GM Confessional

[Joshua Randall]

There's a tricky balance to strike between
(a) adding lots of opportunities for player characters to speak to characters who only have one niche language, and
(b) ending up with too many situations where the player characters just can't communicate with characters they meet because they made the "wrong" choice in character creation.

That said, I'd kind of love it if one of my games got to the point where the PCs decided they needed to hire a dedicated hyperpolyglot as an on-demand interpreter.

Yeah, language-as-blocker is no good, because then it's just like (in GUMSHOE terms) a core clue that doesn't get found.

"Sorry, you didn't understand what the shaman was saying about how to enter the important location. So you can't and the bad guys win. Oh well."

That's lame.

I typically try to run it as everyone speaks Common (or whatever) well enough to get the "core clues", but if you actually speak the native language you get some kind of bonus.

But it's exhausting and TBH, most of the time I don't bother. Hence the confession.