Pathfinder 1E How can I make an ancient language fun?

[howandwhy99]

What is the game of learning the language?

For the following purposes I've assumed a text-only approach unless the language is stored orally somehow. Perhaps by blowing wind through pipes to create particular sounds? Or a series of Magic Mouth spells?

For fine detail: Do the players collect symbols, words, phrases, that represent something in the world they are exploring? Do they collect those symbols and then string these together to pass on lengthy information? Perhaps create scrolls in a kind of magical ur-language from the pieces? This could definitely be a game, but perhaps not the one you wish?

For standard language proficiency in d20, where grammar, vocabulary, syntax, and so on are abstracted, you might try:

1. Undeciphered texts with a Skill Roll by those who spend time trying to decipher them? Longer texts require more time or perhaps have more pieces that can be deciphered? Language use determines DC difficulty (e.g. the writer was writing more in jargon than common expressions). Modifiers are dependent on the PCs knowing of what the text refers to. People, creatures, places, ideas, etc.

2. Proficiency accumulation without rolling. Copies or the texts themselves are collected and "studied" in spare time. As more is collected the proficiency goes up. Of course this would advance very differently than normal language learning in 3.x. Players begin at Zero and advance through many levels or points of understanding maybe never even reaching the usual proficiency in the language. This ignores players with different texts being able to work together, but that could be abstracted / not played out. Not everyone enjoys the fine detail option at top.

Another game game might use option #2 with the more detailed method. Pieces of texts are collected and players can put them in different orders searching for redundancy and possible meanings. This wouldn't be at the text level, but a collection of generic meanings of each given with a successful skill roll for each piece. "Mothers" "Move" "Children" "Warriors" "Demons" "War" strung in lines and then those redundancies auto-learned on more pieces. Greater proficiency comes later and more concepts are revealed within each text as learning increases. Like a mini-game though I may be unclear here.

There is a lot that could be done. What's important is to express some picture of your ideas. What do you see the players doing during the game, even if not mechanically? Actually, it's perhaps better ignoring game design all together in your expression. Then posters might be able to work backwards to you and help recreate the opportunities within game designs for those experiences to occur to the players?

 

[Quickleaf]

My problem with this solution is that I mean it to represent studying the language, but nothing would prevent *every PC* from claiming to be studying it, just so they could also roll. Our group tends to metagame skill rolls outrageously. i.e. when one person gets the idea to roll to spot something, suddenly everyone wants to roll perception for no reason whatsoever, etc.

The way you describe your gaming group, I wonder if they are into puzzles? If so, definitely do as others have suggested and make it a puzzle.

As for the "everybody pile on" skill checks, I recommend using the group checks from 4e (everyone who makes a check does so, and if half or more succeed its a success, otherwise it's a failure).

 

[Starfox]

Make the language itself different. Base it on cultural value of the lost culture. Make it hard to understand not becaue it is a different language, but because it uses very different metaphors and idioms.

This is a lot of work for you, but this way you need not nerf resources like tounges. They work, but at first sight the result appears to be gibberish.

Star Trek TNG had an episode on this, Damrok.

I did something at least slightly along the lines when I ported Rise of the Runelords to Greyhawk. Tassilonian (the language of the Runelords) became draconic, and draconic lacks different words for virtues and vices. So draconic really had no way to linguistically express the difference between greed and generosity, both were covered by the word "possession". The same applied to all the Tassilonian virtues/vices. I didn't really make this a conundrum for my players, I just used it to show off the oddity of Tassilonian culture, but something similar could be made a feature of your mystery language.

 

[RUMBLETiGER]

Perhaps make the old language something other than verbal?
Sign language, an elaborate dance, alternating flashes of color, Facial expressions without sound, a collection of scents, a tapping code (such as Morse code), etc?

 

[Celebrim]

So I want to have an "ancient language" in my upcoming game that players can gradually learn. It's a dead language, so I am not going to allow them to choose it as a bonus language or drop a single skill point into it and gain total mastery of it.

Languages are something I've been playing around with to make more fun. I'm not sure I'm quite there but I can tell you where I'm at.

In my game there are 'secret languages' that you can't take unless something gives you permission to do so. For example, the languages of animals - carnivores, herbivores, birds, fishes, serpants, insects, etc. - are secret, and you can't take one without the 'Natural Scholar' feat or being explicitly taught it in game by someone that already knows how (usually an friendly animal spirit that swears you to secrecy). Your dead ancient language would qualify as a 'secret language', with entry by DM permission only.

Currently, all my languages are skills, with 1 to 5 skill points in them. Each skill point represents a degree of fluency in a language. With one point, you know how to say "Hello" and "Where is the bathroom?" in a thick accent and can probably work out some words if you are allowed to read the text, but that's about it. Four points represents being a native speaker or at least able to emulate one. With five points, you are a true scholar of the language and get a number of minor benefits to disguise, performance, ect. With 5 points in English and can read Gene Wolfe without recourse to a dictionary, and can speak convincingly authentic Bostonian, Deep South, Austrialian, and Cockney.

