Modifying the New Language Feature in CORE

[Blackfoot]

I'm thinking of tweaking the new language feature to look at skill level before translating the text. We had something like this back in my MUD coding days.. it basically checked the skill and then translated a percentage of the text based on how fluent the speaker and listeners were. This doesn't apply to rulesets with simple 'yes' 'no' languages like D&D/PF but in Rolemaster and Champions (and probably some others), you have actual fluency ratings that could come into play here. What do folks think of this idea? Is it worth looking into or would it be more hassle than it's worth?

In Champions for example, a 3 would be a perfect translation whereas a 1 would only get 33% of the text.
In Rolemaster .. 10 would be perfect.. other values would decrease from there... 1 == 10% ... or something like that..

[Moon Wizard]

While interesting, I'm not sure it's worth the effort unless you're just looking for a smallish project to work on.

You'll have to make a lot of assumptions about what partial understanding means (all or nothing on some text, by letter, by word, etc.). And I'm sure there are different opinions on that as well.

That said, it would be fairly straightforward if you've done any extension work before. Just mainly figuring out which skill to lookup, whether to roll or not, what the result of roll means, and then applying to translation code. The maintenance would be low, since I don't envision the language code changing a lot.

Regards,
JPG

[Skellan]

I think this is a cool idea. It would be amusing to have partial translations

[Blackfoot]

The way this worked in the MUD code we had was a percentage of specific letters would swap out depending on how well the speaker/listeners knew the language... I suppose it could work on 'words' since the FG translator varies the number of letters as it processes the language... actually.. now that I think of it.. I think it had a list of nonsense words that it used to replace unknown words.. flargle nobbin dilly wubbin.. so this would likely work well in this situation as well.

[Nylanfs]

Shadowrun has this also., although you would also have to check for the presence of a linguasoft also.