Language barrier

[Chuckabeth]

Hi! I'm a new player, and I just want to share an awesome experience I had with the language system!

My character is named Lueta, and she's from the Hills. In her stats, I gave her a certain aptitude for all languages, but not expertise in any language other than Hillish. This has given me some interesting results in trying to understand other people, but in the end, I found it very rewarding indeed!

I was roleplaying with loads of other people--it was awesome. This is the best RP experience I've had in a long time. I was doing the best with what I could understand, but my little character eventually became very angry, thinking she was being ganged up on and insulted. She shouted a bunch, cried, and punched another kid in the face! Eventually the situation calmed down and Lueta ended up making friends, but it wasn't until the next day when I asked one of the people I was RPing with to send me a transcript of their side of events. I was more than a little embarrassed to see that most of the things that were said weren't nearly as hurtful as I'd read them, with a quarter of the words in jibberish. But then, I realized just how awesome the whole experience was!

I was experiencing first-hand what it must be like to be in a completely different country, with people speaking a different language, and how weird and disorienting that is. I was making the best inferences I could based off of context and body language, but I was still lacking in some very important nuances that made my character's actions seem unwarranted, whereas to me it was the most logical reaction for my character to make.

As I said, this is AWESOME. I've mostly thought of RP as an opportunity to make collaborative story telling fun, but now I realize it can be made into a very interesting kind of immersive experience, one that can be created with a lot of thoughtful mechanics in a game where you can do nearly anything you can think of, and which can help the player better understand other people!

[Pixie]

Sounds like a fantastic experience! The language system is awesome for this exact reason.

Welcome to TI, by the way!

[Chuckabeth]

Hey, thanks so much! I'm very glad to meet you!