To get up to 5 points in a language is generally difficult for most PC's because langauge is a cross class skill for basically everything but Bards and Explorers. Even gaining fluency takes 6 points if you aren't a class that specializes in learning languages. Conversely, especially with the increased skill points most of my classes get relative to stock 3.X, its pretty easy for a Bard or Explorer to dabble in lots of langauges.

Whenever a player with less than 3 points in a language encounters a language, spoken or written, I roll 2 dice - one for vowels and one for consonants. If you have 1 point in the language, any word that has either the vowel or the consonant in it I replace with another word or a bit of gibberish. If you have 2 points in the language, only the words with the consonant are replaced. If you have 3 points in the language, you can speak and understand the language, but everyone can immediately tell you are non-native. In this way, I can simulate partial understanding. (I don't keep track of what a character 'knows' in any systematic way, first because its too hard and secondly because I assume that the language they are translating from has like English many different ways of saying roughly the same thing.)

The Decipher Script interfaces with this and works on the principle that difficult successes (and lengthy time investment) give you the equivalent of X skill ranks in the language for the purpose of the text you are trying to read. The theory behind this is that all the languages in my game are supposed to be fairly closely related. Obviously having some understanding of the langauge or a related family of languages is helpful.

It sounds to me like for your 'Ancient Language' you could do roughly the same thing, but perhaps extending the number of skill ranks out to some degree. Additionally, you could require before you put ranks into the skill that the character succesfully decipher or partially decipher one or more texts between leveling. As far as metagaming 'learning the language' goes, sure everyone can claim to be learning the language, but because there is an investment that has to be made (skill points) to actually learn it it's highly unlikely that everyone will want to, and if you require successes as proof of the investment only those characters with an apptitude (high intelligence, decipher language skill, existing skill in the language) will be able to improve anyway. Eventually this will separate out the pretenders from those that are really serious.

Alternately, if you don't want to force the PC's to spend resources on the language but give out skill points for free, require like 10 sucessful translations per 1 gain in skill points (and don't let them take 20).

I should note that I don't need a sophisticated explanation for why Comprehend Language doesn't work. The Comprehend Language spell in my game doesn't automatically let you understand a langauge anyway. It just temporarily makes you good at deciphering languages (+5 enhancment bonus, 10 minutes of understanding per round of study, verbal as well as written, and you may subsitute your Scry skill for Decipher Script skill). A great many spells have this sort of transformation in my game, going from an absolute effect to a short term boost to how you interact with the skill system. The idea is to prevent spells from fully replacing skills, or to force spellcasters that want to be skillful to spend points on the skills.

 

[Samloyal23]

The language rules in D&D are too simplistic. Some languages are harder t learn and require more work to study, no should be fluent in a language for one proficiency slot. Instead, each point spent on a language should allow more complex forms of communication. So spending one skill point on a language would allow simple conversations with one to two syllable words. Adding another point would allow the use of more complex vocabulary. Maybe being fully fluent takes 4-5 points or more, depending on the difficulty of the language...

 

[Starfox]

The language rules in D&D are too simplistic...

Well, it all depends on what you are trying to use the rules for. For a dungeon bash, they are quite sufficient, and that is what they are written for. For pulpish action adventures, they also work. For Cthulhu-style investigations, they are lacking but not seriously so. For ethnological field studies, they are definitely inadequate.

I'm not trying to say you are wrong, just that rules are (and should be) aimed at a particular genre, and might not work outside that genre.

 

[Celebrim]

The language rules in D&D are too simplistic. Some languages are harder t learn and require more work to study, no should be fluent in a language for one proficiency slot. Instead, each point spent on a language should allow more complex forms of communication. So spending one skill point on a language would allow simple conversations with one to two syllable words. Adding another point would allow the use of more complex vocabulary. Maybe being fully fluent takes 4-5 points or more, depending on the difficulty of the language...

Well, while my own language rules mostly incorporate your intuitive sense of how langauge should work, I should confess that in practice such rules are mostly honored in the breach.

This is because I long ago learned that many things that were realistic added nothing to the game. One such area is realistic linguistics. In reality, in the year 1400 there were probably 10,000 spoken langauges in the world. In my game world, I doubt that there are as many as 40 humanoid languages and probably fewer than 100 languages altogether. Additionally, in practice almost everyone on the big continent of Sartha speaks the Westron common tongue. And even further, most languages are assumed to be pretty closely related. If you can speak Ancient HUman, you can probably achieve at least very basic communication with most humans in most dialects in the way that Italian, Spanish, French, and Portugese all have many similarities. This because fundamentally, it is almost always failure of your game if it is not possible to communicate at all with the NPCs. Why? Because it is simply not fun. RPGs are about RP, and RP requires communication and interaction. It's not fun to have a potentially interesting NPC that the PC's can't interact with. It's not fun to have potentially interesting clues written on the walls if the PC's can't get at least some of the clues.

More than as barriers to communication, being able to speak a language in my game usually serves as an effective bonus to diplomatic efforts. Those hobgoblins probably speak at least some common. But if you can speak to them in goblin, it's going to greatly improve their esteem of you. You might not get full zenophobia circumstantial penalties on your skill checks, or you might if you are very fluent get bonuses - perhaps you are a friend to the goblin people if you can speak so eloquently in their native tongue. I try to avoid creating situations where knowledge of a particular language is needed for understanding.

