Remove Language Limit?

[The Rambling Midget]

It occurred to me that with the new language progress meter, it's now much easier to bring a language to 99% and stop there, so that it doesn't count toward your total learned languages, but you can still speak and comprehend the language better than most expatriates.

I really love the language system, and would like to see it used more, and I don't see that there's much of any mechanical benefit to learning an unlimited number of languages, given how easy it is comprehend them with Lore. The learning speed for low INT characters alone seems enough to prevent them from having too many languages. A simple 10INT minimum for learning languages at all seems like enough, and if someone with INT that low really wants to spend a RL year in classrooms, then they deserve the benefits of their suffering.

What does everyone think? Would this hurt wizards and polyglots somehow? Does anyone even care?

[flower]

It could be modified yes.

Right now the ones capable of obtaining most are wizards and with their skill points and high int languages are trivial for them but others are severe limited.

I would even make some languages harder to learn. Mostly those used by outsider races. Celestials, abyssal, infernal.

And made some languages bonuses when cross learning them: Xanalress X Elven (different dialects of one language! in lore, Lloth even demand elven in rituals). And so on.


But, is it worth to ask to put it on the list of to-do now, instead of other things (...completing riding, new appearences in haks...)


Also would be awsome on selection to selection you do not want to begin with some starting language! Elf speaking only elven? goblin speaking only goblin (and class ones)? Mh.

[naturaly]

Leave it restricted. Languages should be really hard to learn.

[The Rambling Midget]

But, is it worth to ask to put it on the list of to-do now, instead of other things (...completing riding, new appearences in haks...)

That's irrelevant at the moment, because the suggestion box is locked, but unless the system was implemented in some horribly convoluted way, a change should be as simple as snipping out or fixing the language limit calculation and cleaning up any references.

Leave it restricted. Languages should be really hard to learn.

But that's my point. They're already as hard as they're going to be. Changing this would only make the difference between 99% and 100%. There would be no change whatsoever to the rate of learning, which is what really stops people. There would be almost no change to the achievable level of comprehension. Languages would still be the domain of high INT characters, and those with Gift of Tongues.

It's really just a matter of OOC convenience, unless the staff feels very strongly about that final 1%.

[Durvayas]

It occurred to me that with the new language progress meter, it's now much easier to bring a language to 99% and stop there, so that it doesn't count toward your total learned languages, but you can still speak and comprehend the language better than most expatriates.

Personally, I've never liked that holding a language at advanced is a thing as I feel it incentivizes hanging onto characters for longer and gaming the system.

A 16 int character can get 3 languages mastered, but 'learn' all of them if they put enough time into the system. This renders the language limit somewhat moot for people who know what they're doing. An INT 10 could learn all of the languages at once, and just monitory their progress and throw away books as needed.

I'm in favor of being able to learn only as many languages as your language cap, and being capped at 20%(at best) for the languages outside of your limit.

How do I propose implementing this? The first language books your PC picks up(up to their language limit) become the languages your PC is studying to completion. Any books picked up after have those languages capped.

So if I have a 16 INT PC.
I pick up an elvish book and begin learning elvish.
Then I pick up an infernal book and begin learning infernal.
Then I pick up a draconic book and begin learning draconic.
Then I pick up a dwarvish book and my progress for that language becomes capped at 20%
Then I pick up a hinnish book and my progress for that language becomes capped at 20%
And so on, and so forth

If I drop my elvish book before completing the language, reset my progress to 20%. The next language book I pick up fills the learning slot.

So if I decide to drop elvish at 80%, I drop the book, and pick up dwarvish as my new language of choice to learn. I just drop both books, and pick up the dwarvish one first. I can resume my dwarvish from 20% progress, but my elvish drops to 20% proficiency.

[Disciprine Come From Within]

Honestly, I never understood the big deal about the language cap. Language learning in RP is not fun, takes a great deal of time, and in many cases, you'll get to 40 Lore and mastery of understanding long before you get 1-2 languages learned. This is a system I find incredibly frustrating and time consuming. And it's not like languages are really a big deal in D&D anyway. You start with 1 extra language per Int Modifier, including your racial language (Humans get an extra pick), and if you want to learn more languages, it costs 2 skillpoints. 1 to learn to speak the language and 1 to learn to write in it.

