Languages

[zeromig]

How do you handle the issue of languages in your game?

My characters are heading to Japan, to track down an artifact, and gain the blessings of one PC's father. Of course they'll be meeting english-speakers, but I'm planning on causing trouble for them by taking advantage of the language barrier.

I was thinking of letting them take languages as a series of stunts, to allow for varying degrees of comprehension. There's a test, the JLPT, that basically ranks Japanese language comprehension from rank 5 to 1 (lowest to highest), and since my friends already have rough ideas of what each rank entails, the stunt would give them the equivalency of that rank as a diceroll bonus. The stunts can be bought over and over in the same way for further languages.

What do you do to handle foreign languages and language barriers in your game? Thanks!

[Sanctaphrax]

One language free, plus one language for each point of Scholarship. I think that's what Your Story says.

If it seems appropriate for a character to speak a language, though, I might just ignore the rules and say that they speak it.

There's a stunt called Linguist that gives 4 additional languages.

And I'd call universal language comprehension a fair -1 custom power.

Of course, all of that adds up to make language a minor issue. If you want the linguistic proficiency of your characters to be important, then you'll have to do things differently.

[Kiero]

We've decoupled languages from Scholarship, largely because we have a number of multilingual characters who don't have it, yet their Aspects and background make sense of them being so. Two of them are older than many formal systems of education, too. People can still make a Scholarship check to understand something in particular, but we've pre-established what languages each character knows.

[zeromig]

Thanks-- looked it up, and it was right on YS141. Can't believe I overlooked it.