Have you played D&D in a foreign language?

[Allanon]

Quick question towards Li Shenron, what does the (I'm guessing Italian) quote in you're .sig mean? Just being curious .

"Vuolsi cosi' cola' dove si puote cio' che si vuole, e piu' non dimandare..." (Dante Alighieri to his audience, while DMing his Planescape campaign)

I'm asking this cause Babelfish gives me this :

Vuolsi thus cola' where puote cio' that it wants, and piu' not to dimandare

 

[Viking Bastard]

As someone who has never played in anything but English, I may be out of place here, but I have noticed in this thread that most people who play in another language still use the English names for spells, etc. To me this would make roleplaying that much cooler. It makes arcane things and mystic powers seem more mystical to have them in another language. I mean sure I imagine that when arcane spells are cast that they are cast in draconic or some-such, but just looking at the Spanish translation site, I was inspired by the foreign-ness of the words, despite the fact that I have some knowledge of Spanish and Italian.

For those of you who have done this, are my thoughts ringing true?

~hf

Well, can't speak for others, but in my case, the answer would be a definate no.
English has it's strong points, but it doesn't sound very mystic or old. I use
English though, sometimes, as a foreign language in my games, the one of a
neighbouring country, for instance. Easily understood, yet foreign. In fact, I use
Icelandic as a foreign language too (by Barbarians or Dwarves etc.) since the
language used at the table is really a hybrid, Icelanglish.

In fact, in a 'New World' campaign of mine, I used Icelandic as the Old World
Tongue of humans and English as the language of the New World races. The
'common' tongue of the New World became a mix of the two, the English/Icel.
hybrid we were already using.

 

[Viking Bastard]

And since everyone's doing it, here's an example of Icelanglish:

"Fighterinn minn levelar upp. Hann hækkar Dexið svo Armor Classinn
verði tuttugu og þrír. Hann eyðir featinu sínu í improved init vegna
þess að hann er alltaf seinastur með sverðið sitt."

 

[Zappo]

True, I also had the same thought long ago, but can't really think of anything better... Not sure, but "Ladro" was used in all previous editions, or also something else was tried? Like "Avventuriero" (bad, since every PC basically is), "Canaglia" (sounds too evil) or "Vagabondo" (sounds too poor)?

Yeah, they already used "ladro", but at the time it was correct because previous editions had "thief".

Also there is a lot of confusion between "abilita'" and "caratteristiche"

Yes, but since they are radically different things, you can usually understand from the context what you're talking about. Not so with magic schools. That also reminds me that many players here say "skill" instead of "abilità".

"Vuolsi cosi' cola' dove si puote cio' che si vuole, e piu' non dimandare..."
=
"Thus is wanted there, where what is wanted can be, and don't ask any more..."
Virgilio, Dante's tout through Baator, told this to a baatezu who didn't want clueless Dante to pass to the next layer.
Mine is a quick translation, if it isn't clear, it basically means "God decided it, so pike it berk!".

(Thus is proved that Planescape is high literature).

 

[Oldtimer]

There's an unofficial Swedish translation of the 3E SRD, made by a fan.

That would be me.

I respect the time and effort put down into it, although some of the translated terms...let's just say I'd never use them in any game of mine.

There, there, it's not so bad once you try it.

/Mikael

 

[Arthur Tealeaf]

I'm from Norway and we game in Norwegian, although I would really like to try a game where all in-character talk is in english, mainly because of the range of useful dialects. Problem is the varying grasp of english throughout my group.

I was at a convention in Norway last year (Arcon) where I played a game of Call of Cthulhu. In this game we played Norwegians visiting England, so everytime we met an english NPC we had to start speaking our horrible english. It was some of the most natural roleplaying I've experienced .

 

[NiTessine]

I live in Finland, and even though our games have mostly been in Finnish, there are also smatters of English, German, Swedish, and French tossed around the table. I've also played in a dominantly English campaign because one of the players was German and didn't understand English, and some of our latest campaigns have been dominantly English. I seriously think that English works better for roleplaying than Finnish, but I don't know why. But what can be said is that without roleplaying games I'd probably have a far less impressive vocabulary in English, which has been a great help since I go to an international school.

Err... The German didn't understand Finnish. He spoke English just fine. And he's scarily fluent in Finnish, nowadays.

I've played D&D in both my native Finnish and in English. The latter gets a lot of use especially in IRC campaigns.

 

[Thanee]

Regular gaming in german, online gaming mostly in english, only some in german.

Bye
Thanee

 

[The Grey Dwarf]

We play in french with english game terms. Sometimes some explanations are also needed in dutch or english, according to the players around the table.
The DMs I know all use the english books (sometimes hard to find) but most of the players use french translations. This sometimes leads to dialogs such as:
P1- Ok, I cast 'Courroux de l'ordre'.
DM- What's that ?
P2 - Wait ... might be something like 'Anger of the Law', I'll have a look.
P1 - Level 4 spell
DM - Got it, it's 'Order's Wrath' ... blabla ... 30' cube thats' about a 9 meter cube.
P1 - Says 10 meter here.
...

In 20 years of gaming, it's become part of it.

 

[Xael]

A nice rule of thumb is that 0 degrees Fahrenheit is about as cold as the weather ever gets (-18 degrees Celsius)...

LMAO! I witnessed about -40 Degrees Celsius over here in Finland earlier this winter.

But yeah, we're in the friggin' north.