There are spells that bypass language necessity, Monks get Tongue of the Sun and Moon, there are things that use language as a very very small option to add variety and not something that is a grind. In some cases, I've learned how to read the elven nonsense words and translate without needing to know what is being typed out OOC because it took that long to actually get to the point of IC comprehension. And every stab at trying to make language learning harder or more limited is just another silly restriction for no reason, in my opinion.

Until a system change is made that makes the process actually enjoyable, I'm not on board with more language restrictions. It's bad enough as it is and someone who hypothetically was a 10 Int character gaming the system to get all languages to advanced at 99% this way probably spent months to years IRL to get that far. They deserve a cookie for their time.

[Dragonfyre]

It occurred to me that with the new language progress meter, it's now much easier to bring a language to 99% and stop there, so that it doesn't count toward your total learned languages, but you can still speak and comprehend the language better than most expatriates.

Holding a language at 99% only works for understanding the language, not speaking it, though it's still a valid argument that it can be "abused" to rank a language up to 99% and hold it for comprehending what's spoken. Even then, this tactic is mostly only useful for characters with low Lore skill, since Lore is tied to being able to understand languages regardless of if you can speak them.

You have to have a phrasebook to speak a language you're not fluent in. Even if you're at 99% fluency, If you don't have a phrasebook, or it's in a bookbag? Then you cannot speak the language, period.

At least, that's been my experience. No matter how far my character has progressed in a language, she's never been able to speak one she's learning without having the corresponding phrasebook on one of her inventory pages. And she tried. I lost track of how many times she tried speaking Abyssal after a mishap at an enchantment basin blew up her phrasebook, and she was at Advanced at the time. Yet the moment she had a new phrasebook? BAM. Back to being able to speak Abyssal again at a regular rate.

I'm in favor of being able to learn only as many languages as your language cap, and being capped at 20%(at best) for the languages outside of your limit.

How do I propose implementing this? The first language books your PC picks up(up to their language limit) become the languages your PC is studying to completion. Any books picked up after have those languages capped.

So if I have a 16 INT PC.
I pick up an elvish book and begin learning elvish.
Then I pick up an infernal book and begin learning infernal.
Then I pick up a draconic book and begin learning draconic.
Then I pick up a dwarvish book and my progress for that language becomes capped at 20%
Then I pick up a hinnish book and my progress for that language becomes capped at 20%
And so on, and so forth

If I drop my elvish book before completing the language, reset my progress to 20%. The next language book I pick up fills the learning slot.

So if I decide to drop elvish at 80%, I drop the book, and pick up dwarvish as my new language of choice to learn. I just drop both books, and pick up the dwarvish one first. I can resume my dwarvish from 20% progress, but my elvish drops to 20% proficiency.

That would be far too clunky a system for "choosing" to study languages. A better system would be to simply add your preferred language choices to your character via the rest menu dialogue. That way, no matter which phrasebooks you pick up or drop, it wouldn't affect the progress of any languages you've been actively learning. If you suddenly decide you don't want to learn a language you've been learning and want to drop it? Make that an option via the same dialogue as well.

[Nitro]

Tie it to lore instead of INT, multilingual people in RL aren't some sort of genius savants so why should our characters have to be? Also gives an incentive to get more lore than 10-15 just to identify everything.

[Lunargent]

Leave it restricted. Languages should be really hard to learn.

Have you ever actually tried to learn another language? It's.. not really that hard. If you immerse yourself in it and practice, you can be fluent in a matter of months even if you're just a regular person and not a 40 int god. If anything, they should be easier to learn. The glacial pace at which non-wizards currently learn is unreasonable and unfair.

What I would do is accelerate the learning of languages within your 'cap' (int bonus), and then slow it down. So if you have 14 intelligence, which most non-wizard builds on Arelith have, your first two languages are learned relatively quickly, whereas beyond that it takes longer.

[MissEvelyn]

Have you ever actually tried to learn another language? It's.. not really that hard. If you immerse yourself in it and practice, you can be fluent in a matter of months even if you're just a regular person and not a 40 int god. If anything, they should be easier to learn. The glacial pace at which non-wizards currently learn is unreasonable and unfair.

And that's why most humans in D&D (not on Arelith) speak at least 2-3 regional languages. But learning Elven, Dwarven, or Abyssal, for example, should be on a whole different scale of difficult.

[The Rambling Midget]

What I would do is accelerate the learning of languages within your 'cap' (int bonus), and then slow it down. So if you have 14 intelligence, which most non-wizard builds on Arelith have, your first two languages are learned relatively quickly, whereas beyond that it takes longer.