Another thing that you could concievably be quite realistic about is coin. There is no strongly realistic reason that coins should be standardized around the world, and plenty of reason to assume that they are not. You could, and realisticly maybe should, create elaborate regional systems of coinage and define exchange rates and so forth. But unless your campaign is really mostly about numismatism and economics, this is likely to not only be wasted effort but to actively get in the way of what your game is supposed to be about.

This is related to the fact that in practice, most people spend very little amount of time dealing with the Appraisal skill. Unless your campaign is really meant to be mostly about shopping, haggling, and bartering spending lots of times obfuscating the value of objects, and spending lots of time developing relationships between the PC's and merchants, is simply going to be a book keeping and time sink nightmare. It's realistic, and maybe even potentially interesting, but its probably less interesting than what you could be doing for 95% of all groups. Realism is no justification for going deeply into this.

Sometimes this realization actually hurts, because you realize that the book keeping actually detracts from something you really value to the point that you can't justify it. In my own case, one example of this is the numinous and fearful quality that magic has. I can give magic this quality, so that it actually seems like magic, but only at the expense of book keeping and mental overhead that is simply beyond what you can reasonably expect when DMing. One of the reasons that in practice most systems make magic items uninteresting and fully disclose magic items powers is simply that it allows you to shift the mental overhead and burden of resolution fully off onto the player. If the players don't know what their magic items do, it improves the relationship players have to magic in the setting, but makes the game almost impossible to correctly run. As a DM in practice you have to make the decision as to what you are going to make the game about and what you are in session going to make your mental space, and in practice, as a human being that memory buffer is finite. You can't remember everything about the game state. So you have to make trade offs. In my case it means keeping most items fairly simple (while still trying to be flavorful), and limiting complex treasure distribution to just 1 or 2 items per player (at most).

It also means trying to avoid using my language rules unless they add to the game, avoiding shopping and haggling unless its super impactful (and hense, reporting values to the players and having them keep track of treasure), and using standard unrealistic universal coinage.

 

[Matthias]

So I want to have an "ancient language" in my upcoming game that players can gradually learn. It's a dead language, so I am not going to allow them to choose it as a bonus language or drop a single skill point into it and gain total mastery of it.

Also, since nobody alive understands it, it will not be translatable through standard magical means. (My reasoning being that such spells "borrow" understanding of a given language from someone else, and since nobody else knows it, nobody to borrow from. This allows said spells to still function for all the other languages in the campaign world, just not this one.)

Originally, I'd thought that I would make it a skill. A player would get a single skill point in "Ancient Language" whenever they came across a new sample of the language, rather than by spending skill points. So eventually they would become proficient.

My problem with this solution is that I mean it to represent studying the language, but nothing would prevent *every PC* from claiming to be studying it, just so they could also roll. Our group tends to metagame skill rolls outrageously. i.e. when one person gets the idea to roll to spot something, suddenly everyone wants to roll perception for no reason whatsoever, etc.

So I need some way for a player to choose to focus on this language for my idea to work, or come up with some other way to handle the ancient language altogether.

Thoughts?

A nice idea. It's not much different from "forbidden" languages such as druidic, except that sources of information on the language are just about as hard to find and everyone who could tell you anything about it are either dead or are almost as much in the dark as you are.

I would, however, think that the right Divination magics cast should shed light on individual words, phrases, or manuscripts. Here's what you could do: Whatever magic you use (IDHTBIFOM), the spell will return a summary understanding of whatever was written in the dead language. You could cast it on a whole page and understand roughly what the text is about, without getting any clues on the meaning of specific words. Or you could break down the page into paragraphs, Divinate for each, and get a little better idea of certain repeated words probably stand for. Or you Divinate on a single sentence or even a single word, and your knowledge precision increases even more.

The problem you're running into is inherent in the system: either a character is fluent in a language or they aren't. There's no skill ranks in a language to rate fluency (though there probably should be, but in most cases partial fluency and "barely able to get by" in terms of ability does not come up enough in most games to be worth the increased granularity/complexity).

I don't see a problem with simply requiring a Linguistics skill check with a certain DC based on the amount of text available and (perhaps) the original author's writing ability.

Length of manuscript:
Single word or short phrase = DC 25
Short sentence = DC 23
Long sentence = DC 21
Short paragraph = DC 20
Long paragraph = DC 17
Passage of several paragraphs = DC 15
Per whole page = DC 12

Author's writing ability:
Commoner, peasant, literate manual laborer = -2 DC
Merchant, warrior, or intuitive adventurer= +0 DC
Aristocrat, adept, or self-taught adventurer = +2 DC
Expert or trained adventurer = +5 DC
(represents superior vocabulary and poetic skill)

Subject matter:
Graffiti, road signs, other very simple writing: -2 DC
Mundane, everyday subject: +0 DC
Slightly more technical subject (religion, engineering, history & local politics, etc.): +2 DC
Moderately technical subject (legal code, earth sciences, arcana, planes): +5 DC