Speaking of Languages

[tesuji]

To start with, the HERO language chart has been around forever and is cool in its own right. I acknowledge a lot of legacy love for the thing.

But what i wanna ask today is "is it contdciting the HERo basic premise"?

Shouldn't the price you pay for language be linked to two things... your level of aptitude and its relevence to the campaign (expressed loosely as "what percentage of people in the campaign environment or interacting with you will speak it) ie more or less severity and frequency?

the chart, optional chart yes indeed optional, links languages by SFX, providing cost breaks for similar real world languages, and penalties for further separated ones, but shouldn't "this language is unlike any other nd likely to see little use at all"mean its cheaper... not more expensive?

Again this is about cost. I could easily see apllying "difficulty modifiers" to the int rolls sometimes required when lanuages are very similar or very disparate, making one an easy task and the other a hard for instance.

This also has applicability to fantasy worlds where elven and dwarven and gnomish might well see widely different levels of use as well.

I might suggest, brainstorming not long in depth figuring, you use the current literacy cost but add another set of modifiers:

Rare language, hardly ever used (8- ???) -1 pts
Common lanuage: At least half used (11- ???) 0 pts
Ubiquitous language: Almost everyone knows (14- ???) +1 pts

the cost adjustment may seem trivial, but then we are talking about things ranging in cost from 1-5 pts to begin with and when someone does invest in languages, its often a lot of them being bought, not just a couple, so it could add up.

and yes, slow day here... email is down so not much happening so i got time for this kind of filler-thunk. :-)

[PhilFleischmann]

Rare language, hardly ever used (8- ???) -1 pts
Common lanuage: At least half used (11- ???) 0 pts
Ubiquitous language: Almost everyone knows (14- ???) +1 pts
Very true that not all languages will be equally useful even though they all have the same basic cost (modified by the Language Chart). However, the same holds true for every other background skill as well. For example, in a Champions game you could have:

The useful set:
KS: Criminal Justice System
PS: Doctor
AK: Sewer System Under Campaign City
SC: Electrical Engineering
Lang: Arabic

vs.

The not-so-useful set:
KS: Model Railroads
PS: Movie Critic
AK: Tiny Town, Middle America, where my parents live.
SC: Zymurgy
Lang: Estonian

And they both cost the same according to the rules.

I have my own house rules that deal with this problem: I let characters have a certain amount of Free Background Skills, with certain restrictions:

1) They have to be skills that any normal person in the campaign world would have access to.
2) They have to make sense with the character's background and INT.
3) As a general guideline, the total free points worth of skills can't exceed the character's INT. (I allow occasional exceptions, but only by a few points.)
4) The free skills have to be written down on the character sheet. You can't just say, "My character knows all about that due to his background" on the fly.

(I also treat Languages like other 2/1 Background Skills, but that's a different topic.)

[Dreadnought]

The not-so-useful set:
KS: Model Railroads
PS: Movie Critic
AK: Tiny Town, Middle America, where my parents live.
SC: Zymurgy
Lang: Estonian


What if Black Harlequin attacks Estonia and you need to use your knowledge of model trains to stop his latest creation?

[Kenn]

In some games, it may be useful, but in my Champions game I find the Optional Language Chart to be more complex than its worth for the tiny numbers of changes it would entail. So I don't use that option.

[Thia Halmades]

I... just posted about this. Yes, in my campaign things that are truly "useless" will call for a price-break, because I believe that a PC who's willing to invest points in non-mission critical material should be 'rewarded' for that. Sure, they can find a way to cleverly introduce Model Trains into every campaign, and you know what? Bully for them! Well done! I won't make them pay an extra point for it.

Of course, if they want to actually build anything, they'll want to invest the points anyway.

[Mike W]

I think that usefulness is not necessarily(or entirely) defined by how many people in the campaign world know the language. In some cases, it can be an advantage if not everyone knows it. For instance, taking a cue from WWII, one of my characters with an espionage background keeps his records coded, but one of the base languages is Iriquois. So if you don't know Iriquois, you can't read his records. In this case, the rarity of the language is an advantage, not a disadvantage. And if I taught it to the rest of the group, we could have whole conversations that would be almost impossible to understand for most people, which would also be a huge advantage. Not only could we call out battle plans, but we could weigh options in almost any situtation, even on a rooftop hostage crisis, and it would be an extremely rare individual who could understand what we were saying.

[Thia Halmades]

That's what I was saying about doubling the cost of the ultra rare language - because not only is it hard to learn, but I anticipated that possible outcome. :D

Model trains? Price break. Rare language? Regular cost. Ultra difficult language with plot implications? Double cost. :D

[zornwil]

I think it would probably be easiest to apply Limitations to languages if they're clearly less useful. The low cost of languages does mean that price breaks are minimal but it also means they don't burn up a large allotment. In lower powered games if a character is going to be a language type one can build a Limited Universal Translator sort of thing ("only languages encountered, -1" or such).

Depending on genre and game, I sometimes allow for basic background knowledge to be free, with some sort of adjusted INT roll if necessary to resolve something unclear in terms of level.

[Narratio]

I agree with Thia and note that a small point to consider is that a player who builds a character with 'non-mission critical' skills or abilities, no matter how the point break goes, will always try and wheedle them into the game. Somehow, someway, that guy with the miniature train knowledge will use it in a way the GM will never expect.

[Manic Typist]

And more power to him!