I was thinking about something like that, too. It's common for stupid Americans like me to see learning other languages as insurmountable, (I've failed to learn three, myself) but in the rest of the world, it seems most people are capable of effectively communicating in at least two languages, even if they're not entirely fluent. I just really want to find a way of incentivizing the use of other languages, and I think that players will be more willing to dive in if they're not worried about exactly which languages they'll have space to learn.

You have to have a phrasebook to speak a language you're not fluent in. Even if you're at 99% fluency, If you don't have a phrasebook, or it's in a bookbag? Then you cannot speak the language, period.

I never noticed that. I'll give it a try, and see if I experience the same thing.

[Durvayas]

It occurred to me that with the new language progress meter, it's now much easier to bring a language to 99% and stop there, so that it doesn't count toward your total learned languages, but you can still speak and comprehend the language better than most expatriates.

Holding a language at 99% only works for understanding the language, not speaking it[...]

That is patently wrong. You can speak a language as well as your character understands it at all stages of learning. Being able to hold a language at 99% is effective fluency as your PC will have a 1% occurance rate of failing to speak properly and failing to understand. It is because of this that you can 'learn' languages that your PC cannot mechanically be fluent in.

The arguement that people can learn lots of languages is valid, but taken to an extreme.

You have class languages(thieves cant, animal, draconic), racial languages(variable), and divine languages(celestial, infernal, abyssal).

Humans do not start with bonus racial languages, because the have common.
But a human with any mage levels is automatically going to have draconic, and any rogue dip(the vast majority of builds) is going to yield thieves cant.

Take into account that said human is 90% of the time going to have 14 int or more(arelith standard), and thats 5 languages. A bit much, even for people with higher IQ in real life.
Wizards are going to have 20 int. So a human wizard is going to have 6 languages besides common.

It gets more absurd when you get into the other races.

Outcasts start with two languages, undercommon and common. Add a blackguard level, you get another, add rogue, you get a fourth. 14 int? Six languages.

Horc outcasts get all this plus orkish. 7 languages

Drow get all of this plus drow sign. make a drow Bcleric with a rogue dip? enjoy your whopping 8 languages.

I have a drow with 16 int; I have seven languages, and I didn't even take any classes that grant freebies.

The language system is so permissive that 80% of the server would qualify to be in MENSA international for linguistics skill alone.
And I didn't even get into what the gift of tongues grants.

Languages should be locked behind high int and lore. They should not be something someone can just collect casually like they are. Yes, it takes time to learn languages, as well it should, but the system is easily gamed.

If I built a drow with 3 ranger level and 3 rogue levels, I could pretty easily learn every language on the server to 99% if I put the time in, especially if I was playing with any substancial INT score. Thats why I'm against any expansion of language availability or ease of learning, and would like to see a cap on auxiliary languages.

[naturaly]

Holding at 99% seems like an exploit that needs fixed somehow.

[Halibutthead]

i kind of agree with TRM. i always like going to the hub because i always see so many different groups talking in different languages (kobolds and a human talking business in draconic. various groups discussing politics in undercommon. nearby a few goblins are being gobbos in goblin while a trio of orcs discuss the intricacies of "honor" in orc). it's actually really freakin cool how it works out, and it's enjoyable to be around.

by contrast, up in cordor, everyone speaks common. and only common.

now, i think it's more of a culture thing than a language thing, but i don't see why ungating the languages would be 'bad' per se, even if it's all sorts of possible to learn umpteen hundred languages if you use a generic cookie-cutter build, like someone else pointed out.

[Dragonfyre]

Holding a language at 99% only works for understanding the language, not speaking it[...]

That is patently wrong. You can speak a language as well as your character understands it at all stages of learning. Being able to hold a language at 99% is effective fluency as your PC will have a 1% occurance rate of failing to speak properly and failing to understand. It is because of this that you can 'learn' languages that your PC cannot mechanically be fluent in

I get the feeling you didn't read the rest of what I wrote, which had to do with actual in-game experience. Yes, you can speak it so long as you have the corresponding phrasebook in a page of your inventory. My character tried when she lost her phrasebook. She tried hundreds of times. At Advanced fluency. It never worked.

I don't know if something was changed between whatever experience gave you that view and mine, but this was as of about a month ago. Maybe a little more. May have been one of those "silent update" things, or maybe it was extraordinarily bad luck on my part.

