What sort of role does language play in your RPGs? How would

>>54462356
Or, I guess we could discuss E-celebs, softcore monstergirl porn, and memes.

>>54462356
Magic soooort of kills language barriers

It doesn't, because "find a translator" isn't a particularly compelling or worthwhile thing to roleplay. Language barriers are just adding trivial bullshit for the sake of it.

>>54462356
>What sort of role does language play in your RPGs?
An important one. 80% of the region is populated by immigrants; those that adopt the regional tongue are more integrated into society, those that keep their native languages and culture are less integrated.

>How would a character go about learning a new language? How long does it take to learn a new language?
Learning a new language takes a normal person a month. Characters with a specific Knowledge ability cut that down to 15 days, 7 days, or 3 days based on the level of that ability. They need access to a teacher and/or several samples of the language.

>At the edge of the map of my campaign, there is a village where the people don't speak common, and I'm curious as to how the players getting there is gonna go.
If you have a caster in the party, let them perform a ritual that lets them establish the effects of a Universal Translator. Have it take time so that their garbled speech slowly starts to include words in common.

If you don't have a caster, have them rely upon pointing and simple universal gestures so they can learn what words mean.

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>>54462933
>>54462869
You might as well be saying "I've never read a fantasy novel and I'm still new to tabletop gaming."

>>54462356
I'm trying to think of the title of a movie I saw once. I thought it starred Robin Williams but I didn't see anything on his filmography page for it.

Anyway, the movie had a scene where the protagonist was traveling by foot and the narration talked about how at each village it was a little harder for him to understand the residents, and then one day he crossed a bridge and couldn't understand the people at all.

If anyone can tell me the title, I would tell OP to watch it.

Not being able to communicate will tend to subtract far more from meeting someone than it adds to it. It limits how you can interact, or at least adds another hazzle to be dealt with, and that's it.

>>54462356
Generally I don't focus on it, but it occasionally does come up. I treat it kind of like an old globe trotting pulp movie, in that almost every important person speaks at least some english/common. The few people who don't (or if the faceless masses in the background come into play) provides a nice little challenge, shake things up a bit.

>>54462869
Only in d&d where the spell is low level, magic is common especially in the party, and a caster can afford to take a spell for the hell of it.

>>54462933
>"find a translator"
Sounds like a great plan, let's just trust this 3rd party to give us the entire unbiased fact of the matter. A translator would never keep sensitive information for themselves while feeding us fluff. Hell even if they're legit that's still another person that's in on things now.

And if we take a less negative view on things, the translator could be a good opportunity to introduce an interesting npc.

>>54463188
>Sounds like a great plan, let's just trust this 3rd party to give us the entire unbiased fact of the matter. A translator would never keep sensitive information for themselves while feeding us fluff. Hell even if they're legit that's still another person that's in on things now.

Right, so we can't speak to anyone, and we can't trust anyone to speak for us. Time for plan B then: kill everyone.

>>54463223
Treasure hunters getting fucked over by crafty locals is a cliche as old as treasure hunting stories themselves. Not that it matters your swift turn to violence (that won't even solve the problem), tells me that you aren't a particularly creative person and puzzles aren't your thing. Perhaps you should stick to video games?

>>54463323
Your epic devious puzzles and traps aren't fun, they're just annoying and confusing because you don't explain them well. Go ahead and keep blaming dumb players though.

>>54463621
Nothing about what he said was ill-explained, and language that you don't understand isn't a devious puzzle, and randomly killing everyone is a symptom of being a shit player.

>>54463621
That's a whole lot of assumption there buddy.

>>54462933
I think my favorite use of translators came from a rippers game. Each one we found in different bits of europe was full of personality.

Found a diary written in latin which shockingly enough nobody took, so we went to see if the local priest could do his job properly. Once he realized what he was reading he tried to persuade us to drop what we were doing, too dangerous, too foul and all that. A little gentle prodding later and he caved, finished the translation, gave us a little local history that might aid our investigation, and a few vials of holy water to keep us safe. It was an uncompelling waste of time.

There was also the time we ended up getting hammered with romanies we saved. Not a soul could talk to any of them other than the glassy eyed fortune telling grandma, but we still got along great and woke up with all of our belongings. It's a wonder what you can communicate through descriptions of tone, body language, and general atmosphere if you put your mind to it, in this hobby of imagination.

There was also a village cunning woman we were led to by an over eager child. Got ourselves a doom and gloom prophecy, some folk magic gubbins, and the directions we needed. All in exchange for some things from the temple we were trying to find to begin with. Would have been nicer to have a guide, much less costly, much less likely to be a cabalist, but we were on a time crunch and getting a translator willing to put themselves in such a dangerous situation wouldn't have been likely. That and the whole probably shouldn't tell some random guy about all these monsters and shit normal people don't know about let alone get him attacked by one.