posted by Armisael View Post
Subtitles have always been such a big help for me. I think that learning a new language by listening to it and reading the letters at the same time can improve your skills considerably.
Subtitling has always been my best-looking idea of how ubiquitous real-time computer translation would work.

You'd wear your video glasses (or have it piped directly into your bionic eyes) and real time translations would appear word for word in one color (call it red).

In many languages this would look like Yoda-speak so after a sentence had been completed the whole thing would appear in another color like yellow below the red line but with natural looking syntax to you.

The seamless instantaneous universal translation we seem simulated in TV and film SF would probably require telepathy.
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Old 04-25-2021, 11:10 AM   #44
Crystalline_Entity
 
Join Date: Jul 2015
Location: England
Default Re: Banestorm language question - english?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Fred Brackin View Post
Subtitling has always been my best-looking idea of how ubiquitous real-time computer translation would work.

You'd wear your video glasses (or have it piped directly into your bionic eyes) and real time translations would appear word for word in one color (call it red).

In many languages this would look like Yoda-speak so after a sentence had been completed the whole thing would appear in another color like yellow below the red line but with natural looking syntax to you.

The seamless instantaneous universal translation we seem simulated in TV and film SF would probably require telepathy.
That's a useful and interesting idea thank you!

That works for listening and reading, and maybe writing if you can take extra time over it for you to trace out what the video glasses are displaying (if you're writing by hand).

If you're speaking in a situation the other person doesn't have a translator (e.g. maybe in an Infinite Worlds setting you might want to keep your technology a secret) it seems much more difficult. The best I can come up with its you'd probably subvocalise a phrase, your video glasses would display a phonetic translation, and you'd try and pronounce it. You'd get better with practice, and your video glasses might learn how to tweak the phonetic representation to better reflect the quirks in your pronunciation (and maybe even predict frequently used phrases?) but it'd take extra time, and I'd be dubious about reaching Native-level ability with the language in this case.
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Old 04-25-2021, 05:45 PM   #45
acrosome
 
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Default Re: Banestorm language question - english?

Well, canonically there are occasional isolated villages where other languages are spoken. Small isolated populations can be very linguistically conservative- look at Iceland. So land your group in some village where a Germanic language is spoken, and have locals teach them Anglish, perhaps a bit faster than normal since they understand English. Somewhere along the mountains would seem appropriate, complete with gingerbread houses. Heck, name a couple of local kids Hansel and Gretel. Landing them in such a fortuitous location is also canonical, since the Banestorm is known to do that- there is some sort of attractor such that Bavarian villages got transported to mountains, Balinese to jungle islands, etc. So your Danish crew gets "attracted" to appear in such an area as well.

You could have an interlude, maybe a month(?), and tell them, ok, you all now know Anglish at Broken and have X many points to spend on a few skills, like basic familiarity with a bow from spending some time at the butts, etc. The intellectual guy spent time with the local magistrate and learned a bit about local politics (Area Knowledge), whereas the outdoorsy guy spent time with the local forester and learned about local wildlife (Naturalist (Yrth)), etc. And you "paid" for all of this help by entertaining the locals with news from Earth, since knowing of the existence of Earth seems to be reasonably common at least among the educated. (And from various vignettes the Yrth locals generally seem to take pity upon Banestorm victims.)

Then they get off with some clothes, a few days of food, and a couple of coins.

Last edited by acrosome; 04-25-2021 at 06:00 PM.
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