[Lunargent]

Have you ever actually tried to learn another language? It's.. not really that hard. If you immerse yourself in it and practice, you can be fluent in a matter of months even if you're just a regular person and not a 40 int god. If anything, they should be easier to learn. The glacial pace at which non-wizards currently learn is unreasonable and unfair.

And that's why most humans in D&D (not on Arelith) speak at least 2-3 regional languages. But learning Elven, Dwarven, or Abyssal, for example, should be on a whole different scale of difficult.

It is no different from an American learning to speak one of the Chinese dialects fluently, which again, can be done in under a year, even though the rules of these languages are completely different. Even children in non-English speaking countries speak English. The difficulty of learning a language is grossly overestimated by those who aren't bilingual.

I would love it if the language learning process was improved to be fairer to non-wizards. Perhaps diminishing returns from high intelligence, or ways you could modify your language learning speed, such as, I don't know, increased learning speed for the frequency you hear the language in question in a certain span of time ("Immersion") or dedicated focus/study in which you trade the ability to learn multiple languages for increased progress in the chosen language until it is fluent.

[magistrasa]

Language learning makes total sense to tie to Intelligence in at least some capacity, because intelligence is all about retaining and recalling information. And that's pretty much all there is to learning a language. I think the language cap makes sense, because the more languages you know, the more difficult it is to learn another - at least, that's been my personal experience, as well as that of many of my language coaches. Portuguese was my first language, but then I forgot a lot of it when I learned English and then Japanese afterwards. In the process of learning some Spanish and relearning Portuguese, I forgot a fair bit of Japanese. Apparently I have 16 Intelligence, because 3 languages is my absolute limit.

Along the same vein, I think maybe a system for forgetting a language to replace it with a new one might be interesting, especially if it lets you replace languages that you start with. Might end up with elves that don't know how to speak elvish. If language limits are ever removed, I think the rate at which you learn the language should be modified by INT (high INT means less time to learn, low INT means more time invested).

[The Rambling Midget]

If language limits are ever removed, I think the rate at which you learn the language should be modified by INT (high INT means less time to learn, low INT means more time invested).

That's already how it works. With high INT you learn much faster. With low INT, it can take longer than the lifetime of a character to learn even one language.

That's why I think that learning speed is enough of an impediment to stop low INT characters from knowing more languages than they should. It just ceases to be worth the time, and you only pick up those languages that you're heavily immersed in.

[TroubledWaters]

For what it's worth, IRL the connection between intelligence and second language acquisition is not as solid as it is played on Arelith. While higher IQ individuals generally score higher on writing and grammar, there isn't as much of a correlation when it comes to stuff like listening and interpersonal communication.

I get that there needs to be a mechanical limit for language learning and INT makes sense, but it is unfortunate that second languages can't be picked up by lower INT characters when it would indeed make sense for them to have it. A guy who has been living in the UD for IG years should be able to speak Undercommon and not take the language cap hit. The same might go for a human who has been living in Brog and doesn't really go anywhere else.

I have no idea how something like this could be implemented fairly, however.

[Skibbles]

What if worldly languages like undercommon, xanalress, elven or dwarven for example didn't apply to the INT limit but all the planar languages did?

Seems like it would strike a fair balance between learning by osmosis and learning for the sake of knowing.

[Zed]

I am actually in favor of increasing language lore DC (from 42 to 60/70ish) simply because I think wizards make way too good of spies without having to deal with the same mechanics. But I do think they should be able to understand all languages a bit more than low int classes and low lore classes ( 60 lore is not hard to achieve with a wizard)

As well I think the amount of languages learned should actually be lowered. With those that learned them being grandfathered of course.BUT languages should be a bit faster to learn.

[Liareth]

Would be a big fan of removing the INT limit and driving language learning speed based on lore. 0 lore = years, 50 lore = months, 100 lore = weeks.

[Zed]

Maybe 2 weeks for 100 lore?


If it would be that quick I would still suggest that language caps should be smaller. I think at most. 3 bonus languages

I dunno if anyone is quadlingual in the forums. But after 4 stuff starts to jumble.

[Hazard]

Right now the ones capable of obtaining most are wizards and with their skill points and high int languages are trivial for them but others are severe limited.

That's how it should be. I wouldn't say trivial, though.. It still takes time, unless you're cheesing it with spam.. which I think should be reported.

[The Rambling Midget]

unless you're cheesing it with spam.. which I think should be reported.

AFAIK, the system is designed with limits that make spam ineffective, unless you're spamming for hours on end.