Reply to How to handle a foreign language in a d-mod?
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To be clear I'm not talking about translating d-mods to (or from) French, or anything like that, I mean in a story where people speaking another language is a plot element and Dink has to interact with them.
So obviously I've been working on something like this, (or was, I took a break recently) anyway I wondered what you all thought about this.
On the one extreme, I could make actually learn the language. Obviously only on a very superficial level, kind of like you might see in a tourist handbook. But I have a feeling most people still wouldn't have the patience (and that may well include me, if I was playing rather the writing it).
On the other extreme, you encounter them, I throw some gobbledegook at you and Dink can't respond with anything but "Huh? I don't understand." Then you "learn" the language at a certain point and everything just gets translated to English. And that just seems totally boring.
Any ideas what the happy middle-ground might be? I think my ideal would be where you have to actually know just a word or two for some key interaction, and then it mostly takes care of the rest automatically. But at the same time it should leave the untranslated language exposed enough that you could potentially could gain some extra advantage by learning a little more.
I'm just not sure how to make that happen mechanically, or logically.
So obviously I've been working on something like this, (or was, I took a break recently) anyway I wondered what you all thought about this.
On the one extreme, I could make actually learn the language. Obviously only on a very superficial level, kind of like you might see in a tourist handbook. But I have a feeling most people still wouldn't have the patience (and that may well include me, if I was playing rather the writing it).
On the other extreme, you encounter them, I throw some gobbledegook at you and Dink can't respond with anything but "Huh? I don't understand." Then you "learn" the language at a certain point and everything just gets translated to English. And that just seems totally boring.
Any ideas what the happy middle-ground might be? I think my ideal would be where you have to actually know just a word or two for some key interaction, and then it mostly takes care of the rest automatically. But at the same time it should leave the untranslated language exposed enough that you could potentially could gain some extra advantage by learning a little more.
I'm just not sure how to make that happen mechanically, or logically.
